Fascinating. The cod Renaissance writing style is occasionally a distraction (especially when Eddison represents the writing of the characters and abandons modern spelling to do so), there are weird inconsistencies that seem to reflect either a change of conception as the novel proceeded or simple forgetfulness (e.g. the frame device vanishes early on and never comes back; the idea that the story takes place on an alien planet is undercut be increasing references to such terrestrial concepts as the classical Greek gods, yule, etc), the country names (Demonland. Witchland. Impland ! Pixyland!!) are jejune, and the plot is chaotic (again, perhaps reflective of changing conceptions as the novel progressed; I don't know). Nevertheless, and especially once it gets going, there is a not of interesting and unpredictable action. Mivarsh's theft of the hippogriff's egg and his ingominious fate being a particularly good example. Characters are types rather than individuals (indeed, I had a hard time throughout telling some of them apart--not helped by the use of similar names such as Corsus, Corund, and Corinius for three of the major villains), so much so that the most interesting, Gro, is so much defined by his status as Machiavellian/betrayer that he not once but twice changes sides for inexplicable reasons. However, there are many memorable scenes and sequences, and Eddison definitely anticipates the darker post-Tolkien turn of more recent heroic fantast. Indeed, several characters and sequences here could almost have come directly out of George R. R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series. Recommended for fans of heroic fantasy. Others may find it heavy sledding.

Not an easy read by a long shot. The prose is very poetic--maybe too poetic, quite frankly--and there is a lot going on here. The opening scene is very clunky and unnecessary, and the idea that this is all taking place on Mars (I think it's Mars) is pretty ridiculous.

Still, the sweeping nature of the story and the heroism of the characters is really striking, and I really got caught up in rooting for the characters. It's a lot like LotR (but published about thirty years earlier), but the writing style is much more challenging.

I thought it was great, but be aware of what you're getting into when you read this. It's kind of like Shakespeare meets Tolkien.

Non ho apprezzato granché questo romanzo. La prima causa è dovuta senza dubbio alla verbosità dell'autore che infarcisce la narrazione con una quantità spropositata di dettagli, molti dei quali inutili ai fini dell'economia della storia. Spesso Eddison si fissa su elenchi infiniti di piante, fiori, oggetti, ambienti e ciò mi ha causato frequenti perdite di attenzione quando non una noia mortale.
Un altro aspetto negativo è stata la ripartizione netta fra personaggi buoni e personaggi cattivi, obbligati nelle loro parti e pertanto prevedibili. Una volta percepito questo schema, la storia stessa è diventata facilmente intuibile e ha perso un po' dell'interesse iniziale.
Mentre infine è evidente la vasta cultura dell'autore, non ho capito perché Eddison abbia deciso di cominciare la sua storia con un personaggio della sua epoca che raggiunge un luogo fuori dal tempo e dallo spazio nel quale demoni e streghe, goblin e altri esseri fantastici convivono credendo negli dei dell'Olimpo. Il risultato è stato un guazzabuglio assurdo.

I love how the worm encircles the picture in these covers.

The witches of Witchland are the bad guys, but they're not your typical witches. They don't own cauldrons or black cats and they don't recruit women for their rituals or armies. These witches are hardened imperialists and fierce, treacherous foes who have conquered many lands already.
t
But unlike Tolkien's irredeemable orcs, the witchlanders are essentially human. They represent all manner of vice, with each of their commanders sporting a different weakness: alcohol, arrogance, greed, etc. But they have relative virtues too, and Eddison often portrays their downfalls as noble tragedies.
t
Scenes set at the Witchland court take on a Shakespearean feel, with soliloquies, complex motives, romance, and skullduggery. Plus, as in Hamlet, most of them die in a poison-packed climax!

n  n
The Witchlander emblem is this nasty crab!

So who are the good guys in this fantastical war? The demons of Demonland. Yes, demons are the good guys and they're also basically humans (but with little horns.) They're also a stoic crew of nobles who travel the land, climb the tallest mountains, evade armies, encounter mysterious spirits, and battle legendary monsters; adventure yarns basically.
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This is an epic fantasy that predated The Hobbit by fifteen years. The writing is dense and the plot features some shocking twists considering the simple story of good-versus-bad. The Worm Ouroboros is a significant literary influence, its manifold loops visible if you look closely.

Edited 8-21-2024

Le había puesto menos estrellas pero creo que si se merece 4. Me sacó carcajadas en público y uno que otro dolor de cabeza, pero al final si lo adoré.

Es un libro un poquitín difícil. Está escrito en inglés anticuado y Edison no se limitó en absoluto a la hora de dar extensas y alzadas peroratas. Pero después de avanzar algunos capítulos se empieza a volver normal y hasta aprecia uno lo copetón y minucioso del lenguaje (así como lo ridículo de mezclar eso con nombres como Goldry Bluzco).

Los personajes son incomprensibles a veces; se comportn como héroes de leyendas y el realismo nada más no existe en este universo, pero a pesar de ello no se mueven en un mundo en blanco y negro. Son caprichosos, vengativos, honorables al más puro estilo nórdico antiguo. Los personajes "buenos" y "malos" pueden gustar o disgustar, sus acciones agradan o exasperar por igual.

Más que nada, aprecio mucho descubrir autores de fantasía pre-Tolkien que hicieron cosas tan hermosas, complejas y elaboradas. Junto a Lord Dunsany, es de lo más bonito y divertido que he leído de ese periodo (1920's).

The Worm Ouroboros is a complex work, sometimes brilliant, sometimes plodding, sometimes bizarre, at moments infuriating, very clearly and deeply flawed, yet strangely compelling and in its best moments extremely beautiful. This is not a book I would recommend to the early-fantasy-curious; I would steer those in the direction of Lord Dunsany, but if you know that you enjoy early experiments in fantastic worlds wrought in over-the-top prose and can deal with archaic language and moral universes, accompanied by occasionally less than consistent plotlines, this book might be for you.

Over the first half of my reading it, I did not think I would have much good to say about this book. E. R. Eddison's lengthy descriptions of people and places, while at times gorgeous, can drag the momentum of the story down to near zero, and at first his characters, especially his heroes, are interchangeable, idealized archetypes with little if any depth. The story begins, after an awkward introduction that would probably have been better omitted, as something the modern reader (if perhaps not Eddison's contemporaries) will regard as a formulaic hero's journey, in which the main protagonist and his friend must rescue his brother from the captivity of an evil sorcerer-king. It all seems very by-the-numbers until the action turns to the villains of the story, who instantly steal the show.

It was only after getting to know these villains, especially the brilliant, fearless, treacherous, yet strangely virtuous Lord Gro, that I came to appreciate the depth of Eddison's world, awkwardly introduced at one point as the planet Mercury, whose inhabitants display strange familiarity with English poetry and worship Greek and Roman gods. The story acquires strong shades of Homer, Virgil, and Norse sagas, though at no point does it replicate them too closely, and even the heroes slowly gain humanity and become worth rooting for. The same prose that drags the early parts of the book down (at one point Eddison spends about half a page describing a fancy flowerpot) lifts the later parts to rare heights of beauty and drama, and magnifies the characters and their inward and outward struggles to truly epic dimensions. It may be useful here to present an example:

"Surely," he said, "the great mountains of the world are a present remedy if men did but know it against our modern discontent and ambitions. In the hills is wisdom's fount. They are deep in time. They know the ways of the sun and the wind, the lightning's fiery feet, the frost that shattereth, the rain that shroudeth, the snow that putteth about their nakedness a softer coverlet than fine lawn: which if their large philosophy question not if it be a bridal sheet or a shroud, hath not this unpolicied calm his justification ever in the returning year, and is it not an instance to laugh our carefulness out of fashion?"

One of the introductions of the edition I read compared Eddison's prose favorably against Shakespeare. I might not go quite so far myself, but I will say that Eddison can stand proudly alongside Dunsany and Tolkien as a founding father of fantasy, and is well worth the time of anyone who appreciates their work.

Either I was stoned when reading this or the closing chapters of this book are the greatest pieces of writing I've ever read in the English language.

Be weary, this is NOT your generic 'fantasy' novel. I was quite frustrated towards the middle and intended to give it a 3. But now, I don't know what to give it.
This work is philosophy masquerading as Elizabethan prose. I would argue no clear villain exists in this novel, and its glorification of war is but a metaphor for conflict in all ages, both externally within the world, and internally within oneself.

The last few chapters were so incredibly moving, so raw in their examination of the deepest relationship between Humanity and Conflict ... its just ...

I can't even. Perhaps in a year or so I'll write a full review.

My favorite fantasy book. Only demerit it gets is that it begins as a trip to Mars to observe some happenings and never gets back to that POV. No matter, it is high fantasy of the grandest order.

A very strange book, frequently beautiful, ofttimes prolix, and with a thematic structure that left me scratching my head. I don't know enough about Eddison so as to say that he wholly endorsed the view put forward by the Demons - namely, that "fun", or "beauty" is the whole goal of life, and that, should access to this be disbarred, it may be necessary to engage the Gods themselves in assuring the perpetuation of an indefinite cycle of meaningless violence - but given the presence of characters like Lord Gro and Lady Mevrian (the relationship between Gro, Prezmyra, Corund and Mevrian being the crux of the book, no matter that the Lords Juss and Brandoch Daha are nominally the heroes), the evocation of the Ragnarok cycle implied in the conclusion, and the fact that this book is first of all a story to be read, and second an elegy for a lost way of life which most people find admirable in abstract (though they'd be rightly loathe to put it into practice) I doubt it really matters.

Either way, it's a page-turner; and wholly unique. And the archaic morality displayed in this book allows for a great deal of the truth about human nature to be put forward with little compromise, and an unexpected level of sympathy for blackguards of all stripes.

Lord Gro is, without a doubt, one of the best and most fascinating characters I've ever encountered.

This is a difficult book to rate, because part of what I'm considering, when I review books, is, "How well did the author accomplish their goals? What would have improved the book had it been done differently?" And Eddison has absolutely, no questions asked, accomplished his goals; there is nothing here that, if changed, would make this book more what he wanted it to be.

That the pacing is rambling and stutter-stop and the characterization almost completely blank is irrelevant. The Worm Ouroboros fails as a novel because Eddison has no interest in writing a novel. He wants to write a sixteenth century epic, and he gives no fucks for the fact that the sixteenth century is more than four hundred years in the past.

Okay, he gives some fucks. There's the weird conceits, found in the very beginning, of the story being set on the planet Mercury and observed by the Englishman Lessingham--attempts, however grudging, of fitting his work into the forms of early 20th century fantastic fiction. They're clunky, and they made the first twenty-five pages difficult to get through. Fortunately, after that, Eddison abandons this figleaf to modernity and goes full-speed head with his epic, never mentioning Lessingham again. From that point, I was hooked.

I'm glad Tolkien, not Eddison, ended up being the template on which modern fantasy was built. Eddison and I have what I'll politely call very different philosophical beliefs, and also his approach to women is, uh, a thing (not that Tolkien's is much better). But as a testament to one man's dedication to writing whatever the hell he wanted, current taste be damned, I can't help but admire this--and the writing, though idiosyncratic, is also in its own way glorious.

Well...this is a beautifully written book. It has flowing prose, a touch of poetry and you can see the influence of a good early twentieth century education in the story telling.

But I freely admit I wonder why a writer writing in 1922 (or shortly before) chose to relate his tale in 16th century English. I know some love it and I also freely admit it is great for "portentous" storytelling:

And it came to pass that the King of Demon Land did challenge the monarch of Witch Land to wrestle (Wrastle). And they did wrastle and lo the fur did fly and great events were foreshadowed and thou shalt seest great and really apocalyptic stuff....

I know this is a much loved book that some like as much as The Lord of the Rings or The Gormenghast books, but (and I'm sorry) I can't go there. It's well written and I believe much of this is a matter of taste... But I can only go 3 on it.