I may be just an idiot but even an idiot can appreciate a good story.

This one of those books that I am not smart enough to fully grasp everything that is going on. It's written in old English and whenever letters are written between characters that old English becomes olde English. I chastised myself several times while reading this for not keeping a dictionary or my phone readily available to look words up because I needed one almost every time I picked it up. The writing is absolutely beautiful but I know the way it is written will irk some of my fellows but for me it was a win.

The book is about four lords trying to regain their honor after it has been slighted by the king of Witchland. There are hippogryphs, manticores, goblins, pixies, demons, and witches though not in the traditional sense for most of these. There are a few epic battles and adventures with some brutal deaths as well. There was a man who sliced with sword so hard that he slashed off the leg of a man, cut through his saddle, and cut his horse. Bah. Honor is the most important thing of these characters and I love a story where the dignity of enemies is on full display. The mains all showed respect to their enemies to the bitter end.

I can't tell you how many times I uttered "oh shit" and gasped at a beautiful passage that just struck me to the quick. I loved this and think I have found my horde novel, that one book that every time I see it in the wild from now on I will be grabbing a copy.

I leave with you this, "I ever was a fighter. So, one fight more." - Zeldornius

There it is and there you have it.

The problem with taking a half star off for the 'flaws' of The Worm Ouroborous' is that one would have to regrade every book on Amazon.com down by about ten stars. The book is simply a masterpiece vaunted high above ordinary things. I read it a sixteen, given me by my friend's father when I was raving about 'Lord of The Rings'. Despite the archaic prose I finished it in an evening and it has lived in my imagination now for over thirty years. I still like 'Lord of the Rings'; it is a great book, although 'soft', to use Eddison's own word.

Rather than re-echo the many justified superlatives that occur when discussing eddison I'd like to address some particular issues:

The Worm has to be read in context with Eddison's other works. Only by doing so will one come to an understanding of the philosophy which produced it an some of the apparent errors. There are elements of Nietzsche, the will to power, master, slave morality and so but more tellingly there is a highly developed metaphysics. This is best seen though the character of Lessingham:

Firstly, the oft maligned first chapter where Lessingham disappears. This is simply an Elizabethan device often used in the drama of the time. There is no question of it being some oversight or mistake.

Understanding Lessingham's place is imperative. He represents the man of action ultimately doomed to failure because action will fail.

Eddison believes the universe operates on a kind of dual godhead - male and female in constant teasing opposition. God created the world, the female aspect constantly keeps him wanting to recreate it. The fantasy land is His creation for Her yet she shields this from him. Naturally, God creates the best of all possible worlds but there are also other lesser worlds (our own for example) In the best of all possible worlds God can have the best of all Earth like things - in Eddison's view this a mixed bag of Scandinavian saga, Ancient Greece and Elisabethian prose. These things are there because they are wonderful and the occupants of the world have all wonderful things at their fingertips. They are not anachronistic.

Every male individual is an aspect of the male God. Lessingham is the man of action, doomed to failure because he lives in a 'material' world. Other characters are simply greater or lesser aspects of Godhood, some more or less Godlike. Likewise the female characters.

The Worm Ouroborous was Eddison's first attempt. He used 'Goblins', 'Pixies' at the age of ten to describe his fantasies. I suspect he didn't go for some formulistic nomenclature because he still loved the childhood names. He loved writing The Worm Ouroborous and I love reading it [...].

Well, it took me 15 months and a stack of dictionaries, but I've finally finished this epic! I feel as much a sense of accomplishment in the reading as Eddison might have felt in the writing of it!

I don't recall it having been so laborious from my first time of reading back in my teenage years, but I guess without internet reference rabbit-holes to fall down, it would be faster, though somewhat more archaic and obscure.

Anyway, the plot takes precedence over character, and there's barely any plot to speak of, so what you are left with is a framework over which Eddison drapes his sumptuous language, weaving moods and reveries, sometimes loud, brash and theatrical, at othertimes delicate fretworks of bejewelled, gilded traceries. It's definitely a love/hate book, and I've needed my own mood to be right to enter into Eddison's world, but I was happy to take my time and approach it as a feast of many courses, rather than a fast food binge.

First off, I recommend against buying the Evinity Kindle edition. While it does have the original illustrations, it also has a number of errors, and breaks up the text with tags for the original pages—breaking up paragraphs and sentences willy-nilly. This is, I believe, straight from old Project Gutenberg files, though those do not have the pagination notes any more.

As for the book itself, it's a 1922 proto-fantasy, using some tropes of the sword and planet genre. Though that last is really just an intro or broken frame to introduce the action. Supposedly, this all happens on Mercury (which here just means "not on Earth at any time"), and the initial viewpoint character is transported there as a vision and introduced to some of the major characters (for the benefit of the reader). After the second chapter, this device is dropped, and never mentioned again, so it's not even a framing device. These days, there's no problems with the idea of a landscape with people and places that have no reference to Earth, but I imagine an introduction was considered necessary when written.

Complicating matters is that it is written in Elizabethan English, making it a bit rougher for most readers to get through. It's been praised for how consistently he keeps up what is effectively a foreign dialect, and doesn't miss the mark, spoiling the illusion. That is beyond my ability to judge. The really rough parts are when a letter or other writing appears in the novel, as none of the characters are great scribes, and the text is an appropriately phonetic approximation of words that quickly becomes very tedious to parse through.

On top of the rest of this, the story is basically a chivalric romance, set in prose. (In fact, I could see Pendragon, with its passion system, being an excellent RPG for this world.) So, we follow the struggle between the island power of Demonland and the continental Witchland (tell me there's not a parallel going on here...), as the hubris of Gorlice of Witchland has him demand fealty from the Demons, and war results. (And I will note that various fantasy staple terms are used here, demons, imps, pixies, etc., but they are more ethnicities than meaning to evoke actual fantastical powers.)

In the end, it's certainly an important book, and generally entertaining in the high heroic mode of great men doing great deeds and leading great armies. Personally, the pacing was all over the place, with all the elements you'd expect: sieges, battles, heroes in single combat, beautiful ladies, politics, beautiful ladies politicing.... And a too-long sequence of climbing a glacier. If you are willing to buckle down with the language, it will reward you, but you have to be mindful of that going in.

I loved this when I read it 20 years ago, and I loved it all over again with knobs on when I re-read it last year to record it as a free audiobook for librivox (listen here). It's a magnificent fantasy, peopled by larger-than-larger-than-life characters who engage in impossible deeds, tumultuous wars and high adventure. It's written in prose of opulent splendour and it's a soaring, glorious and wildly original work.

On the other hand:

* The apparent protagonist is simply abandoned by the author about 50 pages in.

* It's set, oddly, on Mercury, but its habitat and peoples are perfectly Earth-like.

* The nations are eccentrically named (Demonland, Impland, Witchland, etc) even thought they're essentially all populated by humans.

* The wonderful prose style will be off-putting to those seeking a lighter read.

These little foibles do not impact significantly on this reader. It's a classic and a masterpiece. (And if you read it and agree, seek out his tragically incomplete Zimiamvia trilogy. Woof!)

The fantasy genre has become unfortunately muddled in recent history. For every Tolkien work you have a Shannara novel, for every Narnia you end up with an Eragon. Now I'm not an elitist type of reader. I don't disqualify a novel from being entertaining simply because it may be poorly written or a 'clone' of other better fantasy novels. However, that said, the staying power of a fantasy novel diminished when that novel is punctured through with unimaginative cliché or a derivative story.

The point of writing that brief above paragraph is to point out my point. The point being that I am making the point about fantasy novels and confusion. In fact I think my point is being made about confusion even further. A lot of fantasy is written like this to its detriment, giving fantasy a poor reputation as merely escapist entertainment for the geeks, nerds and fanboys/fangirls.

It is works like The Worm Ouroboros which reveal that fantasy has merit as a work of art and as true literature. This is fantasy written in the sweeping style of the epic, a highly beautiful and poetic style that serves to convey truths and interesting narratives at the same time. The result is that The Worm Ouroboros cannot be equalled by many current fantasy novels in its grandeur. Perhaps older tales like the Iliad, The Odyssey and Le Morte d'Arthur may have the same quality, yet I have not read those yet.

The Worm Ouroboros focuses on a long fantastic history of war between Demonland and Witchland. The very names of these two lands strive to provide an ambient, overwhelming, moral greyness to the world created by Eddison. It is a world where you assume at first that those members of Witchland are the enemy and then turn to consider those of Demonland as the enemy. In so doing the overall analysis is that in war there are two sides who perceive the other as the enemy. In many ways Eddison's tale is a narrative about the other and as he so clearly states, not an allegory.

The language is beautifully archaic, a mixture of Modern and Middle English utilised perfectly by Eddison to describe his world like a painter using molten words for colour. His adjectives bristle with life and energy, in fact his words contain an exuberance lacked by many writers now or ever. This is not only a fantasy classic but a classic of classics.

If you are one of those readers who deny fantasy as a genre, content to allow it to sit as the realm of nerds who dwell alone, then I fully recommend that you seek out this novel instead. It is one of the great classics of fantasy and of literature which reveal the value of using the traditions of epic narrative and to some small degree fairytale to reveal truth. I won't discuss what truths are in this story as I feel that that is up to the individual reader, however I fully recommend this novel to any reader, particularly anyone who has a set idea of fantasy as dull and dead.

Addendum
I must add that I first found the novel hard to get into. However with perseverance I discovered the magnificence of the novel and with much thought have come to recognise how great a masterpiece it is. It is not necessarily easy reading, I believe I missed some minor details here or there, but it is excellent reading serving the purposes of all fine literature!

Written long ago in the very early days of the history of epic fantasy this novel is completely unrecognizable in its mode of storytelling from the sheet staining strain of grimdark’s you see hovered before your face all the time nowadays. E.R. Eddison doesn’t really make that consistent use of view point characters nor does the narration get too intimate with any of them but instead he uses whatever methods he can to tell the story and once we know what happened he moves the story right along. We don’t get all the details (although this novel is very detailed). We don’t need all the details. Sometimes we merely just know that the major event happened and that’s good enough. For example at one point a soldier returning home from battle related to his family at their farm the battle that had occurred, and so we know of that battle only through his secondhand account, and what followed therein. Before I read this book for myself I had heard people say that this novel is “pure story telling simply for the sake of storytelling,” and after reading it I can emphatically say this is true.

The writer creates an extremely vivid picture with his wonderfully archaic style, and the sights and the characters really come to life in a world that is bigger than the bounds of the book it’s contained within. Although I can tell this book has meaning, most obviously the ouroboros which is a symbol of rebirth, this theme is never an overt part of the story but is simply so absorbed into the style as to be a completely natural byproduct of the novel in the end…. And you’ll see it once you get there. I should point out that although this is a challenging novel to read it’s not an overly complex one. The dialogue is all written entirely in old English so this can make it quite difficult for the unlearned to get at the substance of what the characters are saying as there you will see many, many words unrecognizable from commonly used English words nowadays. So it might take a few moments to get there but once you decipher the dialogue and sort out who the characters are exactly –some of them have very similar names which is kind of confusing – then the plot is not particularly hard to follow at all and besides some minor intrigues this is a very linear novel, mostly about a war between two lands and the fate they suffer. The war is a brutal one with lots of bloodshed, deaths of important characters, and betrayal but the fighting is never described in close detail, mostly passed over with a brush so we can see what happened, we know what happened, we know the military strategies but we don’t really experience it. The reader does not experience the battle first hand on the front lines like you might find in more modern fantasy epics but instead knows it only in passing. This style doesn’t bother me although I can see why some might find it unengaging, and in fact in some ways I prefer it because you can move through the story a lot quicker and not get dragged into having multiple volumes. The Worm of Ouroboros could have easily been a trilogy or even longer with the amount of plot stuffed in it but it’s not and I’m glad it’s not. Eddison would save that for a later project which I hear takes place in the same world. That is an adventure I’m looking forward to.

I want to start off by saying that this book has some racist scenes. Also, although the female characters are well drawn, and one woman does in one case get to actually do some fighting, for the most part it is assumed that the job of the female is to provide wifely/sisterly support to the male characters. I struggled with how to rate the book, given those facts. I decided to remove a star from my rating.

But it is an interesting book. It opens on what appears to be contemporary Earth, following a man named Lessingham, who goes to sleep in a special room of his house which he expects will produce strange dreams. He offers his wife the chance to join him, but she declines - too weird for her. Which is fair! When he goes to sleep, he is transported to the planet Mercury by a bird, and is then witness to the rest of the story. Or at least, you have to assume he's there for all of it. Very quickly, Eddison disposes of Lessingham and this framing concept altogether, and in fact seems to forget that he set the story on Mercury, as the characters all refer to the planet as Earth or even Middle Earth. The characters also refer frequently to Earthly astrology and to the Ancient Greek/Roman pantheon, and even at one point recite a Shakespearean sonnet.

The heroes of the story are the demons of Demonland, and the villains are the witches of Witchland. Other nations of this world (whatever you want to call it) include Pixieland and Goblinland. Despite the names, the people of these lands don't appear to have any of the characteristics you'd expect of demons, witches, pixies or goblins; they're all just people. Early in the story, the demons are described as having horns, but then Eddison seems to forget about that and never mentions them again. Demonland could just as easily be called Heroland - although admittedly that would be a terrible name.

Although it's made clear that the king of Witchland is an evil sorcerer, and that the kings of Demonland are heroic knights, there are plenty of sympathetic characters in Witchland and among the other races. It's still mostly black and white morally, but there are a few interesting gray areas. Great admiration is given to some of the witches. A particular favorite of mine was Lord Gro, originally of Goblinland, whose loyalties change more than once during the story.

The language throughout is pretty archaic, and both that language and the themes of epic tragedy and high romance remind me of Shakespeare and Arthurian legend. Like much high fantasy that was to come after it, the book features plenty of magic, monsters, swords, castles, horses, lengthy quests across vast and dangerous lands, and massive battles.

One of the uncomfortable parts of the book comes when our heroes travel to a land called Impland and meet and befriend one of the natives, a character named Mivarsh Faz. Mivarsh is treated mostly as comic relief, almost like a foolish and beloved dog, a bit frightened of his masters, but also extremely loyal. That is, until his fear overwhelms him, he makes a tragic mistake, and his fated end comes. The heroes treat his foreign Gods and foreign rituals as funny and ridiculous, and although they briefly mourn his death, he's never mentioned after that again. He seems pretty clearly to be an embodiment of the stereotype of the loyal native guide - when I described him to my wife, she said he sounded like Jar Jar Binks, and that feels right.

The most racist moment comes when our hero Lord Juss arrives in a land full of evil visions meant to turn him from his quest, and the vision that moves him the most is of a beautiful pale woman being attacked by an awful savage "blackamoor." Yeah, Eddison actually uses that word! Ugh.

Now I'm going to talk about the end of the book, so beware spoilers!

At the end of the Lord of the Rings, although our heroes are saddened by what has been lost in the war, there is nothing but joy at the idea of their evil enemies being defeated and destroyed, and at the coming of peace to the land. But in Eddison's book, when their enemies are beaten, the heroes find themselves deeply depressed, contemplating their future lives that will be without war and without mighty foes to conquer. To them, peace and the end of battle is anathema. I remembered Tolkien's line, given to Faramir: "I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend." Our demons, on the other hand, DO love the sword for its sharpness, and the warrior for his glory! In fact, they're so depressed about peace that the blessed immortal queen who's come to visit them petitions to the Gods for them, and brings all their evil enemies back to life!!! In keeping with the title of the book - the worm ouroboros, whose end is his beginning - as the story ends, the events that began it occur again.

On one level, this is rather insane and awful - endless war and blood and death and hardship! - but on another, I appreciate it as a kind of metaphor for the idea of a story that lives forever because it is retold forever. The neverending story, you might say.

The book has its flaws, for sure, but it also has fine writing, fascinating characters, and really memorable scenes. It's also an interesting artifact in the history of the fantasy genre.

One final note: the audiobook edition I listened to was unique among the many audiobooks I've listened to in that it was read, not by a human being, but by an artificial intelligence. I hope this is not something that is going to catch on in the publishing world! Although the voice itself, taken word by word, could pass easily for a real person's, the intonation of that voice across sentences and paragraphs is just wrong, and made it difficult for me to even grasp the meaning of certain passages. Worse, when the AI came across a word it didn't know how to pronounce, it either took a guess, sometimes getting it horribly wrong, or it didn't try at all and instead simply spelled the word out letter by letter! Listening to it was a very strange experience.

A strange and brilliant book. Eddison's plot here is a basic swords-and-sorcery tale, but the plot isn't the point--- though his Lord Gro is one of the finest characters found in fantasy lit (and rather a hero of mine). The point is the language--- Eddison writes in Thomas Malory's prose, in over-the-top, thundering, complex 15th-c. English that's a delight to read. And there's no good or evil here, just warriors with ambitions and reputations to make--- a world that Agamemnon and Odysseus would've understood instantly. Read the preface, but skim the "Induction" and the first forty or so pages. Then dive headlong into the tale and the language. There's nothing like this anywhere else.

Сетингът на романа беше любопитен, героите - достатъчно интересни и "сиви" в хубавия смисъл на понятието, а краят - изключително хитроумен и нестандартен, за да разбера защо влиятелни фентъзи творци (любимият ми Муркок, например) сочат Е. Р. Едисън за свой вдъхновител и учител. Но в противовес на споменатото, не харесах особено литературното изпълнение. Твърде мудно, твърде накъсано от пространни описания на облекла и помещения, твърде много изреждане на имена на личности и географски понятия, без особено отношение към действието, просто в стил "телефонен указател". В тоя ред на мисли една карта на света, приложена в началото на изданието, въобще не би била излишна.

Въведението ми се стори абсолютно ненужно (даже не го и разбрах), а "спойлерите", мяркащи се в описанията към някои от главите яко ме издразниха. Давам пример (условен): "Глава еди-си-коя: За битката на тоя с оня и как тоя/или оня я загуби"... Кое му е интересното да узнаеш изхода на дадено събитие, още преди да си започнал да четеш за него?

Разбира се, вземам предвид стоте и кусур години, минали от написването на текста - време, през което жанрът се е развил експлозивно и критериите ни разбираемо са се променили. Държа да уточня и друго - аз не съм особен почитател нито на Толкин, нито на К. С. Луис, нито на Ле Гуин, чиито суперлативи са изтипосани на кориците на родното издание (без по никакъв начин да отричам значимостта им за фентъзито), та впечатленията ми твърде вероятно не са най-меродавни за техните фенове. В заключение, не съжалявам, че се запознах със "Змията Уроборос", романът безспорно е наваторски за годината на написването му, но към днешна дата не мога да дам по-висока оценка от Среден 3.

I don't often abandon books that I am reading, but in the case of E. R. Eddison's THE WORM OUROBOROS, I think it is overdue. When you read 140-odd pages in a 500+ page book, you expect something to happen -- something besides unending gorgeosity of purple prose. It seems the plot was created by a random number generator, and all the characters are more or less stand-ins for one another. There is a point where poetic language shades into tripe, and I fear that Ourobouros has reached that point.

Therefore I banish it into the outer darkness where there is the weeping and gnashing of teeth.

I never knew what bloated meant until I read this book. At least 50% of this book described flowers and clothing. The other 50% was ridiculous. Since it was written following the First World War, I can imagine it being a commentary on the absurdity of the British cultural position toward warfare, but it would have been nice for at least ONE character to be sort of likable/reasonable/intelligent/NORMAL.

The story in a nutshell: one of three brothers is kidnapped, the remaining brothers and their friend must save him while protecting their kingdom from the evil bad guy trying to steal it from them. So two of the three set off to find where the brother is located, practically arriving at his doorstep, only to discover that they must go all the way home in order to retrieve the magic item that will allow them to cross the threshold.

The characters in a nutshell: two dimensional (probably more like one) war-mongers who are dearly beloved to their soldiers for their prowess, honesty and virtue. Nevermind that by the time the book ends, there can't possibly be a single able-bodied man alive in either kingdom, and NOBODY feels like it's a shame that this many people are dying, primarily for no real reason.