E.R. Eddison – The Worm Ouroboros (1922)

The Worm Ouroboros is a curious book. Written 30 years before The Lord of the Rings, it is often seen as the Ring’s predecessor. And when Tolkien’s work was published, the comparison with Eddison’s book did not always went in Tolkien’s favour. Eddison too gives us a fully realised world, which creation began in Eddison’s teenage years.

Eddison believed in living life to the full, like commercials tell us today. All his characters are larger than life, glorious heroes and passionate villains. Houses are grand, the landscape is legendary, women are beautiful and glory is worth dying for. At the beginning it sounds overdone, but it has a cumulative effect to the effect that you actually feel experiencing a world with a different set of values. Ancient Greek, or Viking. It is the only way in which the ending of the book would make any sense (I can say no more).

Add to this that Eddison is a fantastic storyteller. When the action starts, it is there to stay till the end of the book. And he tells his story in Shakespearian prose, which might be hard at first, but gives a wonderful feel to it. It will make you read the story in small pieces so you can savour it slowly and let the wonderful feel linger in your brain. (Here I must confess that I have read the Dutch translation, but even so, the book’s volcanic nature apparently has shined through.)

So here we have scene after scene of beautifully crafted material. Our heroes are happily climbing an unclimbable mountain, while looking to tame an untameable animal to ride to a land which cannot be reached, while their country gets invaded by a perpetually resurrecting villain. Still the book is a flawed masterpiece, because it has some irksome failings. 1) The first 15 or so pages give an introduction about a guy that dreams about flying to Mercury and then disappears from the story, 2) All the nations have names like demonland, impland and witchland, but all the inhabitants are simply humans. Perhaps Eddison could not discard his teenage ponderings.

This book is a force of nature. It has defined my upper boundary of heroism.