The Worm Ouroboros
- Written By E. R. Eddison
The Worm Ouroboros
- E. R. Eddison
A champion is stolen. A war ignites. Nothing here ever truly ends.
In the high halls of Demonland, on the morning of Lord Juss’s birthday, an ambassador arrives from Witchland bearing an insult disguised as a challenge. The Demons are proud, victorious, and flush from a war just won when King Gorice of Witchland demands a wrestling match to settle old grievances. Juss’s brother Goldry Bluszco accepts without hesitation. The match ends in King Gorice’s death. It should have ended there.
It does not. Witchland’s new king turns to sorcery older and darker than any grudge, and Goldry Bluszco vanishes, spirited to a peak no mortal foot has climbed. Juss vows to bring him back, and with his cousin Brandoch Daha, he sets out across mountains, seas, and the borders of lands that answer to no human law. Around them, conflicts reignite on every front, as armies move and old friends are forced to rethink their allegiances. By its final pages, Eric Rücker Eddison’s Old Norse-inspired novel folds back on itself, serpent-fashion, casting doubt on the real aims of war and the finality of any victory.
“The harvest of this world is to the resolute, and he that is infirm of purpose is ground betwixt the upper and the nether millstone.”
About the Author
- E. R. Eddison
Eric Rücker Eddison was born in 1882 in Adel, Yorkshire, and educated at Eton and Trinity College, Oxford. In 1906, he joined the Board of Trade and spent more than three decades earning honors for distinguished service in civil and foreign affairs, a career built on discretion and competence that, by his own account, left little outward sign of the imagination working underneath it.
That imagination surfaced in 1922 with The Worm Ouroboros, written in his spare hours and steeped in the Icelandic sagas and Jacobean drama he had studied since boyhood. A devoted scholar of Old Norse, Eddison later produced his own translation of Egil’s Saga, a medieval classic set in the Viking age, whose archaic, muscular language shaped Ellison’s invented world of Demonland and Witchland. He returned to that world in the Zimiamvian trilogy, beginning with Mistress of Mistresses in 1935 and left unfinished at his death in 1945 (with the final, incomplete volume, The Mezentian Gate, published posthumously in 1958).
Eddison’s fiction found an appreciative audience among the Inklings, an informal literary discussion group of academics and writers who met at the University of Oxford. Among them, J.R.R. Tolkien called Eddison “the greatest and most convincing writer of invented worlds” he had ever read. Eddison died in 1945, leaving The Worm Ouroboros as one of the foundational texts of modern fantasy.
