The Worm
Ouroboros
by Eric Rücker Eddison
***
In last Friday’s post, one
of the heroes of E.R. Eddison’s 1922 epic fantasy, The Worm Ouroboros, claimed a favor from the eerily beautiful lady of
the dead lands of Ishnain Nemartra. Considering that the hero in question,
Demonland Lord Brandoch Daha, was on a quest to find the lost warrior champion
of his country, the sensible favor would seem to have been the successful completion of
the quest. Unfortunately, Brandoch Daha is thinking with some part of his body
other than his head. He opts for a night in heaven with the lady herself. When he
wakes up enough to return to his quest, she curses him for leaving her. Instead
of the peace he sought, she says, he will find only war.
Despite Brandoch Daha’s
epic goof, the quest for the missing champion is fulfilled and Demonland eventual
vanquishes its archenemy, Witchland. The victory was due as much to a massive
goof on the part of Witchland’s sorcerer king, Gorice XII, as to the virtue of
Demonland’s just cause. For the second time, Gorice attempts to call an
unhallowed spirit to his aid. This time, without the aid of his once-trusted
second, the ineffable traitor Lord Gro, the whole thing gets out of control. The
spirit not only destroys Witchland’s fortress but drags Gorice’s soul,
Faust-like, off in the process.
(Sorry about the spoiler,
but you’ve probably been reading the complete text at Sacred Texts or
other sites. If not, feel free to read the full account, if only for Eddison’s
incredible language, praised by H.P. Lovecraft and others.)
In our world, with one
World War already behind, the possibility of unleashing the energy stored in
atoms was already being discussed when Eddison’s fantasy was published in 1922.
Despite Eddison’s insistence in his dedication to the original edition that Ouroboros “is neither allegory nor
fable,” it’s as difficult not to see a cautionary tale in the Witch King’s
hubris as it is in the destructive power of the One Ring in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.
In both epics, their
respective worlds are devastated by war, as our world was after the first and
second World Wars. Except that in Eddison’s case, the heroes long not for the
peace to restore their world, but for the return of their brave enemies.
As Demonland’s ruler, Lord
Juss, says, “We may well cast down our swords as a last offering on Witchland’s
grave. For now must they rust: seamanship and all high arts of art must
wither…thinking that we, what fought but for fighting’s sake, have in the end
fought so well we never may fight again…”
What more can the gods of
this strange land grant them, than a return of those beloved enemies? And they
do. The Lady of Ishnain Nematra's prophecy is fulfilled: instead of peace, the heroes must wage war everlasting. And the Worm Ouroboros, a symbol for eternity, bites its own tail, and
rolls endlessly onward.
Eddison, born in
1882, never served in a war, having instead a successful career as a civil
servant and man of letters. In his last completed novel, 1940’s A Fish Dinner in Memison, a character
says, “I can’t understand chaps like you. Hankering already for the next war,
or a revolution.” To which the answer is: “Who’s going to stop it?”
This belief in the
inevitability of war, as much as Eddison’s dualist philosophy, may
have been at the root of Tolkien’s quarrel with him, despite his admiration for
Eddison’s created world.
(Next Friday, Adventure
classics begins a December of spiritual adventures with Plato’s The Symposium.)
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