Adventure classics – Fighting for peace, cursed with war

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.)

Adventure classics – The chancy beauties of ER Eddison

The Worm Ouroboros

by Eric Rücker Eddison

***

There is no such thing as an ugly woman in the writings of E.R. Eddison. The author of the 1922 epic fantasy, The Worm Ouroboros, couldn’t stand to write about unlovely women any more than he could write about cowardly men. Which doesn’t mean that either sex were morally upright. He was willing to allow the male characters of his tales of aristocratic mayhem to be cruel, lecherous and treacherous. And the women, beautiful though they are (and beautifully dressed) are equally chancy, as the adventurer-hero Brandoch Daha learned to his discomfiture.

Sometimes it makes me wonder what Eddison’s marriage was like.

In last Friday’s post, the mythical kingdoms of Witchland and Demonland were once again at war following the treacherous sorcery of Witchland’s King Gorice XII that caused the disappearance of Demonland’s warrior champion and co-ruler, Goldry Bluszco. (For those just tuning in, Witchlanders are the bad guys and Demonlanders the good guys, sort of. (Eddison’s odd names for his other-worldly world apparently date back to stories he imagined as a boy, and he wasn’t able to shake himself loose from his fixation with weird appellations until after the publication of this first of his fantasy novels.)

Goldry’s two brothers (and co-rulers of Demonland), Lord Juss and Spitfire, along with Demonland lord Brandoch Daha and their various allies wage war against Witchland while also searching for the lost Goldry.

In the course of the quest, Juss, Spitfire and Brandoch Daha journey to the great mountain ranges of Demonland to ask for the counsel of the semi-divine Queen Sophonisba. Along the way, they catch a glimpse of the holy mountains of the land of Zimiamvia (which will become the locale of Eddison’s later novels) and encounter adventures reminiscent of the medieval tales of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table (and perhaps also of the tales that unhinged the reason of that later knight, Don Quixote). And not the least perilous of these is what Eddison terms, “the amorous commerce of Brandoch Daha with the Lady of Ishnain Nemartra.”

Here is a portion of Eddison’s description that that amorous adventure, from Chapter X of Ouroboros: “They journeyed by the southern margin of a gravelly sea, made all of sand and gravel and no drop of water, yet ebbing and flowing always with great waves as another sea doth” until they saw, in a barren land, “in the lustre of a late bright-shining sun a castle of red stone. . .”

Inside the apparently empty castle a table is spread for a feast. When they dare to eat, they are visited by the lady of Ishnain Nemartra, who offers them the choice of a sorely-needed night’s rest or of staying awake all night to receive any earthly thing he may desire. Brandoch Daha takes on the adventure. When the lady visits him after his successful completion, readers might expect him to make the sensible choice of asking for the return of the vanished champion Goldry Bluzsco, who they’ve come so far to rescue.

But if you expect sensible choices, you don’t know Eddison’s heroes. Brandoch Daha demands a night of love with the lady, although she warns him, “Of all things earthly mightiest thou have taken choose; but I am not earthly.” (Italics mine.)

Brandoch Daha should have paid more attention to the terms of the contract. Before their time together is over, the lady is in love, but when Brandoch Daha insists on leaving her to take up his quest again, she curses him with war instead of peace. And Goldry Bluzsco is yet to be found.

(Next Friday, how it ends – or doesn’t. And why the Worm Ouroboros chases his tail in a never-ending cycle.)

Adventure classics – Mr. Eddison’s never ending story

The Worm Ouroboros

by Eric Rücker Eddison

***

I could hardly believe my eyes when, searching for overlooked pre-Tolkienesque fantasies, I found Listverse’s “Top 10 Underrated Fantasy Stories Before 1937,” and its mention of E.R. Eddison’s  1922 magnum opus, The Worm Ouroboros. “My favorite novel,” gushed the Listverse writer. And I thought, wow, who knew anybody but me loved Eddison’s work?

Ouroboros is the tale of the warring kingdoms of Witchland and Demonland, set ostensibly on the planet Mercury, whose history endlessly repeats itself. The title refers, not to any of the characters, but to the dragon (“worm” in Old English) of Norse mythology that swallows its own tail, with no beginning or ending. And it’s told in a 16^th century idiom reminiscent of Shakespeare in an opium dream.

Although J.R.R. Tolkien had some praise for Ouroboros, which got a 1950’s reprint following the success of at his Lord of the Rings, at this point you may understand why Eddison’s works haven’t exactly become cultural icons.

Still, I think his books may yet get their due in 21^st century fantasy realms. His “Demons” and “Witches,” along with his other nations of Pixies, Imps, Goblins and Ghouls don’t sound as bizarre to readers steeped in paranormal fantasy today as they must have in the early decades of the previous century; his byzantine, sexually-charged plot twists familiar ground to Game of Thrones enthusiasts.

And computer-generated animation seems made to delve into Eddison’s sometimes descriptions of setting, such as this one for the audience chamber in the palace of Lord Juss, ruler of Demonland, whose support pillars are each topped with a precious stone “carved by the hand of some sculptor of long ago into the living form of a monster: here was a harpy with screaming mouth, so wondrously cut in ochre-tinted jade it was a marvel to hear no scream from her: here in wine-yellow topaz a flying fire-drake:…there a star sapphire the colour of moonlight, cut for a cyclops, so that the rays of the star trembled from his single eye….”

Eddison lavished similar detail on everything from the dresses of the highly decorative princesses and damsels accompanying his heroes to Himalayan-rivaling mountain ranges. His characters are equally baroque: heroes inimitably brave, strong and good; villains equally brave, strong and evil. The action is tremendous, beginning with an epic single combat, a wrestling match between the evil king of Witchland and Lord Juss’s brother, the Demonland champion, for domination of their world.

But Witches are witches. No, actually, they’re not. Their kings are powerfully evil sorcerers more like Tolkien’s Saruman than Halloween (or even Shakespearean) crones stirring cauldrons. So they’re not about to let the Demons’ win in the wrestling match keep them from plotting more villainy. In Eddison’s viewpoint, there are no shadows, no in-betweens. And neither side ever, ever gives up.

As the introduction to the 1952 edition states, perhaps with a hint of wistfulness, “There are no complications, no reservations and no excuses here. Pagan these warriors may be (actually, Eddison is notably short on religious overtones) and semi-barbarous, but they are not oppressed by weasel-faced doubts or whining uncertainties…and life itself is joyful and wonderful.”

But there, I haven’t even gotten to the melancholy traitor Gro (the only character with any approach to complexity, little good though it does him). Or to the Scarlet Pimpernellish Demon Lord Brandoch Daha or the May-December romance between lovely Prezmyra and Witchland’s cunning old warrior Corund. I’ll continue this discussion next Friday, although readers who want to read (or reread) will be able to see the entire story here.