The Worm Ouroboros

"It is one of the classic works and you could say it’s important in the history of the genre. It got pulled back into circulation after Tolkien praised it in the 1960s, and Ballantine Books started republishing classic works that then became de facto fantasy works and part of a fantasy canon. Among the very first ones that were published, after Ballantine issued the Lord of the Rings , were the ER Eddison books, including The Worm Ouroboros . That was even before Ballantine started designating these publications as adult fantasy series, which finally was the collective title they came up with. Eddison came to some of the meetings of the Inklings , which is the group with CS Lewis and Owen Barfield, and others. The other thing Tolkien said about Eddison is that his philosophy was repellent! He’s not Christian. Not by any stretch. He had a kind of Nietzschean set of values, the superiority of the heroic individual over the values of society. But he was a great world builder, and probably like Tolkien, he was strongly influenced by William Morris , in that regard. It’s kind of a literary link, where The Worm Ourobouros came out in the 1920s, so it precedes even The Hobbit. It’s a link between the great 19th-century romances and modern fantasy. I see in the world around us fear being weaponised. We invoke fear of the unknown, and the other, and those are kind of the same thing. This is often done in order to foster some sort of emotional response and often overt oppression of the other. So fear turns to hatred, which turns to oppression. Not just now, not just here—though I see it in the political rhetoric today. In thinking about what can fantasy do for us—if it does work in the world as I claim—it should have something to say about this very powerful and very terrible force. So I started looking in my work for references to fear, and stories in which fear was built in. I wanted to distinguish fantasy from horror, because I think it does a different thing. The fear has a different purpose (and I don’t want to go into the whole theory of terror or an HP Lovecraft digression). But I really like an idea that I got from Canadian sci-fi writer John Clute, which is that the structure of a horror story is incomplete action. Whereas a fantasy goes beyond that point where the horror story would stop and makes you work out the implications and, if not actually solve the problem, at least confront it. If that’s the basic structure of fantasy, I think it’s something you can see in the critical writings of Tolkien and Ursula K Le Guin and many others. There’s that completed action, the second half of the story, that leads us beyond horror to something more integrative. Not necessarily happy, but a sense of moving beyond the point you started from. So I started thinking about books like The Worm Ouroboros and I picked up the distinction clearly here."

"Tolkien had conflicting views about it! He disliked the prose, and the fact that it’s more violent. It is a classic novel, a kind of vast romantic fantasy, originally published in 1926. It’s a really difficult read because it’s written in cod-Shakespearean prose; it is incredibly beautiful in places, but also every time I read it there are bits I’ve skipped, because it’s full of ye-s and thee-s and thou-s…. It’s incredibly high romantic fantasy, and it’s very strange. We’ve got people in pixie land and goblin land. We have people who are fundamentally extremely good, and then we have the enemy who are deeply unpleasant bad people, and we end with the good guys winning. But rather as Blake said of Milton , you get the feeling that Eddison is much more interested in what’s going on in the enemy court – the machinations! It’s historically accurate, as far as you can say that for a secondary world fantasy novel. There are political machinations: people will stab each other in the back, there’s an attractive young woman who is clearly sleeping around to get power and influence… And he’s really enjoying writing that – much more than he’s enjoying writing about the good king and his two brothers, who are these upstanding, noble, jolly good chaps you can imagine on the playing fields of Eton. But what’s really interesting about it is this theme… An ouroboros is a serpent swallowing its own tail. There’s a little section in the book, where three different armies are pursuing each other, around and around the desert. Each army is marching to attack the army ahead of it, and also marching to escape the army behind. So they go round and round in a circle through this desert. They’ve been doing this for a long time, and our heroes finally break the spell. But there’s that sense, in one paragraph, of the sheer futility of this entire world of questing knights and armies and kingdoms in conflict with each other for moral reasons. It’s spectacularly weird, and it’s never returned to. But it’s really important, and really strange. “It’s fantasy with the moral restraints taken off…grimdark is just fantasy getting in line with historical reality” And the end – spoilers, sorry! – we end with our three great brothers having defeated the enemy, and going back to their own kingdom to live in peace. So traditionally, that would be where we end: at this point, we’re going to live happily ever after. But they’re sitting around and they’re a bit bored – because they’re these great noble knights, and they realise that without the evil demonic king constantly plotting against them, they have no purpose. So they wish for everything to go back to the way it was at the beginning of the book – and it does! Everything goes back to the point where we began, with the people in the good kingdom arming and preparing. That’s the only way our heroes can be happy, knowing they have an enemy to fight. It’s an astonishing sense of the whole nature of why we read fantasy. A lot of people say they read fantasy and enjoy battle scenes because they enjoy good winning. But if in Lord of the Ring s, fairly early on, they sat down for a parley and decide that Sauron and his lot can carry on living over there , and they won’t bother anyone else, and that was the end… Boring! People want to see good win, but only at the last minute after great sacrifice. That’s the whole point. So this book is saying something really complicated about battle, about the fantasy of chivalry and of knights and of fighting for the good and the happy ending. I think it’s really, really interesting. Yes! One of the big criticisms made of it is that it has almost no characterisation. Partly because it’s written in cod-Shakespearean, fake 16th-century language – so rather like reading something like the Morte D’Arthur , there’s a huge barrier. But also Eddison’s not interested in the psychology of the characters, or why the world is worth preserving – it’s very much just, pixie landers are good, the other lot are bad, and that’s the mechanics. Tolkien gives you a sense of why it’s important; there’s an obvious sense of the Shire in particular, and you can see that Mordor is a terrible place. Whereas here it is just absolute. It’s not about the characters. It’s about the whole concept of chivalry, King Arthur and things, that’s what he’s engaging with."

"This is a pre-Tolkien fantasy . It’s notable for a couple of reasons, one being that the book itself is written in faux-Jacobian English, which doesn’t have an exact historical precedent. When I first read it, it took me three tries to get through the darn thing, because I kept hammering my head against all the unusual vocabulary. But once I got used to it, then it was – I won’t say smooth sailing, but it was comprehensible sailing. I love the book for a number of reasons. One is that it is a complete story in one volume, which is unusual in the world of epics these days. You need to know that it has a strange framing device: right at the beginning, there’s an Englishman who goes to sleep in a lotus room. His spirit is transported, and he gets to witness the activities of the rest of the book – and the author promptly forgets about him for the rest. So you can ignore that part. The other thing is that the names are absolutely ridiculous; they’re like something a ten-year-old boy would come up with when he’s dreaming about a big story. There are demons and witches and goblins, but they’re all just people. But there’s a grandeur to the story. It’s unabashedly pagan. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis were both very religious in their own ways – Lewis was explicit about it, where Tolkien is implicit, but his beliefs informed so much of his approach to story. Eddison was completely off in a different direction. The philosophy he embraces, which is on display in the book itself, is that the way you achieve greatness is by pursuing beauty and perfection in all things that you do, including villainy. So if you are the villain, then you must strive to be the greatest villain that’s ever lived, because that is the point of your life: to achieve notoriety. That is how your name will live on. It’s your form of an afterlife, of immortality. Of course, that’s drawn right from Beowulf and a lot of the Nordic and Anglo-Saxon traditions. So it’s incredibly immoral in some ways. There are peasants who are just slaughtered by the thousands on the battlefield, and no one cares. No one cares that things are not moral in the normal, everyday sense: but there’s greatness to it. The language is delightful. It’s just so scrumptious once you get into it. In fact, right near the beginning of the book, there’s a beautiful throne room that’s described in excruciating detail, and one of the details is a star sapphire. And I loved the idea of a giant star sapphire so much that I put an even bigger one into the Eragon series – and readers of that series, of course, will know what I’m speaking of. Unlike Tolkien, Eddison embraces the full spectrum of human experience, in the sense that there is sex, there are adult relations. It’s not gratuitous or anything, but it’s mentioned that these things happen. And even amid all this grandeur and epic-ness, there are shades of grey and psychological complexity with the characters. There’s a turncoat traitor character who’s really quite well written, and adds a lot of depth to the story… So even though it’s bombastic and over the top, there is still a lot of beauty and subtlety in it. I recommend this book to almost everyone, and almost no one ends up reading it because of the language."