Most Helpful Customer Reviews
|
|
83 of 88 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Eddison's Epic Fantasy Masterpiece, July 18, 2002
The Worm Ouroboros
by E.R.Eddison
Introduction and notes by Paul Edmund Thomas
Foreward by Douglas E. Winter
Dell Books / 1991This is one of those classics which will never generate popular appeal because it is simply too difficult to read, and it has almost nothing in common with the majority of books in the fantasy genre it helped to spawn beyond the broadest of themes (good heroes battling evil villains in a fantastic world). It is also one of the most original books to be written in English in the 20th century, and has inspired and been admired by a pantheon of popular writers: this edition boasts superlative testaments from Tolkien, C.S.Lewis, H.Rider Haggard, Piers Anthony, and Ursula K. Le Guin, among others. For readers with a serious interest in the origins and possibilities of the modern fantasy genre, this book is simply not to be missed. E.R.Eddison (1882-1945) was an English civil servant, Icelandic scholar, and mountaineer. The Worm Ouroboros was his first novel, published shortly before his 40th birthday. It is a story of grand conflict on an imagined world, and is told in a language that is Eddison's own: a rich, heady prose that draws on written English over the last 500 years for its grammar, vocabulary, and expression, and most heavily on that of the Elizabethan dramatists for its dialogue and description. Eddison's prose, above his other powers of invention, is what makes this book (and those that followed in his Zimiamvia trilogy) so unique, and qualify it as a classic. Some of the speeches that come out of the mouths of Eddison's characters are beyond belief! The book also boasts honorable and courageous heroes as well as the most dastardly villains, and the high adventure, outrageous exploits, battles, and sorcery that ensue from their interaction. Marked differences from contemporary novels are its lack of introspection (the narrator does not judge, and we see only the actions of the characters) and its lack of character development (the characters are archetypal, and so while human, they are also something more and something less than human). The Dell edition has an introduction by Eddison scholar Paul Edmund Thomas, who cites Homer and the Icelandic sagas as Eddison's primary sources. Thomas has also annotated the text, which is very helpful as Eddison's prose is riddled with archaic vocabulary and literary references not familiar to this reader. Highly recommended, but not for everyone!
|
|
|
67 of 71 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Beauty at the heart of the world, July 29, 2002
As a youngster I devoured fantasy greedily, any fantasy (there was not a fantasy-genre industry in those days, and fantasy was hard to come by.) Much of what I liked then I can no longer read: too much bombast and adolescent wish-fulfilment But Eddison improves with each rereading.His prose is beautiful, as everyone remarks. If you don't have the patience for sentences of more than two clauses, or if you have a prim horror of archaic language, you should skip this book. (Or maybe you should re-examine the rewards of patience: but that's another matter). But if you have the capacity to appreciate beautiful English prose, if you can read Sir Thomas Browne or the King James Bible with pleasure, then you have a treat in store. Read this book: there aren't many like it. There's a serious philosophy in this book. Eddison believes in greatness. It's no accident that his literary antecedents are in classical Greece and Iceland: Alkibiades and Grettir would have understood his devotion to the heroic, to the ferocious, doomed attempt to set one's indelible mark on the stream of time. For Eddison the reckless, whole-hearted, passionate life is the only life worth living, and the only life worth writing about. It's not a philosophy I agree with. It lives too close to fascism and machismo for me: it insists upon and glorifies a sense of Self that I think is ultimately nonsense. But it's a philosophy that produced much of the most beautiful literature of the last century: Ezra Pound and William Butler Yeats often wrote from just this standpoint. It may be wrong, but it's not childish. It situates Beauty at the heart of the world: greatness, to Eddison, is beautiful action, and all beautiful things demand worship. And reward it. "What I have promised," says Eddison's Aphrodite, "I will perform." Read this book. Read Mistress of Mistresses too. They're dazzling, magnificent books.
|
|
|
42 of 45 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Ian Myles Slater on: A Favorite, if Not For Everyone, September 20, 2004
I adore "The Worm Ouroboros." It has flaws, or at least peculiarities, including a fascination with aristocracy and lack of concern for the "lower classes" rarely expressed so clearly in modern English literature -- perhaps not since the Tudors began eliminating "over-mighty subjects," and the Puritans started comparing the godly poor man in his cottage to the ungodly noble in his mansion (or King in his palace!) without regard to the "natural" order of things. By the 1580s, even Sir Philip Sidney's class-conscious "Arcadia" paid lip-service to rustic virtues, as Malory, a century before, had not. But not Eddison, over three centuries later.
Some, understandably, find this offensive, but it shouldn't be considered political (regardless of the author's own views). E.R. Eddison's narrative and the Homeric or medieval ethos of the book's characters fit together perfectly; and you can consider their attitude the most realistic feature of the narrative.
And it is quite a story. One of the sub-plots includes riding an unridable beast as a stage in climbing an unclimbable mountain, all of which is part of a side-effort (a rescue) in a struggle to kill an undying enemy.
The book is of a piece; gorgeous language (too much for some tastes), mighty heroes (and their adversaries) in colorful and expensive costumes and decorated armor, spectacular landscapes, weird animals from bestiaries and heraldry, magic gems from lapidaries, and stories from "Mandeville's Travels," all fitted together with correspondingly archaic notions of the Good and the Just. Achilles or Lancelot would be at home. So would medieval Norway's eccentric King Magnus Bare-legs, of Scots garb and sayings like "Kings are made for glory, not for long life," whom I am almost surprised not to find among the minor characters -- despite the book's arbitrary setting on "Mercury" (more of an astrological zone than a planet; Mercury as patron of eloquence), which troubles some readers.
And there are the nations of Witches, Demons, Goblins, Imps, and Pixies; names not related to their characteristics -- save that the lords of Demonland seem to have small horns (not mentioned of anyone else), and the late, unlamented, Ghouls were cannibals. One has to get used to thinking in terms of places: people from "waterish Witchland" and "many-mountained Demonland." There is this difference between the main heroes, the Demons, and the main villains, the Witches; the Demons are seen waging wars in defense of themselves and others, the Witches are out for conquest. But they all enjoy a fight; and, again, some lords of Witchland are perfectly decent to other members of the upper class, while the Demonland nobility doesn't seem to notice much how many common soldiers and seamen perish.
Ordinary farming folk going about their tasks do appear, but briefly, and not without a dignifying classical allusion (the Demon song against Corinius is a version of a Greek drinking song against the tyrant Pittacus); this sequence from daily life also suggests a bit of influence from Eddison's beloved Icelandic sagas, which otherwise contribute omens, pithy sayings, and some artifacts.
Magic plays a role -- used mainly by the villains, not so much because it is morally evil, but because it is so dangerous to the user that a more sensible sort of hero might rather take his chances in battle. The protagonists (despite mocking the petty gods of lesser nations), appeal to their thoroughly pagan gods, instead of casting spells -- and sometimes get an answer, at much less risk.
If you are sure you can't get over such issues, or won't be able to abide its elevated, frequently archaic, often Shakespearean, or at least Elizabethan or Jacobean, language, you probably shouldn't bother with the book.
If you think that you might enjoy it, for its high adventure and extravagant imagination, there is the question of what edition to read. It used to be that they were all quite similar, and the best answer was "whichever is available." This is no longer true. Both contents and price differ.
Over the years since I first read it 1967, I've become familiar with a number of editions. These include: the 1922 Jonathan Cape edition, the 1952 E.P. Dutton second American edition, with Orville Prescott's Introduction added to that by James Stephens for the 1926 American edition, and the 1962 trade paperback reprint of this in Crown's Xanadu Library (all three identical except the added front-matter); the 1967 Ballantine mass-market paperback, reset from the Dutton edition, with Barbara Remington's cover art (and some of its nine later reprintings), plus a 1975 copy of the 1971 Pan/Ballantine British edition, and the 1977 and 1981 Del Rey/Ballantine tenth and twelfth printings, on which the older Ballantine cover was replaced with a less attractive one by Murray Tinkelman (originally in green, later in yellow); and, finally, the 1991 re-set edition from Dell, annotated by Paul Edmund Thomas, with a cover of characters and beasties interpreted by Tim Hildebrandt.
(The Hildebrandt cover is, typically, "realistic" -- posed-looking, including studio lighting. I much prefer the crowded, chaotic Remington cover, with its stylized mountains and sea, monsters, ships, and contending armies, and the titular tail-biting serpent, a symbol of eternity, as a frame which intrudes into the landscape. It is recognizably related to Remington's then-recent triptych of covers for Ballantine's "Lord of the Rings." although fortunately far more consistent with the spirit of Eddison's book than those were with Tolkien's. She did an equally good job, in a slightly different style, with the Ballantine 1967-1969 editions of Eddison's three "Zimiamvia" novels, "Mistress of Mistresses," "A Fish Dinner in Memison," and "The Mezentian Gate," catching their High Medieval/Renaissance flavor.)
Although I have some quibbles, and a few major objections, to Thomas's annotations, and to certain omissions, this last is a highly desirable edition, a delight to Eddison's fans, and a resource to those who might be, if they could catch his layered allusions (he often incorporated quotations -- some medieval and adapted, some *literally* sixteenth or seventeenth century English) and follow his frantically rich vocabulary. (Thomas also edited Dell's "Zimiamvia: A Trilogy" omnibus.)
If you are a first-timer, though, it should be remembered that a lot of very literate and intelligent people seem to find Eddison unreadable, even with assistance. You might be one of them. With this in mind, a library copy might be the best start, if available, or an inexpensive used copy of the much-reprinted Ballantine edition (or its rather scarcer Del Rey avatar). I will describe third and fourth options at the end.
The main down side of the Dell trade paperback edition (besides it being out of print, alas!) is that it was the first I know of not to contain the full set of illustrations and chapter decorations by Keith Henderson. Although these vary in quality (and Ballantine's less than intense printing of sharp blacks was not helpful), they were approved by the author, and form a part of his image of the book. (They also have a fascinating relationship to Henderson's roughly contemporary illustrations to a lavish edition of another story of exotic adventure, Prescott's "Conquest of Mexico;" a selection of these were reprinted in "The Fall of the Aztec Empire" in 1993.)
In what may have been a production oversight, rather than an editorial decision, it also lacks the ballad excerpt that should serve as an epigram (see under the Kessinger reprint, below).
Some of the later reprintings by other firms seem to have followed the same assumption that the illustrations could be partly or completely eliminated; a circumstance that makes the 1999 Replica Books edition (hardcover and trade paperback), based directly on the British first edition, particularly attractive. The (British) Millennium Fantasy Masterworks edition of 2002, although possibly reset, and also lacking the American multiple introductions, MAY have ALL the art, and, if available, should be less expensive. I also have yet to see the 2004 American edition from Wildside.
At the opposite extreme from the Replica edition in hardcover is the similarly-priced (!) Kessinger reprint (and its very inexpensive E-Book version, with the same pagination), which not only drops the illustrations -- and the layers of introductions to the American editions -- but in resetting the text also drops the opening epigram, and the appended material Eddison provided for the reader. A mood-setting selection from the ballad of "Thomas the Rhymer" should open the book; it is missing from the Kessinger text, as in the Dell edition, for no apparent reason. (Copyright infringement on Sir Walter Scott's version of the text is unlikely to be a problem!)
Eddison's main appendix, the "Argument with Dates" organizes the considerable amount of back-story offered in widely scattered places throughout the book, and incidentally demonstrates how Eddison had worked out travel times, relative ages of characters, and other details, all in a few pages. It too is gone, which is sure to give some readers the impression that Eddison's "art that conceals art" is actually just confusion.
The "Bibliographical Note on the Verses," which identifies most (not quite all) of Eddison's wide-ranging borrowings of English and Greek verse literature (and specifies the translation of the Icelandic saga read aloud in the "Induction," but not the many echoes of other prose) may not be missed by some, but being able to find some of the (mainly) sixteenth and seventeenth century poetry he incorporated into his created world is helpful, and it is likewise gone without a trace. Even worse, this may give some better-informed readers the impression that Eddison was trying to claim credit for literary borrowings he in fact carefully acknowledged. Indeed, Eddison was more than ordinarily scrupulous; he went so far as to specify the variant readings he used in one of the poems.
The Kessinger E-Book is also littered with new and original misprints, which sometimes make Eddison's classical allusions rather difficult to recognize; I assume that this was generated from the same digital version used for the publisher's hard copy edition, which should have the same flaws. However, the e-book is so inexpensive, and the digital form so convenient for searches, that, for now, I am as delighted with it as child with a new toy. *IF* you don't mind reading a computer screen for long stretches (I do), this may not be a bad place to start. (You will need Adobe Reader 6.x or above to view it; and, even aside from the length, forget about printing it; the file is locked.)
Finally, if you are (as is most likely) reading this on-line, you can check a hypertext version of the 1922 edition on the web -- see the Internet Sacred Text Archive, under Tolkien-related material. This is admirable, but, again, hundreds of pages on a monitor are a more than a bit hard to read (at least for me), and connection speed could be a problem. You can certainly use it as a sampler, to determine if you are interested. Also, the site offers a CD-ROM of a huge collection of material, including "Worm," and many texts relevant to it (particularly Norse and alchemical), at an extremely attractive price. (Its new 4.0 edition should eventually be available through Amazon.) The site itself includes helpful links.
I am classing the e-book and hypertext versions as third and fourth convenient ways to find out if you like this long book, which some find impossible to read, and others rewarding enough to read over and over.
|
|
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews
|
by Lord Dunsany
by Hope Mirrlees
by David Lindsay
by Mervyn Peake
by James Branch Cabell
See all Editorial Reviews
