• Caro Visitante, por que não gastar alguns segundos e criar uma Conta no Fórum Valinor? Desta forma, além de não ver este aviso novamente, poderá participar de nossa comunidade, inserir suas opiniões e sugestões, fazendo parte deste que é um maiores Fóruns de Discussão do Brasil! Aproveite e cadastre-se já!

Eric Rücker Eddison

Administração Valinor

Administrador
Colaborador
<div align="justify">
<span class="jcebox"><img style="border: 0px solid #000000; margin: 5px; float: left; width: 212px; height: 260px" src="images/stories/artigos/48400.jpg" alt="48400.jpg" title="48400.jpg" width="212" height="260" /></span>Nascido em Leeds em 1882, Eric R&uuml;cker Eddison foi um funcion&aacute;rio p&uacute;blico ingl&ecirc;s e tamb&eacute;m um escritor. Embora n&atilde;o muito conhecido (ao menos n&atilde;o no Brasil, j&aacute; que n&atilde;o h&aacute; a venda tradu&ccedil;&otilde;es de suas obras), &eacute; uma referencia essencial para os f&atilde;s da literatura de fantasia, mais precisamente para aqueles que se encantaram pelo estilo de J.R.R. Tolkien em suas hist&oacute;rias sobre a Terra-m&eacute;dia.
</div>
<div align="justify">
&nbsp;
</div>
</ br> Leia Mais...
 
Muito interessante o texto. Já tinha ouvido falar do autor e dessa obra, acho que pelo próprio Gabriel, que, se não me engano, parece que iria traduzir The Worm of Ouroboros, não?
 
Muito bom!!! Não conhecia Eddison!
O interessante é que ele buscou na civilizações antigas e em seus mitos e lendas a inspiração para sua obra, assim como se indentifca isso na obra de Tolkien. Ouroboros por exemplo, esse signo arquétipo extremamente antigo que se encontra em tantas culturas e civilizações do passado da humanidade, como hebreus, egípcios, fenícios, nórdicos... ainda que tenha tido significados diferentes para cada um desses povos. Talvez seja por isso que os diferentes povos a habitar seu mundo imaginário seja, essencialmente, humanos. Uma hipótese apenas, claro!!!
 
Excelente texto, Ana. Eu nunca havia lido nada sobre o Eddison, tirando aquela citação nAs Cartas. Interessante :think:

Mais um livro pra fila de leitura
 
Muito interessante o texto. Já tinha ouvido falar do autor e dessa obra, acho que pelo próprio Gabriel, que, se não me engano, parece que iria traduzir The Worm of Ouroboros, não?

Sim, tenho o livro aqui na estante (já devidamente lido) e já discuti com o Thiago da Arte&Letra sobre a tradução dele.

Continua nos planos. =]
 
Essa e a minha saitorë:grinlove:

Gostei muito do artigo e ele só fez aumentar minha curiosidade sobre essa obra... As vezes acho que seria melhor continuar na ignorância a morrer de curiosidade, uma vez que e muito difícil pra mim ler as coisas no PC...

Mas é isso aí, tá de parabéns Ana! E espero que assim que sair o livro no Brasil a gente fique sabendo aqui... Que daí eu leio ^^

----------------
Now playing: Tenacious D - Drive-Thru
via FoxyTunes
 
Valeuzão, pessoal =D O Deriel esqueceu de fazer a notícia apresentando devidamente a coluna (hanhan) mas pretendo escrever com freqüência textos semelhantes ^^
 
Ah, eu vou fazer sim, só não queria "steal your thunder" já. Deixa um tico e logo a gente faz um rebuzão :grinlove:
 
Aiya!

Espero que logo lance a tradução, pois estou cheio de coisa para ler aqui no pc e não estou tendo tempo para ler nenhuma. hehehehe

Namárie!
 
Muito bacana o artigo! O fato de o próprio Tolkien falar sobre Eddison como "o maior e mais convincente escritor de “mundos inventados”" que ele já havia lido é algo que torna as obras dele muito atrativas para os fãs do Professor.

Dentro de qualquer gênero literário, sempre é interessante buscar outros escritores e estilos diferenciados, até para não ficar bitolado. E depois desse artigo, o Eddison me parece uma ótima opção dentro do gênero da fantasia. =]
 
Testando pra ver se funciona

http://web.archive.org/web/20070210...oks/Wizards/default.aspx?doc=main_classicworm


Classics of Fantasy: The Worm Ouroboros by E. R. Eddison

books_main_classicworm_pic2_en.jpg


By John D. Rateliff

"[T]he grandest heroic fantasy or sword-and-sorcery
tale in the English language"

-- Fritz Leiber

"[F]orty-odd years ahead of its time . . .
the single greatest novel of heroic fantasy"

-- L. Sprague de Camp

Before there was D&D, before there was Tolkien, and before fantasy even existed as a distinct, recognized "genre" of literature with its own imprints, dedicated small presses, and reserved shelves in libraries and bookstores, there was The Worm Ouroboros (1922). If today Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings is the work that defines fantasy, then once upon a time Eddison's book was a major contender for the archetypal epic fantasy.

["I have read all that E. R. Eddison wrote."
"I . . . think of him as the greatest and most convincing
writer of 'invented worlds' that I have read."

-- J.R.R. Tolkien on Eddison

Admired by fellow fantasists like Tolkien, C. S. Lewis (who liked the Worm so much he invited Eddison to visit the Inklings and read his works-in-progress[1]), H. Rider Haggard, James Branch Cabell, James Stephens ("he has added a masterpiece to English literature"), Fritz Leiber (who admitted preferring Eddison to Tolkien), and Ursula K. Le Guin (who placed him first among her examples of superb fantasy stylists, above Kenneth Morris, Tolkien, and Dunsany), Eddison pioneered what has come to be thought of as "Tolkienian fantasy," the grand invented-world epic novel. His book, written over eighty years ago, even comes with the now-requisite paraphernalia: Although the Worm lacks a map, it does come with a timeline and guide to pronunciation, while Eddison's later books (the Zimiamvia series) include not only these but maps of his imaginary realms, genealogical charts, and lists of dramatis personae, as well as a guide to citations. (Eddison's characters, whatever world they're from, have a tendency to quote Shakespeare or Donne or more obscure 16th and 17th century poets and playwrights.)

"[N]either allegory nor fable
but a Story to be read for its own sake"

-- E.R.E.

"So Excellent Well Writ"

Eddison's most outstanding characteristic is, of course, his language. The Worm Ouroboros is the only great fantasy novel written in Shakespearean prose. Other fantasies have been set in the 16th and 17th century (or fantasy-world analogues to Tudor times, give or take a half-century or so), such as Mirrlees' Lud-in-the-Mist (1926), Hodgson's The Night Land (1912), and Briggs' Hobberty Dick (1955), but none featured characters who speak as if they were spontaneously reciting lines from Shakespeare. Eddison was particularly fond of Shakespeare's lesser contemporaries, especially the Jacobean revenge dramatists, his favorite being John Webster (The Duchess of Malfi). He absorbed their vocabulary and phrasing so thoroughly that he could reproduce it perfectly to suit his own purposes:

Now spake Spitfire saying, "Read forth to us, I pray thee, the book
of Gro; for my soul is afire to set forth on this faring."
"'Tis writ somewhat crabbedly," said Brandoch Daha, "and most damnably long.
I spent half last night a-searching on't, and 'tis most apparent no other way
lieth to these mountains save . . . (if Gro say true) but one . . ."
"If he say true?" said Spitfire. "He is a turncoat and a renegado.
Wherefore not therefore a liar?"
"But a philosopher," answered Juss. "I knew him well of old . . .
and I judge him to be one who is not false save only in policy. Subtle
of mind he is, and dearly loveth plotting and scheming, and, as I think,
perversely affecteth ever the losing side if he be drawn into any quarrel
. . . But in this book of his travels he must needs speak truth,
as it seemeth to me, to be true to his own self."

Few writers display so much love of words for their own sake: Eddison at one point spends an entire page describing the hero's bed, and he thinks nothing of devoting a paragraph or two to the magnificence of a villain's clothes and accoutrements; his most prosaic passages are filled with vivid similes and memorable phrases. This verbal luxuriance helps create a heightened sense of drama that befits his larger-than-life cast. For if Tolkien celebrates everyman, the "little people" of our world, through his hobbits, then Eddison glories in the high and mighty: regarding "common men," he has one of his more sympathetic characters say "better a hundred such should die than one great man's hand be hampered."[2] Accordingly, just as Richard III, Hamlet, and Macbeth focus on the doings of kings and princes, lords and ladies, rather than ordinary people, so too Eddison's tale concentrates on the great lords and sensuous, strong-willed ladies of his invented world. Everything in Eddison's world is grander, more intense, and more dramatic than in our mundane reality, from their speeches to their deeds to their passions.

Demons and Witches, Goblins and Imps, Pixies and Ghouls, Oh My

Like a black eagle surveying earth from some high mountain
the King passes by in his majesty. His byrny was of black chain
mail, its collar, sleeves, and skirt edged with plates of dull gold . . .
On his left thumb was his great signet ring fashioned in gold in the
semblance of the worm Ouroboros that eateth his own tail . . .
His cloak was woven of the skins of black cobras stitched together
with gold wire, its lining of black silk sprinkled with dust of gold.
The iron crown of Witchland weighed on his brow, the claws
of the crab erect like horns; and the sheen of its jewels
was many-coloured like the rays of Sirius
on a clear night of frost and wind
at Yule-tide.

-- King Gorice XII of Witchland enters a banquet-hall

While most readers will have little trouble with the archaisms (those who do would be well advised to read the book in Paul Thomas's excellent annotated edition,[3] which glosses the more unusual expressions), even those who get swept up in Eddison's style and story often balk at his nomenclature. Rather than use real-world nations (English, French, Spaniard, and so on) or transparent equivalents (for example, Montaigne, Castille, Eisen, Vodacce in 7th Sea), Eddison opted to dub the heroes of his book the Demons and the villains the Witches, thus creating much confusion (the Demons are heroic and in his eyes wholly admirable; the Witches while treacherous are great warriors and most definitely male). The other nations are called the Goblins (who include the brilliant traitor Lord Gro), the Pixies (most notably the beautiful Lady Prezmyra), the Imps (a wild folk who have names like Fax Fay Faz, Philpritz Faz, and Mivarsh Faz), and the Ghouls (who have been exterminated to the last soul in a genocidal war by our heroes just before the story begins), but these names are just odd window-dressing: all these folk are human.

Besides the names of the nationalities, the personal names are also notably eccentric -- the four heroes of the story, for example, are the brothers Lord Juss (king of Demonland), Spitfire, and Goldry Bluzco, along with their cousin Brandoch Daha (their subordinates include the lords Vizz, Volle, and Zigg). The villains include not only Gorice XII, Witchland's sorcerer-king, but his generals Corund, Corinius, and Corsus (very distinct in personality but with names easily confused on a first reading) and the advisor Lord Gro. Place names similarly range from grand (Carce, Krothering) to simply bizarre (Kartadza, Melikaphkhaz, Thremnir's Heugh). Occasionally Eddison's eclectic, haphazard way of naming characters and places (not unlike those used by most modern-day fantasy novelists, or most DMs for that matter) strike gold (for example, Lady Mevrian), but all too often they flop (who can take seriously swashbuckling adventurers named Spitfire and Gaslark?).[4]

There but not Back Again

There was a man named Lessingham
dwelt in an old low house in Wasdale, set in
a gray old garden where yew-trees flourished
that had seen Vikings . . . in their seedling time

-- Opening sentence of The Worm

One other element has deeply puzzled readers for eighty years: the "Induction." Today most invented-world stories simply start in the world of the story, but that's part of Tolkien's legacy -- earlier fantasy often devoted precious pages to establishing the relationship or "bridge" between the fantasy world and our own (cf. Alice's falling asleep at the beginning of Alice in Wonderland). Eddison's bridge is odd indeed: his story begins with a man named Lessingham, who falls asleep and is carried to Mercury in a dream, where he witnesses the events of the story. However, after the second chapter Eddison stops mentioning the invisible watcher and never returns to the frame story at the end. Many critics have simply assumed Eddison forgot about his point-of-view character since they are at a loss to otherwise explain his disappearance.

In fact, Eddison's broken frame is a deliberate part of the book's plan -- yet another homage to the Elizabethan and Jacobean plays he loved. In this case, his model was Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, which begins with an "Induction" where a sleeping beggar is dressed in a rich man's clothes and told he's a lord who had dreamed he was a beggar. The baffled beggar, a man named Christopher Sly, is convinced by what the hoaxers show him and begins to watch a play: this play is "The Taming of the Shrew" itself. In the anonymous play Shakespeare based his own play on, the story returned to Christopher Sly at the end, but Shakespeare includes only the set-up, not the pay-off. Performances of the play invariably omit the Induction and single later reference to Sly. Like Shakespeare, Eddison in his own Induction introduces us to an inset story which then takes on a life of its own, eviscerating the need for any return to the real world.

Similarly, though the narrator says he has been transported to Mercury (not via a conventional spaceship but in a chariot drawn by hippogriffs), he's very obviously not on the first planet from the sun but a quicksilver fantasy variant of our own world -- not only do the characters in the book quote Herrick, Donne, Shakespeare, old ballads, and the like but several references to telling time by the phases of the Moon establish that they are on Earth (albeit a weird fantasy version of our Earth). Eddison's world is mercurial, not Mercury: quicksilver, ever-changing.

Perhaps the truest indication of Eddison's intent lies in the poem with which he prefaced his work: a fragment from the ballad of Thomas the Rymer (14th century), telling of his meeting with the Queen of Elfland, who has come to carry him off to a strange world, neither Heaven nor Hell but full of marvels unguessed at by mortal men. The poem is unaccountedly omitted from the annotated edition, but its presence in the original suggests that Eddison intends to show the reader, like Lessingham, a wondrous new world somehow linked to our own but standing apart, with its own rules.

A Flawed Masterpiece Is Still a Masterpiece

"'. . . none may come alive unto [Koshtra Belorn],
for the mantycores of the mowntaines will certeynely
ete his brains ere he come hither.'"

"What be these mantichores of the mountains
that eat men's brains?" asked the Lady Mevrian.

.". . . 'The beeste Mantichora, whych is as much as to say
devorer of menne . . . These be monstrous bestes,
ghastlie and ful of horrour, enemies to mankinde,
of a red coloure, with ij rowes of huge grete tethe
in their mouthes. It hath the head of a man,
his eyen like a ghoot, and the bodie of a lyon
lancing owt sharpe prickles fro behinde. And hys
tayl is the tail of a scorpioun. . . And hys voys
is as the roaryng of x lyons.'"

-- Brandoch Daha reads of manticores in Lord Gro's book

For all its virtues, The Worm Ouroboros is too eccentric to capture a mainstream audience as Tolkien did. Despite being much admired, it is little imitated (though a few bits inspired by it did find their way into The Lord of the Rings -- cf. Pippin's theft of the palantir and Saruman's attempted assassination of Frodo). Perhaps this is because the style, a major part of the story's appeal, is simply too hard to fake; only someone who lived and breathed Jacobean drama could pull it off.

That the book, despite a revival in the 1960s (which saw its first paperback publication) and for a decade or two thereafter, has begun to sink out of sight in recent years is a great pity: there really is nothing else quite like it. For those who like adventure fantasy, the Worm has it all: evil sorcery, battles with monsters, impossible quests, battles by land and by sea, with swords and with bare hands, battles with the elements (particularly in an epic mountain-climbing sequence), a varied and powerful cast of well-motivated villains (including King Gorice, who is reincarnated in a new body each time the heroes slay him -- e.g. Gorice X, Gorice XI, Gorice XII), scheming ladies perfectly capable of setting their own agendas, some discreet sex (most notably Brandoch Daha's encounter with the Lady of Ishnain Nemartra, which he thinks lasts a single night only to be surprised afterwards to find an entire week has gone by; or Lady Sriva of Witchland's avoiding her fiancé to arrange a tryst with his rival, only to stand both men up and go seduce her King instead), dungeons to escape from, kidnapped friends to rescue, powerful enchantments to be broken, and much, much more. Eddison sets the stakes high: whoever comes out triumphant in the all-or-nothing three-year struggle he chronicles will rule the world.

[W]ith a horrid bellow [the mantichore] turned on Juss, rearing
like a horse; and it was three heads greater than a tall man . . .
The stench of its breath choked Juss's mouth and his sense sickened,
but he slashed it athwart the belly . . . so that the guts fell out. Again
he hewed at it, but missed, and his sword . . . was shivered into pieces.
So when that noisome vermin fell forward on him roaring like a thousand
lions, Juss grappled with it . . . t might not reach him with its murthering
teeth, but its claws sliced off the flesh from his left knee downward to the
ankle bone, and it fell on him and crushed him on the rock, breaking in
the bones of his breast. And Juss, for all his bitter pain and torment, . . .
thrust his right hand, armed with the hilt and stump of his broken
sword . . . until he searched out its heart . . . , slicing [it] asunder
like a lemon."

-- Lord Juss's hand-to-hand combat with a mantichore on a mountain-side

But of all his varied and vivid cast, none stands out like the treacherous Lord Gro, one of fantasy's great villains. A former adventurer of spectacular accomplishments, Gro is smart, brave, witty, likable, and learned; an author and an explorer, popular with the ladies and invaluable when plotting strategy. Unfortunately, he has one fatal character flaw: he cannot stand to be on the winning side. When the side he's on begins to win (often through Gro's own efforts), he feels compelled to betray it and go over to their enemies. Rather than gain him a reputation as the champion of the underdog, this makes him a despised outcast, the eternal traitor, distrusted even by those who depend upon his help. Even so he continues to perform great deeds at extreme risk for first one side and then the other of this cataclysmic war, allying first with the Witches to help them conquer Demonland, then with the Demons to help them expel the invaders, and finally with the Witches again in their final extremity; he simply cannot help himself. Rarely has a fantasy author created such a sympathetic villain.

Ouroboros

"This sword Zeldornius gave me. I bare it at Krothering Side
against Corinius, when I threw him out of Demonland. I bare it
. . . in the last great fight in Witchland. Thou wilt say it brought me
good luck and victory in battle. But it brought not to me . . .
that last best luck of all: that earth should gape for me
when my great deeds were ended."

-- Brandoch Daha laments the passing of his enemies

"Would [the blessed Gods] might give us our good gift, that should be
youth for ever, and war; and unwaning strength and skill in arms.
Would they might give us our great enemies alive and whole again.
For better it were we should run hazard again of utter destruction,
than thus live out our lives [in peace] like cattle fattening
for the slaughter, or like silly garden plants."

-- Lord Juss wishes his enemies alive again

The most extraordinary thing of all about The Worm Ouroboros, however, comes at the very end; a final surprise that trumps everything that's come before and leaves the reader stunned -- either delighted or appalled. Eddison had provided a clue of his intent in the name he gave the book, "the wyrm (dragon) which devours its own tail"[5] -- that is, the Midgard Serpent, who encircles the entire earth; anyone tracing its length would come in time back to his or her starting point and begin all over again. And this is exactly what Eddison's novel does. Granted a wish by the gods after their great deeds, Lord Juss, Brandoch Daha, and the others cannot think of anything they would like more than the chance to do it all over again. Accordingly, time is looped back; their foes brought back to life; all their hard-fought victories undone and waiting to be achieved again.

To Eddison, and the Demons, this is the happiest of happy endings: the final paragraphs of the book repeat the scene from the first chapter, and his heroes will be able to battle his villains forever. It's a frame of mind familiar to any D&D player who's just completed a long, hard, challenging, but ultimately successful campaign: a tinge of regret that it's all over and that combination of characters, players, DM, NPCs, and plot will never come again. Eddison offers a means by which his fictional heroes can go back and enjoy it all over again. Seventeen years before Joyce pulled the same trick in Finnegan's Wake, The Worm Ouroboros loops back in a closed circle, and its events repeat over and over again forever.

Notes

[1] In addition to inviting him to Inklings meetings as an occasional guest, Lewis struck up a correspondence (in Middle English) with Eddison that lasted the remainder of Eddison's life (he died in 1945). The "E. R.", by the way, stands for Eric Rucker (Rick).

[2] Eddison and Tolkien debated their respective positions when they met, as Tolkien recounted long afterwards: "I read his works with great enjoyment for their sheer literary merit . . . I disliked his characters (always excepting the Lord Gro) and despised what he appeared to admire . . . Eddison thought what I admire 'soft' (his word: one of complete condemnation, I gathered); I thought that . . . he was coming to admire, more and more, arrogance and cruelty." (JRRT, letter 24 June 1957). It's hard to imagine, for example, that Frodo, or indeed any of Tolkien's heroes, at the end of The Lord of the Rings would wish to repeat all the horrors experienced during the quest, as Eddison's heroes do.

[3] The best edition of The Worm Ouroboros is the 1991 trade paperback edited, with annotations, by Paul Edmund Thomas (Dell; ISBN 0-440-50299-3; 1991, 448 pages). Unfortunately, this edition leaves out not only the prefatory poem (an excerpt from the ballad of True Thomas) but also all the illustrations that accompanied the original 1922 edition. While most of these are of only minor interest, the brooding portrait of Gorice XII and the swirling picture of his destruction ("The Last Conjuring in Carce") are both sadly missed. Fortunately, they are included in the mass market paperback edition from Ballantine (ISBN 0-345-25475-9; April 1967, 520 pages), which is still readily available through used bookstores (and online through Amazon.com's used books and bookfinder.com). (The mass market edition cover is shown in this article.) Two editions are currently in print: one in the Fantasy Masterworks series, published in Britain by Millennium Books (ISBN 1857989937; April 2000, 520 pages, £6.99); while only available in a limited number of bookstores in this country, it can be ordered direct from England via amazon.co.uk. The other is by Replica Books (ISBN 0735101396; 1999, 445 pages, $32.95).

[4] Part of the book's eccentric nomenclature might be due to the fact that Eddison made up the story as a child and only wrote it down and published it years later, when he was forty. An unpublished picture book survives that he drew when he was ten (e.g., c.1892), which clearly illustrates scenes out of The Worm; it is now in the Bodleian Library at Oxford.

[5] Tolkien paid tribute to Ouroboros years later by borrowing the name for Farmer Giles' sword, Caudimordax, or Tailbiter, these simply being the Latin and English equivalents, respectively, of the Greek "ouroboros" (JRRT, Farmer Giles of Ham, 1949). It is important to note that "the worm ouroboros" does not refer to a creature in Eddison's book but the book itself -- the story that never ends but always loops back and begins anew.

Other Works: Readers who enjoy Eddison might want to explore his other works. These include an attempt to create an authentic Icelandic-style saga (Styrbiorn the Strong, 1926), a translation of an actual saga (Egil's Saga, 1930), and the Zimiamvia series: Mistress of Mistresses (1935), A Fish Dinner at Memison (1941), and The Mezentian Gate (1958), the latter left unfinished at Eddison's death and published posthumously; all three were gathered with some additional material into an annotated edition, Zimiamvia, by Paul Edmund Thomas in 1992. The Zimiamvia series has tenuous connections to The Worm (Lessingham, the observer in the Induction, is a major character in Mistress and Fish Dinner) but is wholly different in tone, being more Eddison's presentation of his private religion (a form of Aphrodite-worship) than an adventure novel. Still, the series does include two great characters: the elderly wizard-philosopher-councilor Dr. Vandermast (inspiration for a character in the Forgotten Realms Cormyr novels) and the villainous Horius Parry, a.k.a., "The Vicar," as well as a bizarre and impressive scene in which King Mezentius creates Earth as a parlor-trick at a dinner party. Most readers of The Worm find the Zimiamvia books repellent, but they also have their admirers who consider them far superior to the better-known book.
 
Última edição:
Texto interessante da Web Escandinava, conectando o estudo da filologia com a fantasia épica e o trabalho de Erick R. Edisson, autor do Worm Ouroboros, transcrita aqui pq SEMPRE tá fora do ar...

Tolkien, Laxness, Undset. Andrew Wawn: PHILOLOGY AND FANTASY BEFORE TOLKIEN 13.09.2002

Symposium, The Nordic House
Tolkien, Undset, Laxness
September 13th - 14th 2002

ANDREW WAWN

PHILOLOGY AND FANTASY BEFORE TOLKIEN

I want to begin by saying something about three books that Tolkien didn'twrite. They are written in the 1920s by the same author, who was born in North Leeds, about 100 yards from where I now live. His father's first name was Octavius, not a common first name in Leeds, then or now; and his own name was Ernest Ruckert Eddison. These three books are closely linked with each other, but I also want to suggest that they also are significantly connected with Tolkien.

The first work begins with a scene set in North Yorkshire: it is evening in a country house in Wastdale in 1920s, and a middle-aged husband and wife have just finished dinner; while their daughter plays the piano in the next room the wife has a suggestion for post-prandial entertainment - 'Should we finish that chapter of Njal's saga'. And that is just what they do. She reads the saga chapter out loud from the only English version then available - the household copy had, we are told, a faded green cover, which means that it must have been the (by then) celebrated Story of Burnt Njal (1861) translation by one of Victorian England's greatest Icelandicists, George Webbe Dasent. The chapter, accurately quoted in the novel, describes one of the portents which preceded the burning of Njáll and his family at Bergþórshvoll. Hildiglúmr Runólfsson sees a man on horseback with a burning brand in his hand; he sings a verse about Flosi and fire; he then hurls the brand at the mountains which are duly set ablaze; he then disappears, and within four chapters Njáll and his family are burnt to death. Our Wastdale couple finish the chapter, retire to bed, and the sleeping husband has a vision even more disturbing than that of Hildiglúmr. The rest of the novel, The Worm Ouroboros (1922) describes that vision. It tells of conflict between two mighty cosmic forces; a vulnerable young hero and his friend undertake epic journeys, during which they meet wizards, dwarfs and goblins; there are magic spells, swords and cloaks, aged kings and councils of war, songs, and a ring of symbolic importance. The story is told in archaised language, and there are echoes of Old English and Old Icelandic literature and landscapes, as with names such as Trentmar from 'Scorradale', for example.

'Skorradale' appears in the second book that I want to mention, also by Ernest Ruckert Eddison. The place-name appears on a map accompanying his 1930 translation of Egils saga Skallagrímssonar. This is no whimsical version of the saga. Published by Cambridge University Press, the decently accurate text is accompanied by detailed annotation which includes frequent references to the help received from major scholars in the field, among them Bertha Phillpotts, Sigurður Nordal, Finnur Jónsson, and also from Bogi Ólafsson, a teacher of English at the Menntaskóli in Reykjavík. The preface and notes also make it very clear that Eddison, like many Victorian saga enthusiasts before him, has visited many of the significant saga-steads of Borgarfjörður, and is proud of the fact. He had stayed at the school at Hvanneyri, just south of Borg, and dedicates the volume to his Anglophile hostess Svava Þórhallsdóttir: it may be that the translator shared her interest in visionary spiritualism, as reflected in her published Icelandic translations of several such English works (as with Andi hinna óbornu, Reykjavík, 1929)

Along with Eddison's 1922 fantasy novel and 1930 saga translation can be listed a 1926 novel based on a single saga character. By the 1920s novelistic versions of Old Icelandic sagas were nothing new - in English that trail had been blazed in novels about the Jómsvikings (George Dasent, 1875), Grettir Ásmundarson (Sabine Baring Gould, 1890), Leifr Eiríksson (Ottilie Liljencrantz, 1902), Gísli Súrsson (Maurice Hewlett, 1919), and others. But the hero of Eddison's 1926 was not a famous figure, but rather a minor-league Jómsborg viking mentioned for just three sentences inEyrbyggja saga, and for three pages in Styrbjarnar þáttr Svíakappa, one of the Flateyjarbók short tales. Only a serious British enthusiast of Icelandic literature would have known about Styrbjörn, and seen fit to make him the subject of a novel; and only a very serious enthusiast would have been able to flesh out his story with detailed references to other sagas, and then to narrate the tale in such a stylistically alert Old Icelandic manner.

The Flateyjarbók þáttr offers us a standard kolbítr tale about Björn whose uncle and guardian was King Eiríkr the Victorious of Sweden. Sent abroad by the king the previously obstreperous hero matures strikingly, eventually becoming leader of the mighty Jómsborg vikings. Eiríkr soon realises that Björn now represents a threat to his own position, and confronts the returning hero in battle at Fyrisvellir near Uppsala. Björn is victorious and emerges as a major new force in the land. Though Eddison's Styrbiorn the Strong follows many of the same narrative contours, there are important differences: it not only draws material from Jómsvíkinga saga, but also offers a sexual as well as a political motivation for the king's hostility to the young hero. We are shown the tendresse which developed briefly between the eponymous hero and Eiríkr's flirtatious wife, Sigríðr. During a feast at the Uppsala court, their eyes meet during a performance by the court skald of the eddic poem 'Helreið Brynhildar'. Styrbiorn empathises with the heroic Sigurðr, and sees the queen as the luckless Brynhildr, married to the wrong man. The couple sleep together that night, 'lust burned and ale heated'. Next morning, however, the lovers fall out, and in no time Styrbiorn finds himself exiled from Sweden as king and queen unite against him. At the end of the novel, in a supernatural scene which suddenly breaks the narrative plane (not unlike Chapter 7 in Gautreks saga, or, even, the end of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde) we see Óðinn in Valhalla choosing Styrbiorn as one of his own warriors, thereby determining the result of the final battle with the Swedish king.

Three books, then, by the same author, and if we add up the score we find an Oxford graduate, a not very English sounding middle name, links with Leeds, an accomplished scholar of Icelandic, known to many learned Icelanders, and a saga translator who had also written a fantasy novel with clearly identifiable Icelandic and Old English echoes. This could almost be a lightly sketched pen-portrait of J.R.R. Tolkien - Íslandsvinur, medieval scholar, medievalist, fantasy novelist - even though Eddison was never a university academic, but lived most of his life as a senior civil servant in London.

In identifying these similarities, I do not wish to suggest that Eddison influenced Tolkien, or that Eddison was a more accomplished writer than Tolkien, or that Eddison would have been as famous as Tolkien if the fates had been more propitious; though we may note, in passing, that claims of this sort can be found on one or two Eddison-related websites. This reminds me of the story of the luckless American entrepreneur who invented a great new lemon/lime drink, and called it first '4 Up'; the marketing campaign didn't work, so he relaunched the product as '5 Up', and, then, equally unsuccessfully, as '6 Up'; at which point he gave up - one short of the jackpot, as it were.

Yet Eddison is an intriguing 'Before Tolkien' phenomenon. His sequence of three clearly interconnected 1920s books helps us to recognise two basic points about pre-Tolkien British novelistic responses to Icelandic medieval literary tradition: firstly, that there was a vigorous 'pre-Tolkien' tradition of such responses, and, secondly, that this tradition often had a strong philological underpinning. These two traditions - novelistic fantasy and philology - intersected fruitfully as pre-Tolkienian novelists and scholars constructed and explored an old north to which many of them felt closely attached, often for political reasons. Tolkien did not create these traditions - but he developed and diversified them with far greater imaginative energy and ambition than any of his predecessors or successors. I want, therefore, to say something about these two intersecting traditions of fantasy fiction and philology in pre-Tolkienian Britain.

Firstly, the fiction. As I have suggested, neither Tolkien (nor, indeed, Eddison) invented the idea of creating novels based on Icelandic eddic or saga narratives. The 'Before Tolkien' tradition of such stories was well established and wide-ranging. There were novels which rework single saga narratives, or which combine scenes or motifs from several sagas, or which create more generalised Viking-Age mood music to accompany authorially created events; there were novels set in Settlement-Age or Saga-Age Iceland, or in other parts of the Viking world - anywhere from Byzantium to Balestrand in Norway to Barrow-in-Furness in North-West England; there were novels by those who had pilgrimaged, translations in hand, to famous saga-steads, and by others who had never left the shores of Britain or the United States; and, lastly, there were novels written in colloquial modern English, and others that deploy archaised English nourished (sometimes) by an author's knowledge of Old and Middle English and Old Icelandic. I have discussed works of this type in my recent book The Vikings and the Victorians (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2000)

Some of these tales tried hard to be historically plausible, while others were more determinedly fantastical. Tolkien knew both sorts of narratives. He certainly knew one in which a shire community of ordinary folk finds itself threatened by dark forces from outside; a young and vulnerable hero and his fellows must undertake a quest to fight these foes and save the shire from death and enslavement; they journey through dark woods and over fearsome mountains; along the way they pass ancient doom rings and meet trolls and other spirits; and they come across forgotten communities, whose history is accessible in song or in runic carvings. The overall story is narrated in both verse and prose, with the latter created by someone familiar with Old English and Old Icelandic narratives. The desire to deploy such elements need not surprise us in this instance, for the author in question twice travelled widely in Iceland, wrote two memorable journals describing those journeys, full of references to ancient doom rings, runic inscriptions and local legends. It is really only that last clue which confirms that I am not talking about Tolkien or about Lord of the Rings, but about William Morris - not the Morris of his early epic poems The Lovers of Gudrun(from The Earthly Paradise, and Sigurd the Volsung, but the Morris of his late 1880s prose romances - in this case The Roots of the Mountains (1889), one of a sequence of medievalised narratives set in periods ranging from the fourth to the fourteenth centuries.

It was these romances by Morris which encouraged later Icelandophile writers to explore in fiction their local or regional or national history, drawing on the resources of Old Icelandic literature as they did so. Old Icelandic texts had certainly provided Morris with a set of narrative moulds into which he could pour his molten narrative material - journeys, famous weapons, non human foes, ancient traditions, threatened communities and the like. Victorian saga novelists duly made use of these same motifs. If we take the simple example of shires or communities being threatened by dark forces, it is clear that this was a well established saga novel motif well before the end of the nineteenth century. We find it in Charles Kingsley'sHereward the Wake (1866), in which the settled Anglo-Saxon and Viking ways of Fenland England are threatened by Normans; we find it in R.M. Ballantyne's Erling the Bold (1869), in which Harald Fairhair's centralising instincts challenge the ancient Norwegian Viking traditions of Halldorstede in Horlingdal; and, lastly, we find it in W.G. Collingwood's Thorstein of the Mere 1895, where the Viking-Age rhythms of life in Lake District England are disrupted by royal and episcopal interference from York. By the end of each novel such threats are resolved in suitably optimistic ways - the shires are either transformed for the better by the momentary cultural upheavals, or abandoned in favour of new lands and better prospects. In the case of Charles Kingsley, for instance, Norman invasion is presented as a felix culpa, leading to that fusion of Anglo-Saxon and Viking vigour with European discipline which helped to shape the all-conquering culture of the Victorian Empire. In the Ballantyne tale, Erling and his family were able to escape and to establish a potent new colonial 'shire' in Iceland. The narrative offers a kind of Darwinian legitimisation of ancient and modern colonial expansion.

William Morris knew these saga novels, and his early narrative poems such as 'The Lovers of Gudrun' mimic the narrative realism of the sagas which (with Eiríkur Magnússon) he had translated, and of the early saga novels which he had read and relished. But by the time he was writing the late 1880s romances - for example, The House of the Wolfings, and The Roots of the Mountains - Morris's narrative priorities were moving in recognisably Tolkienian directions. We can see this in The Glittering Plain. The skeletal story is straight out of a standard Victorian saga novel: Viking raiders seize the hero's girl; the hero undertakes a quest to rescue her; he has many trials and adventures along the way; eventually the lovers are reunited and return home. But by the 1880s Morris's narrative instinct led him to cut back on the saga and saga-novel realism, and to medievalise and universalise his treatment of the story. Thus his hero quests as much through dreamscapes as landscapes, as when he finds his beloved on the glittering plain itself. The names of both places and characters edge towards allegory, reminiscent of both the romances of Chretien de Troyes, and also of Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, a work which Morris's collaborator Eiríkur Magnússon had translated into Icelandic in 1876. Morris's hero and heroine eventually reject life in an environment in which there is neither toil nor loss nor death. They return to their shire, and to a life of change, loss, vulnerability and contingency; they rejoin the human race.

In both these late romances, then, we find Morris exploring a pre-saga, pre-sagastead, pre-Icelandic old northern world, voicing his narratives in the archaised language of an author sensitive to the philological drum-beat of Old English and Old Icelandic. It is not difficult to believe that such works helped to signal to Tolkien the benefits of linking the traditions of chronicle narrative with those of romance, ballad and fairy tale.

I indicated earlier that I wanted to mention two pre-Tolkienian traditions: fantasy, discussed briefly above, and philology. Let me, then, end with just a few words on the latter topic, which has been such an important element in Professor Shippey's field-commanding contributions to Tolkien scholarship. When he visited Liverpool in 1887, the great Icelandic philologist and lexicographer Guðbrandur Vigfússon wrote to a friend: 'The philologists I am getting tired of; they are such dry sticks'. In Guðbrandur's case this was probably a case of the pot calling the kettle black, and it certainly was not the way many late Victorians viewed philologists and philology. Tolkien himself, educated in a relatively creative and supportive nineteenth-century philological tradition, conscious of the hostility which that tradition had come to generate when he returned to Oxford at the end of World War One, and yet still determined to retain its best elements when teaching his Leeds students in the 1920s, writes to a friend that he hopes to remove the terror of philology while retaining its mystery. Morris's tales had shown that narrative fiction could exploit that mystery. The study of old northern languages could help to uncover and animate long-forgotten cultural worlds. Indeed in the work of some of the greatest Victorian philologists the distinction between philological treatise and embryonic novel came close to dissolving.

Two brief instances help to illustrate this important point. Firstly, there is the case of a fiery English philologist who served for 50 years as Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Copenhagen, before his death in 1895. His name is George Stephens; like all great men he was born in Liverpool; and he and William Morris knew each other well. George Stephens loved the idea of the old north as a place of individual freedom and representative democracy - but for him that society had existed not in the (as he regarded it) late, barbarous and over-promoted world of the Vikings, nor in Iceland (which, like Tolkien, he never visited), but rather in a broader Anglo-Scandic old north which (he claimed) had flourished for several centuries after A.D. 200, and which could most readily be accessed through the runic inscriptions which Stephens spent the best years of his life collecting and classifying. Philology, runology, a vivid imagination, and strong political opinions helped him to create his own distinctive old north - and this was promoted vigorously in his scholarly editions and articles, but also in his poetry and plays. Generic distinctions dissolved. Modern runologists recognise the (sometimes spectacular) errors in Stephens' readings of individual texts and inscriptions, while still admiring his energy and fervour. What Jónas Kristjánsson once said of the great Finnur Jónsson - 'the trouble with Finnur is that he wasn't always wrong' - may also be true of Stephens, however.

My other example of a philological fantasist is a name familiar to many modern Icelanders: Þorleifur Repp. His reading of the runes on the Ruthwell Cross in Scotland is a pioneering example in 1830s England of romantic runology and imaginative archaeology. I note, en passant, that Sigrid Undset's father was an archaeologist, as were at least two nineteenth-century saga novelists, Paul du Chaillu and J.F. Hodgetts. Memories of Repp point me towards my simple conclusion. There was in England a powerful pre-Tolkienian tradition of saga novelists, old northern tale-tellers, and philological theorising which sometimes shaded over into fantasy. We can trace that tradition through from Repp to Tolkien: Repp knew Stephens in Copenhagen; Stephens knew Morris in London; and Tolkien knew Morris's family in Oxford. Here, then, we find our four old northernists linked by traditions of fantasy and philology.

Tolkien may well have known the poem by William Morris that prefaced one of his late romances, and with lines from which this paper can appropriately end. They serve to distill neatly the role of the narrative philologist. Morris asks us to imagine that we are walking on a winter's night past a house where we once lived; candles now shine brightly in the house, but we can no longer enter it. Civilisations are like that, says Morris -


E'en so the world of men may turn
At even of some hurried day
And see the ancient glimmer burn
Across the waste that hath no way;
Then with that faint light in its eyes
A while I bid it linger near
And nurse in wavering memories
The bitter-sweet of days that were


It is philology that can shelter and brighten that faint light - and it is philologically-enriched story which can cause the light to linger and the wavering memories to take memorable shape.
arnastofnun [hjá] hi.is
 
E aí embaixo a resenha do John Rateliff feita pro site da Wizards of the Coast anos atrás, indisponível na Web agora:

spacer_1_1.gif

spacer_1_1.gif

Home > Books
Classics of Fantasy: The Worm Ouroboros by E. R. Eddison
By John D. Rateliff

books_main_classicworm_pic2_en.jpg
"[T]he grandest heroic fantasy or sword-and-sorcery
tale in the English language"

-- Fritz Leiber

"[F]orty-odd years ahead of its time . . .
the single greatest novel of heroic fantasy"

-- L. Sprague de Camp

Before there was D&D, before there was Tolkien, and before fantasy even existed as a distinct, recognized "genre" of literature with its own imprints, dedicated small presses, and reserved shelves in libraries and bookstores, there was The Worm Ouroboros (1922). If today Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings is the work that defines fantasy, then once upon a time Eddison's book was a major contender for the archetypal epic fantasy.

["I have read all that E. R. Eddison wrote."
"I . . . think of him as the greatest and most convincing
writer of 'invented worlds' that I have read."

-- J.R.R. Tolkien on Eddison

Admired by fellow fantasists like Tolkien, C. S. Lewis (who liked the Worm so much he invited Eddison to visit the Inklings and read his works-in-progress[1]), H. Rider Haggard, James Branch Cabell, James Stephens ("he has added a masterpiece to English literature"), Fritz Leiber (who admitted preferring Eddison to Tolkien), and Ursula K. Le Guin (who placed him first among her examples of superb fantasy stylists, above Kenneth Morris, Tolkien, and Dunsany), Eddison pioneered what has come to be thought of as "Tolkienian fantasy," the grand invented-world epic novel. His book, written over eighty years ago, even comes with the now-requisite paraphernalia: Although the Worm lacks a map, it does come with a timeline and guide to pronunciation, while Eddison's later books (the Zimiamvia series) include not only these but maps of his imaginary realms, genealogical charts, and lists of dramatis personae, as well as a guide to citations. (Eddison's characters, whatever world they're from, have a tendency to quote Shakespeare or Donne or more obscure 16th and 17th century poets and playwrights.)

"[N]either allegory nor fable
but a Story to be read for its own sake"

-- E.R.E.

"So Excellent Well Writ"

Eddison's most outstanding characteristic is, of course, his language. The Worm Ouroboros is the only great fantasy novel written in Shakespearean prose. Other fantasies have been set in the 16th and 17th century (or fantasy-world analogues to Tudor times, give or take a half-century or so), such as Mirrlees' Lud-in-the-Mist (1926), Hodgson's The Night Land (1912), and Briggs' Hobberty Dick (1955), but none featured characters who speak as if they were spontaneously reciting lines from Shakespeare. Eddison was particularly fond of Shakespeare's lesser contemporaries, especially the Jacobean revenge dramatists, his favorite being John Webster (The Duchess of Malfi). He absorbed their vocabulary and phrasing so thoroughly that he could reproduce it perfectly to suit his own purposes:

Now spake Spitfire saying, "Read forth to us, I pray thee, the book
of Gro; for my soul is afire to set forth on this faring."
"'Tis writ somewhat crabbedly," said Brandoch Daha, "and most damnably long.
I spent half last night a-searching on't, and 'tis most apparent no other way
lieth to these mountains save . . . (if Gro say true) but one . . ."
"If he say true?" said Spitfire. "He is a turncoat and a renegado.
Wherefore not therefore a liar?"
"But a philosopher," answered Juss. "I knew him well of old . . .
and I judge him to be one who is not false save only in policy. Subtle
of mind he is, and dearly loveth plotting and scheming, and, as I think,
perversely affecteth ever the losing side if he be drawn into any quarrel
. . . But in this book of his travels he must needs speak truth,
as it seemeth to me, to be true to his own self."

Few writers display so much love of words for their own sake: Eddison at one point spends an entire page describing the hero's bed, and he thinks nothing of devoting a paragraph or two to the magnificence of a villain's clothes and accoutrements; his most prosaic passages are filled with vivid similes and memorable phrases. This verbal luxuriance helps create a heightened sense of drama that befits his larger-than-life cast. For if Tolkien celebrates everyman, the "little people" of our world, through his hobbits, then Eddison glories in the high and mighty: regarding "common men," he has one of his more sympathetic characters say "better a hundred such should die than one great man's hand be hampered."[2] Accordingly, just as Richard III, Hamlet, and Macbeth focus on the doings of kings and princes, lords and ladies, rather than ordinary people, so too Eddison's tale concentrates on the great lords and sensuous, strong-willed ladies of his invented world. Everything in Eddison's world is grander, more intense, and more dramatic than in our mundane reality, from their speeches to their deeds to their passions.

Demons and Witches, Goblins and Imps, Pixies and Ghouls, Oh My

Like a black eagle surveying earth from some high mountain
the King passes by in his majesty. His byrny was of black chain
mail, its collar, sleeves, and skirt edged with plates of dull gold . . .
On his left thumb was his great signet ring fashioned in gold in the
semblance of the worm Ouroboros that eateth his own tail . . .
His cloak was woven of the skins of black cobras stitched together
with gold wire, its lining of black silk sprinkled with dust of gold.
The iron crown of Witchland weighed on his brow, the claws
of the crab erect like horns; and the sheen of its jewels
was many-coloured like the rays of Sirius
on a clear night of frost and wind
at Yule-tide.

-- King Gorice XII of Witchland enters a banquet-hall

While most readers will have little trouble with the archaisms (those who do would be well advised to read the book in Paul Thomas's excellent annotated edition,[3] which glosses the more unusual expressions), even those who get swept up in Eddison's style and story often balk at his nomenclature. Rather than use real-world nations (English, French, Spaniard, and so on) or transparent equivalents (for example, Montaigne, Castille, Eisen, Vodacce in 7th Sea), Eddison opted to dub the heroes of his book the Demons and the villains the Witches, thus creating much confusion (the Demons are heroic and in his eyes wholly admirable; the Witches while treacherous are great warriors and most definitely male). The other nations are called the Goblins (who include the brilliant traitor Lord Gro), the Pixies (most notably the beautiful Lady Prezmyra), the Imps (a wild folk who have names like Fax Fay Faz, Philpritz Faz, and Mivarsh Faz), and the Ghouls (who have been exterminated to the last soul in a genocidal war by our heroes just before the story begins), but these names are just odd window-dressing: all these folk are human.

Besides the names of the nationalities, the personal names are also notably eccentric -- the four heroes of the story, for example, are the brothers Lord Juss (king of Demonland), Spitfire, and Goldry Bluzco, along with their cousin Brandoch Daha (their subordinates include the lords Vizz, Volle, and Zigg). The villains include not only Gorice XII, Witchland's sorcerer-king, but his generals Corund, Corinius, and Corsus (very distinct in personality but with names easily confused on a first reading) and the advisor Lord Gro. Place names similarly range from grand (Carce, Krothering) to simply bizarre (Kartadza, Melikaphkhaz, Thremnir's Heugh). Occasionally Eddison's eclectic, haphazard way of naming characters and places (not unlike those used by most modern-day fantasy novelists, or most DMs for that matter) strike gold (for example, Lady Mevrian), but all too often they flop (who can take seriously swashbuckling adventurers named Spitfire and Gaslark?).[4]

There but not Back Again

There was a man named Lessingham
dwelt in an old low house in Wasdale, set in
a gray old garden where yew-trees flourished
that had seen Vikings . . . in their seedling time

-- Opening sentence of The Worm

One other element has deeply puzzled readers for eighty years: the "Induction." Today most invented-world stories simply start in the world of the story, but that's part of Tolkien's legacy -- earlier fantasy often devoted precious pages to establishing the relationship or "bridge" between the fantasy world and our own (cf. Alice's falling asleep at the beginning of Alice in Wonderland). Eddison's bridge is odd indeed: his story begins with a man named Lessingham, who falls asleep and is carried to Mercury in a dream, where he witnesses the events of the story. However, after the second chapter Eddison stops mentioning the invisible watcher and never returns to the frame story at the end. Many critics have simply assumed Eddison forgot about his point-of-view character since they are at a loss to otherwise explain his disappearance.

In fact, Eddison's broken frame is a deliberate part of the book's plan -- yet another homage to the Elizabethan and Jacobean plays he loved. In this case, his model was Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, which begins with an "Induction" where a sleeping beggar is dressed in a rich man's clothes and told he's a lord who had dreamed he was a beggar. The baffled beggar, a man named Christopher Sly, is convinced by what the hoaxers show him and begins to watch a play: this play is "The Taming of the Shrew" itself. In the anonymous play Shakespeare based his own play on, the story returned to Christopher Sly at the end, but Shakespeare includes only the set-up, not the pay-off. Performances of the play invariably omit the Induction and single later reference to Sly. Like Shakespeare, Eddison in his own Induction introduces us to an inset story which then takes on a life of its own, eviscerating the need for any return to the real world.

Similarly, though the narrator says he has been transported to Mercury (not via a conventional spaceship but in a chariot drawn by hippogriffs), he's very obviously not on the first planet from the sun but a quicksilver fantasy variant of our own world -- not only do the characters in the book quote Herrick, Donne, Shakespeare, old ballads, and the like but several references to telling time by the phases of the Moon establish that they are on Earth (albeit a weird fantasy version of our Earth). Eddison's world is mercurial, not Mercury: quicksilver, ever-changing.

Perhaps the truest indication of Eddison's intent lies in the poem with which he prefaced his work: a fragment from the ballad of Thomas the Rymer (14th century), telling of his meeting with the Queen of Elfland, who has come to carry him off to a strange world, neither Heaven nor Hell but full of marvels unguessed at by mortal men. The poem is unaccountedly omitted from the annotated edition, but its presence in the original suggests that Eddison intends to show the reader, like Lessingham, a wondrous new world somehow linked to our own but standing apart, with its own rules.

A Flawed Masterpiece Is Still a Masterpiece

"'. . . none may come alive unto [Koshtra Belorn],
for the mantycores of the mowntaines will certeynely
ete his brains ere he come hither.'"

"What be these mantichores of the mountains
that eat men's brains?" asked the Lady Mevrian.

.". . . 'The beeste Mantichora, whych is as much as to say
devorer of menne . . . These be monstrous bestes,
ghastlie and ful of horrour, enemies to mankinde,
of a red coloure, with ij rowes of huge grete tethe
in their mouthes. It hath the head of a man,
his eyen like a ghoot, and the bodie of a lyon
lancing owt sharpe prickles fro behinde. And hys
tayl is the tail of a scorpioun. . . And hys voys
is as the roaryng of x lyons.'"

-- Brandoch Daha reads of manticores in Lord Gro's book

For all its virtues, The Worm Ouroboros is too eccentric to capture a mainstream audience as Tolkien did. Despite being much admired, it is little imitated (though a few bits inspired by it did find their way into The Lord of the Rings -- cf. Pippin's theft of the palantir and Saruman's attempted assassination of Frodo). Perhaps this is because the style, a major part of the story's appeal, is simply too hard to fake; only someone who lived and breathed Jacobean drama could pull it off.

That the book, despite a revival in the 1960s (which saw its first paperback publication) and for a decade or two thereafter, has begun to sink out of sight in recent years is a great pity: there really is nothing else quite like it. For those who like adventure fantasy, the Worm has it all: evil sorcery, battles with monsters, impossible quests, battles by land and by sea, with swords and with bare hands, battles with the elements (particularly in an epic mountain-climbing sequence), a varied and powerful cast of well-motivated villains (including King Gorice, who is reincarnated in a new body each time the heroes slay him -- e.g. Gorice X, Gorice XI, Gorice XII), scheming ladies perfectly capable of setting their own agendas, some discreet sex (most notably Brandoch Daha's encounter with the Lady of Ishnain Nemartra, which he thinks lasts a single night only to be surprised afterwards to find an entire week has gone by; or Lady Sriva of Witchland's avoiding her fiancé to arrange a tryst with his rival, only to stand both men up and go seduce her King instead), dungeons to escape from, kidnapped friends to rescue, powerful enchantments to be broken, and much, much more. Eddison sets the stakes high: whoever comes out triumphant in the all-or-nothing three-year struggle he chronicles will rule the world.

[W]ith a horrid bellow [the mantichore] turned on Juss, rearing
like a horse; and it was three heads greater than a tall man . . .
The stench of its breath choked Juss's mouth and his sense sickened,
but he slashed it athwart the belly . . . so that the guts fell out. Again
he hewed at it, but missed, and his sword . . . was shivered into pieces.
So when that noisome vermin fell forward on him roaring like a thousand
lions, Juss grappled with it . . . t might not reach him with its murthering
teeth, but its claws sliced off the flesh from his left knee downward to the
ankle bone, and it fell on him and crushed him on the rock, breaking in
the bones of his breast. And Juss, for all his bitter pain and torment, . . .
thrust his right hand, armed with the hilt and stump of his broken
sword . . . until he searched out its heart . . . , slicing [it] asunder
like a lemon."

-- Lord Juss's hand-to-hand combat with a mantichore on a mountain-side

But of all his varied and vivid cast, none stands out like the treacherous Lord Gro, one of fantasy's great villains. A former adventurer of spectacular accomplishments, Gro is smart, brave, witty, likable, and learned; an author and an explorer, popular with the ladies and invaluable when plotting strategy. Unfortunately, he has one fatal character flaw: he cannot stand to be on the winning side. When the side he's on begins to win (often through Gro's own efforts), he feels compelled to betray it and go over to their enemies. Rather than gain him a reputation as the champion of the underdog, this makes him a despised outcast, the eternal traitor, distrusted even by those who depend upon his help. Even so he continues to perform great deeds at extreme risk for first one side and then the other of this cataclysmic war, allying first with the Witches to help them conquer Demonland, then with the Demons to help them expel the invaders, and finally with the Witches again in their final extremity; he simply cannot help himself. Rarely has a fantasy author created such a sympathetic villain.

Ouroboros

"This sword Zeldornius gave me. I bare it at Krothering Side
against Corinius, when I threw him out of Demonland. I bare it
. . . in the last great fight in Witchland. Thou wilt say it brought me
good luck and victory in battle. But it brought not to me . . .
that last best luck of all: that earth should gape for me
when my great deeds were ended."

-- Brandoch Daha laments the passing of his enemies

"Would [the blessed Gods] might give us our good gift, that should be
youth for ever, and war; and unwaning strength and skill in arms.
Would they might give us our great enemies alive and whole again.
For better it were we should run hazard again of utter destruction,
than thus live out our lives [in peace] like cattle fattening
for the slaughter, or like silly garden plants."

-- Lord Juss wishes his enemies alive again

The most extraordinary thing of all about The Worm Ouroboros, however, comes at the very end; a final surprise that trumps everything that's come before and leaves the reader stunned -- either delighted or appalled. Eddison had provided a clue of his intent in the name he gave the book, "the wyrm (dragon) which devours its own tail"[5] -- that is, the Midgard Serpent, who encircles the entire earth; anyone tracing its length would come in time back to his or her starting point and begin all over again. And this is exactly what Eddison's novel does. Granted a wish by the gods after their great deeds, Lord Juss, Brandoch Daha, and the others cannot think of anything they would like more than the chance to do it all over again. Accordingly, time is looped back; their foes brought back to life; all their hard-fought victories undone and waiting to be achieved again.

To Eddison, and the Demons, this is the happiest of happy endings: the final paragraphs of the book repeat the scene from the first chapter, and his heroes will be able to battle his villains forever. It's a frame of mind familiar to any D&D player who's just completed a long, hard, challenging, but ultimately successful campaign: a tinge of regret that it's all over and that combination of characters, players, DM, NPCs, and plot will never come again. Eddison offers a means by which his fictional heroes can go back and enjoy it all over again. Seventeen years before Joyce pulled the same trick in Finnegan's Wake, The Worm Ouroboros loops back in a closed circle, and its events repeat over and over again forever.

Notes

[1] In addition to inviting him to Inklings meetings as an occasional guest, Lewis struck up a correspondence (in Middle English) with Eddison that lasted the remainder of Eddison's life (he died in 1945). The "E. R.", by the way, stands for Eric Rucker (Rick).

[2] Eddison and Tolkien debated their respective positions when they met, as Tolkien recounted long afterwards: "I read his works with great enjoyment for their sheer literary merit . . . I disliked his characters (always excepting the Lord Gro) and despised what he appeared to admire . . . Eddison thought what I admire 'soft' (his word: one of complete condemnation, I gathered); I thought that . . . he was coming to admire, more and more, arrogance and cruelty." (JRRT, letter 24 June 1957). It's hard to imagine, for example, that Frodo, or indeed any of Tolkien's heroes, at the end of The Lord of the Rings would wish to repeat all the horrors experienced during the quest, as Eddison's heroes do.

[3] The best edition of The Worm Ouroboros is the 1991 trade paperback edited, with annotations, by Paul Edmund Thomas (Dell; ISBN 0-440-50299-3; 1991, 448 pages). Unfortunately, this edition leaves out not only the prefatory poem (an excerpt from the ballad of True Thomas) but also all the illustrations that accompanied the original 1922 edition. While most of these are of only minor interest, the brooding portrait of Gorice XII and the swirling picture of his destruction ("The Last Conjuring in Carce") are both sadly missed. Fortunately, they are included in the mass market paperback edition from Ballantine (ISBN 0-345-25475-9; April 1967, 520 pages), which is still readily available through used bookstores (and online through Amazon.com's used books and bookfinder.com). (The mass market edition cover is shown in this article.) Two editions are currently in print: one in the Fantasy Masterworks series, published in Britain by Millennium Books (ISBN 1857989937; April 2000, 520 pages, £6.99); while only available in a limited number of bookstores in this country, it can be ordered direct from England via amazon.co.uk. The other is by Replica Books (ISBN 0735101396; 1999, 445 pages, $32.95).

[4] Part of the book's eccentric nomenclature might be due to the fact that Eddison made up the story as a child and only wrote it down and published it years later, when he was forty. An unpublished picture book survives that he drew when he was ten (e.g., c.1892), which clearly illustrates scenes out of The Worm; it is now in the Bodleian Library at Oxford.

[5] Tolkien paid tribute to Ouroboros years later by borrowing the name for Farmer Giles' sword, Caudimordax, or Tailbiter, these simply being the Latin and English equivalents, respectively, of the Greek "ouroboros" (JRRT, Farmer Giles of Ham, 1949). It is important to note that "the worm ouroboros" does not refer to a creature in Eddison's book but the book itself -- the story that never ends but always loops back and begins anew.

Other Works: Readers who enjoy Eddison might want to explore his other works. These include an attempt to create an authentic Icelandic-style saga (Styrbiorn the Strong, 1926), a translation of an actual saga (Egil's Saga, 1930), and the Zimiamvia series: Mistress of Mistresses (1935), A Fish Dinner at Memison (1941), and The Mezentian Gate (1958), the latter left unfinished at Eddison's death and published posthumously; all three were gathered with some additional material into an annotated edition, Zimiamvia, by Paul Edmund Thomas in 1992. The Zimiamvia series has tenuous connections to The Worm (Lessingham, the observer in the Induction, is a major character in Mistress and Fish Dinner) but is wholly different in tone, being more Eddison's presentation of his private religion (a form of Aphrodite-worship) than an adventure novel. Still, the series does include two great characters: the elderly wizard-philosopher-councilor Dr. Vandermast (inspiration for a character in the Forgotten Realms Cormyr novels) and the villainous Horius Parry, a.k.a., "The Vicar," as well as a bizarre and impressive scene in which King Mezentius creates Earth as a parlor-trick at a dinner party. Most readers of The Worm find the Zimiamvia books repellent, but they also have their admirers who consider them far superior to the better-known book.
 

Valinor 2023

Total arrecadado
R$2.404,79
Termina em:
Back
Topo