The Worm Ouroboros

3.5 stars, Metaphorosis reviews

Summary
Relations between Witchland and Demonland have been tense. When the sides decide to decide matters via a contest of champions, things go awry, with both sides claiming dishonesty. The result is bloody war.

Review
I first read The Worm Ouroboros a long time ago, when I was young. I remember it, then and on a later re-read, as dense and slow moving, hard to get through. Several decades on from that reading, and now over 100 years since the book was first published, not much has changed.

Ouroboros is dense, full of archaicisms, and Eddison names everything – which, without a map, is more harmful than helpful. It takes a long time to get into the book; while it's interesting enough, it's often difficult to parse the author's meaning, so intent are he and the characters on high-flown, complex, and circuitous phrasing. What's odd and impressive is that the story is engaging despite (and sometimes because of) the challenging language. It's not so much the spelling and odd tenses as the forced and artificial formality of the whole thing. And yet, we do care about the many characters. I'll note here, though, that only the nobility count – the rabble die in droves, and nobody much cares. One minor noble gets a notable role, but Eddison literally forgets about him for over a chapter, in the middle of his big adventure.

The Worm itself, I'll point out, plays only a metaphorical role, brought in at the end to round things out (so to speak). Similarly, witch and demon are just names for different nations. So far as we know, it's humans we're talking about. And mostly men; as with the commoners, women are here primarily to admire, protect, and have sex with (and sexual favor is passed around pretty readily).

The most interesting character, Gro, a committed traitor, unfortunately gets short shrift at the end; he deserved better. A cast of characters table would have been handy for keeping track of the rest; the witches, especially all seemed to have names starting with Cor-, and I found it hard to remember which was which.

I encountered this as a classic, and I think it is; this is as high as high fantasy gets. It's worth reading, but don't expect it to be easy. I've tried a few of Eddison's other books, but I'm frankly not sure that I finished them. This one I've now read at least three times, thought it does at times feel like an academic exercise.