What Is The Worm Ouroboros? Reading One of C. S. Lewis’s Favorite Books
I have at last satisfied my curiosity about a book that C. S. Lewis praised again and again in his letters but to which I have never seen reference anywhere else: The Worm Ouroboros by E. R. Eddison.
Eddison was an English bureaucrat who diverted himself by writing. In 1922, Ouroboros appeared.
Two decades later, while reading something else, Lewis came across a reference to Ouroboros that enticed him into taking a look. Once he did, he was so enthralled he immediately wrote to Eddison in what Lewis’s assistant Walter Hooper has called “mock Tudor English,” an imitation of the style that Eddison sometimes used in Ouroboros. Lewis called it “the most noble and ioyous book I haue read these ten yeres.” Later, he called it a book he “most keenly and spontaneously enjoys” and flatly said, “I love Eddison’s works.” Lewis and at least some of his fellow Christians appreciated Eddison’s work because, like him, they both “soe hate the androgynous and petrol-nourished monstres of this Age.” Lewis hosted Eddison in Oxford, England, and brought him to meet with his friends, the Inklings. He and Eddison continued to correspond in archaic language until Eddison died in 1945.
The Worm Ouroboros is a fantasy story about a war between Demonland and Witchland, medieval nations located on Mercury and, despite the names, populated by humans. Witchland demands Demonland’s submission to it, but Demonland resists. Critical to the success of Demonland is whether the heroic lords Juss and Brandoch Daha can rescue its greatest hero, Goldry Bluszco, from mount Zora Rach nam Psarrion, which no man has ever been able to access, located in the land of Zimiamvia. They make an unsuccessful journey to this land, while Spitfire, another Demon hero, tries to hold off the Witches back in Demonland. Then Spitfire joins Juss and Brandoch for another journey to the mountain. The story closes with a final showdown between Witchland and Demonland.
Eddison wrote in a distinctive style. Lewis found that after reading him “All modern prose looks thin.” Characters sound like they are in an epic tale. The story is free of the cool, inarticulate contemporary lines that mar the film versions of The Lord of the Rings. Narration and speech is in an old, high style of English echoing the King James Bible. Describing Juss’s battle with a monster called a mantichore, Eddison wrote, “Juss smote it in the hinder parts and on the ham” and “hewed at it, but missed.” Speaking of who may ride a hippogriff, Queen Sophonisba says, “if thou be man enow to turn him to thy will he shall bear thee to the uttermost parts of earth, unto thine heart’s desire. But if thou be aught less than greatest, beware that steed, and mount only earthly coursers. For if there be aught of dross within thee, and thine heart falter, or thy purpose cool, or thou forget the level aim of thy glory, then will he toss thee to thy ruin.” When written documents are quoted, the language grows especially archaic. A travel guide speaks of monsters “with ij rowes of huge grete teth.”
Ouroboros is full of exuberant creativity. Adventure piles onto adventure. Eddison created a vast, wondrous world filled with castles; sea, mountain, forest, and wasteland; fog, storm, sunshine, and sleet; and peoples with their own interests, including the nations of Pixyland, Goblinland, and Impland and the armies of Zeldornius, Jalcanaius Fostus, and Helteranius, which spend nine years pursuing one another through Impland. Lewis admired Eddison’s fertile mind for names, particularly Owlswick, Spitfire’s castle.
But although Lewis believed Eddison excelled at making up an entirely fictional place from scratch, I found Eddison’s universe rather undeveloped. Ouroboros lacks a map, something that also bothered Lewis, creating an impression that Eddison never systematized his geography and simply threw out place names. People other than great lords are rarely mentioned, have little influence, and mostly seem to exist to stock the armies. In The Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien considered the prosaic matter of what his characters would eat in the wilderness. I wondered how Juss and Brandoch Daha ate as they journeyed across Impland.
Eddison created characters of great grandeur and glory. Brandoch nobly says, “did any man with serious intent dare bid me do a dastard deed, he should have my sword through the dearest part of’s body.” Eddison painted a scene of “Lord Goldry Bluszco, standing in great pride and splendor . . . , and scowling terribly on the Ambassador from Witchland, so that the Ambassador was abashed and his knees smote together.” Corinius, one of the Witch lords, has a “proud, luxurious mouth, made for wine-cups and for ladies’ lips.” Gorice XI of Witchland sports “mighty limbs” and appears to be “built all of iron.” Even unclothed he “seemed to have put off not one whit of his kingliness and the majesty and dread which belonged to him.”
But heroism does not guarantee individuality. Other than name, characters run together. They differ little from one another in personality, interests, and strengths and weaknesses.
And the glory of these characters seems ill-fitted to them because it draws little from their virtue or the goodness of their cause. Lewis recognized that he and Eddison differed in their metaphysics. When Eddison visited the Inklings he was a “martyr-lion fallne vnawares ammides an whole covine of Xtianes,” according to Lewis, who in another place flatly admitted that “wee Christianes . . . so abhorre” his religious views. One reason that Lewis preferred Ouroboros to Eddison’s later works was that it contained less to offend his Christianity. Compared with the later works, Lewis thought that “the journey in the Worm appeals to things more eternal.” As Lewis saw it, Eddison’s later works were marred by pantheism and a portrayal of God as female. In his view, Ouroboros featured at least one strong female character, Sophonisba, whereas the women of Eddison’s later books lacked wisdom, refinement, and strength of will. Such characters fed “a horrid Aphrodite mysticism which even renders some of his women nearly vulgar.” Commenting on Eddison’s later works, George Rostrevor Hamilton, a friend of his, observed that he made beauty the “ultimate value” but did not include in his definition “beauty of character, according to the highest conception of good.”
Lewis and Hamilton may not have agreed, but features of the later stories that they criticized also seem present in Ouroboros. Eternal things seem lacking, since there is little moral foundation to the story. It is hard to prefer any side in a conflict between nations given names like Demonland and Witchland, and the distance between the goodness of the Demons and the evil of the Witches is narrow. Juss even admits that the lords of Demonland “fought but for fighting’s sake.” Likewise, the female characters still have features of goddesses in their dignity, beauty, and power. Lady Mevrian, for example, is “white-skinned and dark, like the divine Huntress, tall and proud and lovely.” Indeed, there is even a racy side to the story. Male characters are often highly attracted to these women to the point of pressuring them to accept their advances or giving in to their seduction. The story’s treatment of women may have driven even Lewis into a less-than-sanctified state of mind. Right after he read Ouroboros for the first time, he described the author of the book from which he learned about Ouroboros as “som poore seely wench that seeketh a B.Litt or a D.Phil, when God knows shad a better bestowed her tyme makynge sport for some goodman in his bed and bearing children for the stablishment of this reaulme or els to be at her beads in a religyous house.”
Perhaps above all the ending of Ouroboros suggests the tale’s lack of a moral compass. On the one hand, the rollicking turn to an otherwise melancholy conclusion suggests that the heroes love adventure and long for a purpose. But the ending also suggests that history is not moving in a line toward redemption and the defeat of evil. Rather, it is cyclical because humans are bored without evil to face, suggesting that goodness alone is unsatisfying.
Ouroboros engaged me enough to want to know how the story turned out, but I did not care what happened to the characters or their world and gleaned little wisdom from the story. The greatest virtues of Ouroboros are creativity and quality of presentation. I would put Ouroboros in a second tier of fantasy stories below Harry Potter, which I would rank below the Redwall stories. The stories in my first tier of fantasies at least match its writing style and feature richer, more endearing characters, a more textured setting, and more moral gravity. My first tier of fantasies include Lewis’s Narnia books and a story that Lewis had not yet read when he picked up Ouroboros. Although Lewis loved The Worm Ouroboros throughout his life, he, too, eventually found something better. In 1949, after reading The Lord of the Rings, he told Tolkien that Eddison was one of his “mere ‘precursors.’ ”