The Worm Ouroboros: A Romance
Published in 1922, two decades before The Lord of the Rings remade the genre, The Worm Ouroboros remains one of the most strangely magnificent works in all of fantasy. Eric Rücker Eddison constructed a world of aristocratic heroes and sorcerous tyrants, then told their story in prose that deliberately echoes the seventeenth century, spare, muscular, and thundering with an almost operatic grandeur. The Lords of Demonland, led by the imperious Lord Juss and the legendary swordsman Brandoch Daha, face an ultimatum from the tyrannical King Gorice XII of Witchland, whose dark sorcery and ruthless ambition threaten to consume all lands. What follows is a saga of mountain passes and maritime battles, of heroic duels and desperate quests, all building toward a climax that defies the very nature of story itself. For Eddison's great secret is the ouroboros: the serpent that eats its own tail. The ending does not conclude, it returns, looping backward through time to the beginning, suggesting that glory and tragedy are eternal, that some wars are never truly finished. This is not gentle fantasy. It is a work of fierce beauty, of heroes who live and die by codes of honor that feel ancient and absolute, and of prose that demands to be read aloud.
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“Let worthy minds ne'er stagger in distrustTo suffer death or shame for what is just””
— Eric Rücker Eddison
“Us, little children of the dust, children of a day, who with so many burdens do burden us with taking thought and with fears and desires and devious schemings of the mind, so that we wax old before our time and fall weary ere the brief day be spent and one reaping-hook gather us home at last for all our pains.””
— Eric Rücker Eddison
“The harvest of this world is to the resolute, and he that is infirm of purpose is ground betwixt the upper and the nether millstone””
— Eric Rücker Eddison
“But because day at her dawning hours hath so bewitched me, must I yet love her when glutted with triumph she settles to garish noon? . . . Who dares call me turncoat, who do but follow now as I have followed this rare wisdom all my days: to love the sunrise and the sundown and the morning and the evening star.””
— Eric Rücker Eddison
“with cunning colubrine and malice viperine and sleights serpentine””
— Eric Rücker Eddison
“This last best luck of all: that earth should gape for me when my great deeds were ended.””
— Eric Rücker Eddison
“Thunder and blood and night must usurp our parts, to complete and make up the catastrophe of this great piece.””
— Eric Rücker Eddison
“The sun stooped to the western waves, entering his bath of blood-red fire. He sank, and all the ways were darkened.””
— Eric Rücker Eddison
“In which star of the unclimbed sky wilt though begin our search? Or in which of the secret streams of the ocean where the last green rays are quenched in oozy darkness?””
— Eric Rücker Eddison
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<a href="https://lex-books.com/book/the-worm-ouroboros-a-romance-fa279776-d9bd-458b-ab40-7a081c2c3717"><img src="https://lex-books.com/badges/read-on-lex.svg" alt="Read The Worm Ouroboros: A Romance by Eric Rücker Eddison free on Lex" width="160" height="40"></a>[](https://lex-books.com/book/the-worm-ouroboros-a-romance-fa279776-d9bd-458b-ab40-7a081c2c3717)[url=https://lex-books.com/book/the-worm-ouroboros-a-romance-fa279776-d9bd-458b-ab40-7a081c2c3717][img]https://lex-books.com/badges/read-on-lex.svg[/img][/url]Read The Worm Ouroboros: A Romance by Eric Rücker Eddison free on Lex: https://lex-books.com/book/the-worm-ouroboros-a-romance-fa279776-d9bd-458b-ab40-7a081c2c3717Cite this book
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Eddison, Eric Rücker. The Worm Ouroboros: A Romance. Lex, lex-books.com/book/the-worm-ouroboros-a-romance-fa279776-d9bd-458b-ab40-7a081c2c3717.Eddison, E. R. (n.d.). The Worm Ouroboros: A Romance. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-worm-ouroboros-a-romance-fa279776-d9bd-458b-ab40-7a081c2c3717Eddison, Eric Rücker. The Worm Ouroboros: A Romance. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-worm-ouroboros-a-romance-fa279776-d9bd-458b-ab40-7a081c2c3717.
