This thick volume collects four works of fiction by a British civil servant who spent his free time inventing and exploring worlds vastly different from that of his day job. He was a passionate student of the ancient Scandinavian sagas and transposed their values, along with a strong admixture of Homer, Sappho, and a bit of potted Spinoza, to imagine worlds where gods take flesh. The results have led Eddison to be called one of the first writers of fantasy literature. One of his early fans, the American aficionado of lost, aristocratic worlds, James Branch Cabell, used the term “romance,” however, to distinguish these books from what he called disparagingly “novels.”
I read this in the Kindle version, which was good enough, but it would have been better to have a print copy to make it easier to consult the maps or the charts of the intricate and confusing cast of characters.
The first book in the collection, The Worm Ouroboros, is set in a world the author calls Mercury. It is similar to our world but also different. The various lands are inhabited by beings motivated by recognizable human qualities but called Goblins, Ghouls, and Imps. The two leading nations are the Demons and the Witches. Despite their name, the Demons are the good guys. But while the Witches have many traits usually associated with the villains—they never make a treaty they don’t intend to break at the first opportunity—, Eddison is careful to impart to them a certain nobility. In fact, the greatest tragedy that could befall the Demons would be to not have an adversary as strong as the Witches. For then they “must turn shepherds and hunters, lest we become mere mountebanks and fops,” as their monarch, King Juss, laments. This is not the morality of the Biblical prophets; the thought of turning swords to plowshares is foreign to this world. A sword is nothing more than forged metal unless its glory is found in testing its mettle against another, wielded by a powerful foe.
Fittingly, there are many battles, and I enjoyed the way the author varied his descriptive technique. Some are told as straightforward narratives, another from the viewpoint of an observer watching from the ramparts, while others are recounted after the fact by surviving participants.
The other three books form a cycle set in a land only glimpsed from afar in Worm, Zimiamvia. They are printed here in the order they were published, although the first of them, Mistress of Mistresses, is the last narratively. I read them in the order they appear in this collection. This works because Mistress of Mistresses is the most fully realized. Eddison employs two plots in parallel, one in Zimiamvia, the other on our earth, with the action shifting back and forth. It soon becomes clear that the protagonist on earth, Lessingham, is (as is his wife) an incarnation of a figure who also lives in Zimiamvia, a more rarified plane of existence (this is also a feature of the subsequent book).
The remaining two books fill in the history of Zimiamvia and its rival dynasties. One, A Fish Dinner in Memison, has a high ratio of talk to action. Even more so than in Mistress, Eddison’s mix of intricate description and complex philosophy veers to incoherence. Overall, I found it the weakest of the four, although the dinner involves a marvelous conceit.
The final book, The Mezentian Gate, is the most ambitious in scope but was left unfinished at Eddison’s death. He left behind a plot outline, however. This, along with notes for some of the unwritten chapters, stitch together the finished chapters so that one gets the picture. Fortunately, the portion Eddison wrote includes the closing chapters. In particular, the lengthy final chapter is a fitting conclusion to the entire cycle.
It’s jarring, however, that the plot of Gate surrounds that of Fish Dinner, the events of which are crucial for the unfolding of the denouement in the final book. It seems as if Eddison did not start out with the entire trilogy in mind but added to it as new plot elements came to him.
Eddison’s style, like his values, is that of the Scandinavian sagas. It’s interesting that, on the one hand, he is an adept of philosophy, with its insistence on viewing life Sub specie aeternitatis, as the mephistophelean Vandermast is fond of saying, yet on the other, he (like the characters he creates) is in love with sensual world. Eddison spends pages describing a castle and its halls, for instance, as well as the fantastical landscapes in which it is set. Readers of modern fantasy might grow impatient, wondering when the action might begin. At first, I found the prose slow-going, but my enjoyment rose once I slowed down to savor the luxuriant, archaic prose.
Perhaps the key to this duality of philosophy and sensuality is the basic theme of these books. Eddison has the temperament of an aristocrat and is a devotee of the pantheon, whether in its Greek or Nordic guise. His heroes (all brave and manly) and his heroines (all beautiful—voluptuous, even) are, to one degree or another, incarnations of the divine two, one of whom, Zeus, creates worlds to delight the other (Aphrodite). ( )