The worm Ouroboros
A unique work of 20th Century prose following the epic power struggle and conflict between two peoples, the Demons and the Witches. Pre-dating the much better known works of Tolkein, it involves quests and battles on land and sea, heroic acts and deceits, love, lust and infidelity; all in settings so lavishly and extravagantly described as to stretch even the most vivid imagination. Although this work has been described as 'flawed' by many critics, because of a few minor glitches, if read with an open mind, and heart, it will transport the reader to realms of delight of a kind few authors are able to engender in these modern, almost monosyllabic times. To try it is most adviseable, to ignore it is to miss out on a rare treat.
Stats for nerds
2recommend
8mentions
8people
2015–2026years
25% recommend63% neutral13% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Of these I've only read The Worm Ouroboros, and I cannot recommend it enough. The structure is a bit weird at first—you gotta get past the first chapter—but after that it settles and is astounding. If you have any passing interest in Lord of the Rings, you'll likely love it.
- It's worth providing the context in which CS Lewis praised 'A Voyage to Arcturus:' it's in a list of what he considered the best mythopoeic fiction. The quote below is from Lewis' essay 'On Science Fiction,' available e.g. in his collection 'Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories'
> Specimens of this kind [of fiction], at its best, will never be common. I would include parts of the Odyssey, the Hymn to Aphrodite, Much of the Kalevala and The Fairie Queene, some of Malory (but none of Malory's best work) and more of Huon, parts of Novalis's Heinrich von Ofterdingen, The Ancient Mariner and Christabel, Beckford's Vathek, Morris's Jason and the Prologue (little else) of the Earthly Paradise, MacDonald's Phantastes, Lilith, and The Golden Key, Eddison's Worm Ouroboros, Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, and that shattering, intolerable, and irresistible work, David Lindsay's Voyage to Arcturus. Also Mervyn Peake's Titus Groan.
- That's not what high literature is. That's like looking at some clever linux kernel code and dismissing it in favor of a small nodejs backend.
Good literature is difficult (not always, of course). Just like you can't go from a couch potato to running a marathon in one day, you can't jump from Brandon Sanderson to enjoying Gormenghast (or something like the The Worm Ouroboros). It's impossible. It takes effort, it takes time and it takes a lot of reading to appreciate what the real masters can do with mere words.
- Elves and dwarves didn't strictly mean children's fairy tales prior to Tolkien. There's plenty of semi-popular prior art where they feature, like the Worm Ouroboros or The King of Elfland's Daughter. Poul Anderson also published The Broken Sword the same year as LOTR, which shows a lot of the same influences as written by a very different author.
Tolkien's importance is that the specific kinds of creatures he wrote became the default for virtually all subsequent authors and the popularity/quality of the works were pivotal in establishing fantasy as a "proper" genre.
- At the risk of contributing to the AI fatigue: The 4 GTP papers in order of publication.
I'm also in the middle of the following:
1. Software Engineering at Google (O'Reilley)
2. The Worm Ouroboros by E. R. Eddison
3. Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake
- I would be very surprised if this were true. I volunteer with standardebooks.org on getting books in the public domain transcribed, proofread, and typeset for modern e-readers. There are a swarm of books that we would like to upload but can't, due to unclear copyright status on them. This includes stuff that everyone and their mother has probably bought several times already, including the works of HP Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, etc. For most of these, we still follow the Mickey Mouse rule, and do not proceed until we are absolutely sure they're safe.
Case in point, I've been thinking about transcribing The Worm Ouroboros[0] for some time, as it should be in the public domain even by conservative estimates, and yet I can't formally verify its copyright status, so I haven't yet.
