The Zimiamvia Trilogy Read online

  The Complete Zimiamvia

  E. R. Eddison

  Copyright

  Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

  77–85 Fulham Palace Road

  Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

  www.harpercollins.co.uk

  The Worm Ouroboros © E. R. Eddison 1922

  The Mistress of Mistresses © E. R. Eddison 1935

  A Fish Dinner in Memison © E. R. Eddison 1941

  The Mezentian Gate Copyright © E.R. Eddison 1958, 1992

  Introduction © Paul Edmund Thomas 1992

  Jacket illustration by John Howe © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 2014

  E.R. Eddison asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

  Source ISBN:

  The Worm Ouroboros 9780007578115

  The Mistress of Mistresses 9780007578139

  A Fish Dinner in Memison 9780007578153

  The Mezentian Gate 9780007578177

  Ebook Edition © December 2014 ISBN: 9780007578191

  Version: 2014-09-30

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  The Worm Ouroboros

  Mistress of Mistresses

  A Fish Dinner in Memison

  The Mezentian Gate

  About the Publisher

  A high epic of royal revenge and romance, wizardry and warfare … and a quest that has no end.

  Dedication

  To W. G. E.

  and to my friends K. H. and G. C. L. M.

  I dedicate this book

  It is neither allegory nor fable but a Story to be read for its own sake.

  The proper names I have tried to spell simply. The e in Carcë is long, like that in ‘Phryne’, the o in Krothering short and the accent on that syllable: Corund is accented on the first syllable, Prezmyra on the second, Brandoch Daha on the first and fourth, Gorice on the last syllable, rhyming with ‘thrice’: Corinius rhymes with ‘Flaminius’, Galing with ‘sailing’, La Fireez with ‘desire ease’: ch is always guttural, as in ‘loch’.

  E. R. E.

  9th January 1922

  True Thomas lay on Huntlie bank

  A ferlie he spied wi his ee;

  And there he saw a Lady bright

  Come riding down by the Eildon Tree.

  Her skirt was o the grass-green silk,

  Her mantle o the velvet fyne,

  At ilka tett of her horse’s mane

  Hung fifty siller bells and nine.

  True Thomas he pulld aff his cap,

  And louted low down on his knee:

  ‘Hail to thee, Mary, Queen of Heaven!

  For thy peer on earth could never be.’

  ‘O no, O no, Thomas,’ she says,

  ‘That name does not belong to me;

  I’m but the Queen of fair Elfland,

  That am hither come to visit thee.

  ‘Harp and carp, Thomas,’ she says,

  ‘Harp and carp alang wi me.

  And if ye dare to kiss my lips,

  Sure of your bodie I will be.’

  ‘Betide me weal, betide me woe,

  That weird shall never daunton me.’

  Syne he has kissed her rosy lips,

  All underneath the Eildon Tree.

  THOMAS THE RHYMER

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Foreword by Douglas E. Winter

  Introduction by Orville Prescott

  Introduction by James Stephens

  THE INDUCTION

  I. The Castle of Lord Juss

  II. The Wrastling for Demonland

  III. The Red Foliot

  IV. Conjuring in the Iron Tower

  V. King Gorice’s Sending

  VI. The Claws of Witchland

  VII. Guests of the King in Carcë

  VIII. The First Expedition to Impland

  IX. Salapanta Hills

  X. The Marchlands of the Moruna

  XI. The Burg of Eshgrar Ogo

  XII. Koshtra Pivrarcha

  XIII. Koshtra Belorn

  XIV. The Lake of Ravary

  XV. Queen Prezmyra

  XVI. The Lady Sriva’s Embassage

  XVII. The King Flies His Haggard

  XVIII. The Murther of Gallandus by Corsus

  XIX. Thremnir’s Heugh

  XX. King Corinius

  XXI. The Parley Before Krothering

  XXII. Aurwath and Switchwater

  XXIII. The Weird Begun of Ishnain Nemartra

  XXIV. A King in Krothering

  XXV. Lord Gro and the Lady Mevrian

  XXVI. The Battle of Krothering Side

  XXVII. The Second Expedition to Impland

  XXVIII. Zora Rach Nam Psarrion

  XXIX. The Fleet at Muelva

  XXX. Tidings of Melikaphkhaz

  XXXI. The Demons Before Carcë

  XXXII. The Latter End of All the Lords of Witchland

  XXXIII. Queen Sophonisba in Galing

  ARGUMENT: WITH DATES

  BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES ON THE VERSES

  Also by E. R. Eddison

  FOREWORD

  BY DOUGLAS E. WINTER

  ‘The Worm Ouroboros, that eateth its own tail …’

  I FIRST read these words more than twenty years ago. They seemed magical, an invocation of something locked deep inside me – something dark and dangerous, and yet desperately alive. They intrigue me, uplift me, haunt me, even today; and I introduce them to you with the anxious delight of a child who wishes to share a special secret. You hold in your hands the best single novel of fantasy ever written in the English language.

  Eric Rücker Eddison (1882–1945) was a civil servant at the British Board of Trade, sometime Icelandic scholar, devotee of Homer and Sappho, and mountaineer. Although by all accounts a bowler-hatted and proper English gentleman, Eddison was an unmitigated dreamer who, in occasional spare hours over some thirty years, put his dreams to paper. In 1922, just before his fortieth birthday, a small collector’s edition of The Worm Ouroboros was published; larger printings soon followed in both England and America, and a legend of sorts was born. The book was a dark and blood-red jewel of wonder, equal parts spectacle and fantasia, labyrinthine in its intrigue, outlandish in its violence. It was also Mr Eddison’s first novel.

  After writing an adventure set in the Viking age, Styrbiorn the Strong (1926), and a translation of Egil’s Saga (1930), Eddison devoted the remainder of his life to the fantastique in a series of novels set, for the most part, in Zimiamvia, the fabled paradise of The Worm Ouroboros. The Zimiamvian books were, in Eddison’s words, ‘written backwards’, and thus published in reverse chronological order of events: Mistress of Mistresses (1935), A Fish Dinner in Memison (1941), and The Mezentian Gate (1958). (The final book was incomplete when Eddison died, but his notes were so thorough that his bro
ther, Colin Eddison, and his friend George R. Hamilton were able to assemble the book for publication.) Although the books are known today as a trilogy, Eddison wrote them as an open-ended series; they may be read and enjoyed alone or in any sequence. Each is a metaphysical adventure, an intricate Chinese puzzle box whose twists and turns reveal ever-encircling vistas of delight and dread.

  Eddison’s four great fantasies are linked by the enigmatic character of Edward Lessingham – country gentleman, soldier, statesman, artist, writer, and lover, among other talents – and his Munchausen-like adventures in space … and time. Although he disappears after the early pages of The Worm Ouroboros, Lessingham is central to the books that follow. ‘God knows,’ he tells us, ‘I have dreamed and waked and dreamed till I know not well which is dream and which is true.’ One of the pleasures of reading Eddison is that we, too, are never certain. Perhaps Lessingham is a man of our world; perhaps he is a god; perhaps he is only a dream … or a dream within a dream. And perhaps, just perhaps, he is all of these things, and more.

  Eddison was exceptional in his embrace of the fantastique; in his fiction there are no logical imperatives, no concessions to cause and effect, only the elegant truths of the higher calling of myth. Characters traverse distances and decades in the blink of an eye; worlds take shape, spawn life, evolve through billions of years, and are destroyed, all during a dinner of fish. These are dreams made flesh by a dreamer extraordinaire.

  ‘There was a man named Lessingham dwelt in an old low house in Wastdale …’ Thus The Worm Ouroboros introduces Lessingham and his lady, Mary, the first glimpse of the tragic romance that will haunt the Zimiamvian novels. Lessingham retires, alone, to the mysterious Lotus Room, a place of contemplation and opiate calm – there to sleep, perchance to dream. ‘Time is,’ speaks a little black bird, and a shining chariot, drawn by a hippogriff, arrives to fetch Lessingham to Mercury. His destination is not the first planet from the sun, but a medieval Norseman’s nightmare of our own Earth, ‘all grey and cold, the warm colours burnt to ashes’, save one: the crimson of blood. It is a grim world, peopled by Demons and Witches, Imps and Pixies, Goblins and Ghouls – all of them human, and all of them at war. Swordplay and sorcery and Machiavellian intrigue are the order of the day; vengeance and feuds, betrayal and bloodletting, as common as the dawn.

  The heroes of this majestic Romance are the Demons, ruled and captained by the three brothers – Lords Juss and Spitfire and Goldry Bluszco – and their cousin Brandoch Daha. Valiant in war, courtly in speech and stance, these are heroes in the classical sense, superhuman, violent, passionately alive, with the ferocious good looks and fate of fallen angels; if there is a single certainty, it is that those who befriend them will die. The Demonlords are demigods who struggle for a kind of savage nobility, forever pursuing a sentimental, romantic code that places word before deed, death before dishonour. Their trials are many, and painted brightly with blood.

  Arrayed against the Demonlords are the Witches of Carcë, purveyors of a blackness ‘which no bright morning light might lighten’. Their king is the crafty warlock Gorice XII, an egromancer ‘full of guiles and wiles’. Skilled in grammarie, he lurks forever in his citadel, which stands ‘like some drowsy dragon of the elder slime, squat, sinister, and monstrous’. At his side are his warlords: brave Corund, the bearish Corsus, the insolent Corinius, and ‘the landskip of iniquity’, the renegade Goblin Gro – philosopher, schemer, and traitor by nature. No blacker and more dastardly crew of scoundrels could be found; yet Eddison’s passion for them is obvious and intense.

  The struggle between the Demons and Witches is nothing less than epic; the battles of this modern Iliad rage on land, sea, and air, taking us from the ocean depths to the lofty pinnacles of heaven. Among its finer episodes are the ‘wrastling for Demonland’, which pits Goldry Bluzco against the King of the Witches and sets an entire world aflame; the fog-clouded siege at Eshgrar Ogo; the harrowing ascent of Koshtra Pivrarcha and the struggle there with the beast mantichora; the bloody battle at Krothering Side; the flight of the hippogriff to the gaunt peak of Zora Rach; and the playing of the final trumps at the dark citadel of Carcë.

  Eddison’s prose is archaic and often difficult, an intentionally affected throwback to Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. His characters are thus eloquent but long winded; they speak not of killing a man, but of ‘sending him from the shade into the house of darkness’. In his finest moments Eddison ascends to a sustained poetic beauty; listen, for example, to the haunting premonition of the Goblin Gro:

  ‘in my sleep about the darkest hour, a dream of the night came to my bed and beheld me with a glance so fell that the hairs of my head stood up and pale terror gat hold upon me. And methought the dream smote up the roof above my bed, and the roof yawned to the naked air of the midnight that laboured with fiery signs, and a bearded star travelling in the houseless dark. And I beheld the roof and the walls one gore of blood. And the dream screeched like the screech-owl, crying, Witchland from thy hand, O King!’

  At other times the reader is virtually overwhelmed with words. Palaces and armoury were Eddison’s particular vices; he describes them with such ornate grandeur that page after page is lavished with their decoration. The reader should not be deterred by the density of such passages; like a vintage wine a taste for Eddison’s prose is expensively acquired, demanding the reader’s patience and perseverance – and it is worthy of its price. These are books to be savoured, best read in the long dark hours of night, when the wind is against the windows and the shadows begin to walk – books not meant for the moment, but for forever.

  The Worm Ouroboros inevitably has been compared with J. R. R. Tolkien’s later and more popular Lord of the Rings trilogy; apart from their narrative ambition and epic sweep, the books share little in common. (Eddison, like Tolkien, disclaimed the notion that he was writing something beyond mere story: ‘It is neither allegory nor fable but a Story to be read for its own sake.’ But, as the reader will no doubt observe, he proves much less convincing.)

  If comparisons are in order, then I suggest Eddison’s obvious influences – Homer and the Icelandic sagas – and that most controversial of Jacobean dramatists, John Webster, whose blood-spattered tales of violence and chaos (from which Eddison’s characters quote freely) saw him chastised for subverting orthodox society and religion. The shadow of Eddison may be seen, in turn, not only in the modern fiction of heroic fantasy, but also in the writings of his truest descendants, such dreamers of the dark fantastique as Stephen King (whose own epics, The Stand and The Dark Tower, read like paeans to Eddison) and Clive Barker (whose The Great and Secret Show called its chaotic forces the Iad Ouroboros).

  Eddison would have found this line of succession, like the cyclical popularity of his books, the most natural order of events: the circle, ever turning – like the worm Ouroboros, that eateth its own tail – the symbol of eternity, where ‘the end is ever at the beginning and the beginning at the end for ever more’.

  You hold in your hands a masterpiece.

  DOUGLAS E. WINTER

  1990

  INTRODUCTION

  BY ORVILLE PRESCOTT

  IT IS thirty years since The Worm Ouroboros was first published in England and twenty-six since I first succumbed to its potent magic. Since then I have reread it several times, always finding new evidence for my belief that this majestic romance is an enduring masterpiece, although a peculiar and imperfect one, and that Eric Eddison is a great master of English prose and a greatly neglected one. His rediscovery is long overdue. Perhaps it will come with the republication of this book.

  E. R. Eddison was a successful English civil servant, the author of several minor works and of three of the most remarkable romances in the English language, The Worm Ouroboros, Mistress of Mistresses and A Fish Dinner in Memison. When he died in 1945 he left uncompleted a large fragment of still a fourth [The Mezentian Gate, published after this Introduction was written]. The three completed novels are loosely linked together
as separate parts of one vast romantic epic; but the connection of The Worm Ouroboros with the others is remote. And it is unique in the simplicity of its theme, which is heroic adventure. The other two books have double themes, heroic adventure and the symbolical presentation of a moderately abstruse philosophy. For this reason it is best to read The Worm first. It makes an easier introduction into the splendid cosmos of Eddison’s imagination. And anyone who has once savoured the rare delights to be found there will not be content without exploring the uttermost reaches, metaphysical as well as fanciful.

  What are the reasons for considering this flawed masterpiece (so noble in concept and so mighty in scope and yet marred with a few irksome failings) worthy of the attention of serious students of literature? First of all, there is the lordly narrative sweep of it, the pure essence of storytelling for its own sake such as has become increasingly rare in our introspective modern world. Second is the splendour of the prose, the roll and swagger and reverberating rhythms and the sheer gorgeousness of much of its deliberate artifice. And third is the blessed sense of vicarious participation in a simpler, more primitive world where wonders still abound and glory is still a word untarnished by the cynical tongues of small-minded men. Before elaborating a little on each of these qualities of The Worm Ouroboros, it seems wise to indicate what Eddison’s story is actually about.

  Since this is a romantic epic about an imaginary world, Eddison felt it necessary to set his stage and explain things before launching into his story proper. This he did awkwardly, by sending an English gentleman in a magic dream to the planet Mercury to observe events there. It is a distracting and clumsy notion; but since Eddison forgot all about his earthborn observer after the first 20 pages, no prospective reader should allow himself to be troubled by his fleeting presence. And in Mercury, Eddison chose to call the people of the various nations Witches, Demons, Goblins, Imps, Pixies. This, too, is distracting, but only temporarily. The great war between the Demons and the Witches is the theme of this modern Iliad.