Quotes from book
The Worm Ouroboros

The Worm Ouroboros
Eric Rücker Eddison

The Worm Ouroboros is a heroic high fantasy novel by English writer Eric Rücker Eddison, first published in 1922. The book describes the protracted war between the domineering King Gorice of Witchland and the Lords of Demonland in an imaginary world that appears mainly medieval and partly reminiscent of Norse sagas. The work is slightly related to Eddison's later Zimiamvian Trilogy, and collectively they are sometimes referred to as the Zimiamvian series.

Eric Rücker Eddison photo

“Thou art nothing. And all thy desires and memories and loves and dreams, nothing.”

Eric Rücker Eddison book The Worm Ouroboros

Source: The Worm Ouroboros (1922), Ch. 28 : Zora Rach Nam Psarrion, p. 427
Context: Thou art nothing. And all thy desires and memories and loves and dreams, nothing. The little dead earth-louse were of greater avail than thou, were it not nothing as thou art nothing. For all is nothing: earth and sky and sea and they that dwell therein. Nor shall this illusion comfort thee, if it might, that when thou art abolished these things shall endure for a season, stars and months return, and men grow old and die, and new men and women live and love and die and be forgotten. For what is it to thee, that shalt be as a blown-out flame? and all things in earth and heaven, and things past and things for to come, and life and death, and the mere elements of space and time, of being and not being, all shall be nothing unto thee; because thou shalt be nothing, for ever.

Eric Rücker Eddison photo

“Now he conducted her through his armouries where he kept his weapons and weapons for his fighting men and all panoply of war. There he showed her swords and spears, maces and axes and daggers, orfreyed and damascened and inlaid with jewels; byrnies and baldricks and shields; blades so keen, a hair blown against them in a wind should be parted in twain; charmed helms on which no ordinary sword would bite. And Juss said unto the Queen, "Madam, what thinkest thou of these swords and spears? For know well that these be the ladder's rungs that we of Demonland climbed up by to that signiory and principality which now we hold over the four corners of the world." She answered, "O my lord, I think nobly of them. For an ill part it were while we joy in the harvest, to contemn the tools that prepared the land for it and reaped it."”

Eric Rücker Eddison book The Worm Ouroboros

Ch. 33 : Queen Sophonisba in Galing, p. 499 http://www.sacred-texts.com/ring/two/two39.htm
The Worm Ouroboros (1922)

Eric Rücker Eddison photo

“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 book The Worm Ouroboros

Ch. 3 : The Red Foliot http://www.sacred-texts.com/ring/two/two09.htm
The Worm Ouroboros (1922)

Eric Rücker Eddison photo

“And the Lord Juss cried aloud in his agony, "Fling me to Tartarus, deliver me to the black infernal Furies, let them blind me, seethe me in the burning lake. For so should there yet be hope. But in this horror of Nothing is neither hope nor life nor death nor sleep nor waking, for ever. For ever."”

Eric Rücker Eddison book The Worm Ouroboros

Source: The Worm Ouroboros (1922), Ch. 28 : Zora Rach Nam Psarrion, p. 427

Eric Rücker Eddison photo

“The Queen said, "Remember: when thou shalt see the lord thy brother in his own shape, that is no illusion. Mistrust all else. And the almighty Gods preserve and comfort thee."”

Eric Rücker Eddison book The Worm Ouroboros

Therewith the hippogriff, as if maddened with the day-beams, plunged like a wild horse, spread wide its rainbow pinions, reared, and took wing. But the Lord Juss was sprung astride of it, and the grip of his knees on the ribs of it was like brazen clamps. The firm land seemed to rush away beneath him to the rear; the lake and the shore and islands thereof showed in a moment small and remote, and the figures of the Queen and his companions like toys, then dots, then shrunken to nothingness, and the vast silence of the upper air opened and received him into utter loneliness. In that silence earth and sky swirled like the wine in a shaken goblet as the wild steed rocketed higher and higher in great spirals. A cloud billowy-white shut in the sky before them; brighter and brighter it grew in its dazzling whiteness as they sped towards it, until they touched it and the glory was dissolved in a gray mist that grew still darker and colder as they flew till suddenly they emerged from the further side of the cloud into a radiance of blue and gold blinding in its glory.
Ch. 28 : Zora Rach Nam Psarrion, p. 420 http://www.sacred-texts.com/ring/two/two34.htm
The Worm Ouroboros (1922)

Eric Rücker Eddison photo

“And now in a soft voice she began supplication to the Gods which are from everlasting, calling upon them in turn by their holy names, upon gray-eyed Pallas, and Apollo, and Artemis the fleet Huntress, upon Aphrodite, and Here, Queen of Heaven, and Ares, and Hermes, and the dark-tressed Earthshaker. Nor was she afraid to address her holy prayers to him who from his veiled porch beside Acheron and Lethe Lake binds to his will the devils of the under-gloom, nor to the great Father of All in Whose sight time from the beginning until to-day is but the dipping of a wand into the boundless ocean of eternity.”

Eric Rücker Eddison book The Worm Ouroboros

Source: The Worm Ouroboros (1922), Chapter 28, "Zora Rach Nam Psarrion"

Eric Rücker Eddison photo

“Shall they make rhymes upon us that we of Demonland, whom men repute and hold the mightiest lords in all the world, hung sheepishly back from this high needful enterprise lest, our greatest captains being abroad, our enemies might haply take us at home a disadvantage? It shall not be said of the women of Demonland that they upheld such counsels.”

Eric Rücker Eddison book The Worm Ouroboros

Mevrian, in Chapter 8, "The First Expedition to Impland"
The Worm Ouroboros (1922)

Eric Rücker Eddison photo

“And now when the retorts and beakers with their several necks and tubes and the appurtenances thereof were set in order, and the unhallowed processes of fixation, conjunction, deflagration, putrefaction, and rubefication were nearing maturity, and the baleful star Antares standing by the astrolabe within a little of the meridian signified the instant approach of midnight, the King described on the floor with his conjuring rod three pentacles inclosed within a seven-pointed star, with the signs of Cancer and of Scorpio joined by certain runes. And in the midst of the star he limned the image of a green crab eating of the sun. And turning to the seventy-third page of his great black grammarie the King recited in a mighty voice words of hidden meaning, calling on the name that it is a sin to utter.”

Eric Rücker Eddison book The Worm Ouroboros

Source: The Worm Ouroboros (1922), Chapter 4, "Conjuring in the Iron Tower"

Eric Rücker Eddison photo

“Dismal and fearsome to view was this strong place of Carcë, most like to the embodied soul of dreadful night brooding on the waters of that sluggish river: by day a shadow in broad sunshine, the likeness of pitiless violence sitting in the place of power, darkening the desolation of the mournful fen; by night, a blackness more black than night herself.”

Eric Rücker Eddison book The Worm Ouroboros

Source: The Worm Ouroboros (1922), Chapter 4, "Conjuring in the Iron Tower"

Similar authors

Eric Rücker Eddison photo
Eric Rücker Eddison 11
British writer 1882–1945
A.A. Milne photo
A.A. Milne 169
British author
Doris Lessing photo
Doris Lessing 94
British novelist, poet, playwright, librettist, biographer …
V.S. Naipaul photo
V.S. Naipaul 34
Trinidadian-British writer of Indo-Nepalese ancestry
Arthur C. Clarke photo
Arthur C. Clarke 207
British science fiction writer, science writer, inventor, u…
W. Somerset Maugham photo
W. Somerset Maugham 158
British playwright, novelist, short story writer
Elias Canetti photo
Elias Canetti 43
Bulgarian-born Swiss and British jewish modernist novelist,…
William Golding photo
William Golding 79
British novelist, poet, playwright and Nobel Prize for Lite…
Kazuo Ishiguro photo
Kazuo Ishiguro 76
Japanese-born British author
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien photo
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien 78
British philologist and author, creator of classic fantasy …