E.R. Eddison - The Worm Ouroboros

By the time it wraps up, 2013 will, I am sure, have more Fantasy novels with imaginary kingdoms warring in invented worlds than anyone could possibly read. 1922 had one. The Worm Ouroboros is a strange beast to read now. Back then, three decades before Tolkien’s masterwork, it must have been utterly, overwhelmingly bewildering. But it is not only interesting historically. Though seriously flawed, The Worm Ouroboros is an interesting beast indeed, a novel that reads something like what might have happened if Shakespeare had written an alternate universe Epic Fantasy version of Homer’s Iliad.

Readers looking for purely second world, immersive fantasies might be confused by the book’s opening. Eddison begins with a man named Lessingham that, due to entering a strange room in his house, is transported to Mercury to observe what his guide insists will be something extraordinary. It’s a less than stellar opening that reads like Eddison sticking his toe into the then-uncharted waters of secondary world fantasy before he can quite summon the courage to dive in.

But dive in he does. The world he creates ceases to be the barren, overheated lump of rock we call Mercury as soon as Lessingham arrives, and Lessingham himself is quite literally forgotten about within the first few pages, never to be mentioned again. In his place, the reader finds themselves in an imagined world dominated by the struggle between vast nations. These nations, it must be admitted, have atrocious names. Demonland and Witchland are the main combatants, with Impland and Pixyland showing the caliber of the rest of Eddison’s nomenclature. The lack of skill in naming, however, does not translate to a lack of skill in world-building. Though it doesn’t seem to have much at all to do with demons as we conceive them, Demonland (and the other nations that Eddison creates) is a richly imagined place with a wide cast of characters and a well considered history.

The war between Demonland and Witchland begins with a challenge issued by the cruel King Gorice XI of Witchland and the “wrastling” match that commences. When the Witches’ reincarnated leader, now Gorice XII, proves disinclined to honorably back down, he summons the fearsome Worm Ouroboros. When the Worm takes one of the four brothers that rule and lead Demonland and tosses him to some godforsaken corner of the world (for… some reason?), the others set off to save him as the war begin the two nations begins.

The war is a fought solidly in the heroic register. It is a matter of great champions and their quest for glory, one where the heroes believe that “all occasions are but steps for us to climb fame by” (p. 118). As such, these battles are welcome, for it is through them that glory may be won and great deeds done. As our protagonists say: “Are not all lands, all airs, one country unto us, so there be great doings afoot to keep bright our swords?” (p. 129)

The cost of this register is that these characters are more collections of grand deeds than they are complex personalities. To briefly give you the chief cast of Demonland: Juss is the strong but wise (ish) leader, Goldry Blusczo is the great fighter seized by the Worm, Brandoch Daha is the pretty boy master swordsman with a wonderful name, and Spitfire does seem to on occasion spit fire. That about sums them all up. The cast of villains is somewhat more interesting but, with one exception, is not greatly so.

One of the few different notes is Gro, who is essentially a normal fellow forced into this superhuman world. He is the savvy, amoral manipulator of the bunch, and the few times we see him fight do not end particularly well for him. He is also an explorer and a writer, a man that has realized that it is all but "a fable of great men that arise and conquer the nations” (p. 311). Truly, glory fades with death and time, so he has aimed himself at, instead of it, “to love the sunrise and the sundown and the morning and the evening star ? since there only abideth the soul of nobility, true love, and wonder, and the glory of hope and fear” (p. 312). He may be no more moral than the rest of our cast, but he seeks a quieter kind of hedonism, a glory not of great deeds but of love and the enjoyment of life. It doesn’t go well for him, but I loved him all the same.

The other variances from the shallow but epic heroics that make up most of the cast are the female characters. Alas, they are different but not well done. The female nobility we see spends their time being seduced, wooed, and threatened with rape. One particularly uncomfortable scene has a woman sent by her father to the king to try and seduce him towards the father’s point of view. King Gorice laughs off the attempted persuasion but does enjoy her body after he finishes explaining how futile her errand was and how powerless she is.

Despite the shallowness of the characters, Eddison thrives in his depiction of the grand deeds that his creations accomplish. Mountains are climbed, beasts are slain, battles are fought, and each encounter comes through to the reader with impossible richness. Much of the success of the novel’s atmosphere, and of how Eddison imparts its almost hedonistic heroic code, come from Eddison’s prose. Eddison writes like a time traveller from Jacobean times. His every word and phrase is strange, but it is a managed strangeness that he crafts without a misstep, and it soon begins to read not so much like an actor desperate for a role in Shakespeare as it does like the standard dialect of this distant, heroically elevated world. For an example of it at its height, witness Gorice’s calculated decision to use magic against his foes: “But I, that am skilled in grammarie, do bear a mightier engine against the Demons than brawny sinews or the sword that smiteth asunder. Yet is mine engine perilous to him that useth it.” (p. 54) But while Eddison’s writing is heavy, it is not without its playfulness, and the grandiosity of his style also allows for profoundly silly moments, such as one’s character’s exclamation: “devil damn me black as buttermilk” (p. 143).

Still, moral problems with this kind of fiction creep in. The characters are shamelessly elitist. They refer to the “common muck o’ the world” (p. 150),and uncountable numbers of those that make up the muck are slaughtered in the grand battles in which Juss and his brothers win their glory. When the lords of Witchland conquer Demonland, we hear of how they oppress the populace. But the reader comes to wonder long before the end of the book whether the lords of Demonland are actually any better. Celebrating glory becomes hard to do once you realize that the glory is attained by slaughtering one’s fellow (albeit, if you ask your heroes here, lesser) man.

But the novel’s ending shows that Eddison was aware of that problem throughout. [Note that a discussion of the ending will, obviously, contain SPOILERS.] Having finally defeated Witchland, the heroes of Demonland see the hollowness of glory and become despondent. “Thinking that we,” they say, “that fought but for fighting’s sake, have in the end fought so well we never may fight more; unless it should be in fratricidal rage against each. And ere that should betide, may earth close over us and our memory perish.” (p. 431) They realize that glory must be constantly renewed, that, once the fighting is over, it fades and death returns. Without a new battle to fight, they are not only prevented from doing new deeds but must see their old deeds fade: “We […] have flown beyond the rainbow. And there we found no fabled land of heart’s desire, but wet rain and wind only and the cold mountain-side. And our hearts are a-cold because of it,” Juss says (p. 432).

And so Eddison, in the last pages of his work, brings forth his final and devastating twist: the Gods grant the heroes of Demonland their prayer. Their war is eternal. It began an infinite amount of time before The Worm Ouroboros did and will continue forever after. Gro was right, and the glory of the strong will fade with the years until they, eventually, die like anyone else. The only way for them to escape that fate is to fight on, to fight for ever. And so the Lords of Demonland fight an endless war, causelessly slaughtering the common man again and again for all of time so that the great might retain their glory and greatness.

The Worm Ouroboros is a bizarre book. It lacks the characterization that fans of modern Fantasy no doubt expect to find. But that is not to discount it. Eddison simultaneously succeeds at the best modern evocation of Homeric heroism that I have read while also managing to critique and ultimately expose the horrors of that ideal, creating a book that both thrills the reader and makes them question even the ideals of heroism, greatness, and war in their modern form. After 1922, Fantasy developed down a very different path from this. But The Worm Ouroboros is a unique beast that is very much worth looking at, one that exists and immerses the reader in its own archaizing language and elevated cosmos.

Jeff Salyards - Scourge of the Betrayer

My review of Scourge of the Betrayer is now live at Strange Horizons. Head on over to hear about witty prose, Arki the chronicler, and the grimmest and grittiest of grimdark.

Disillusionment in A Game of Thrones

[Note: I have felt for a while that I should probably put those of my academic essays that fit this blog's purview up here. As it would be hard to find a book more fitting to what I do on The Hat Rack than A Game of Thrones, I figured that this is where I would start. This paper was originally written for the class "Fantasy Literature and the Historical Imagination" and was intended to explore Martin's usage of both in-world history and world-building. 

Alas, I do have the habit of copious footnoting in my academic writing, and I don't know a graceful way of integrating that with a blog's formatting. I'd recommend having a second tab open at the bottom of the page to read them as you go.]

A Game of Thrones is the first book in George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series. In it, Martin sets out to shatter his characters’ illusions. After building up a great store of cultural knowledge and ideals, he sets about destroying it. He shows his characters that war and politics are nothing like that they expect. But he doesn’t sotp there. By the time he is done, he has shown them that their very world is not as they thought it was.

The people of Westeros^[1] have a great deal of lore. Knowledge and ideas are preserved and spread in a large body of songs and stories that are often alluded to. ^[2] The oldest woman in service to the Starks is Old Nan, whose purpose seems to be telling bedtime stories to each generation of new lords. Not all of what the Westerosi know comes from general knowledge and oral traditions. Chroniclers record the details of major events (Martin 102), and lords’ castles hold large libraries. Books are so prized that they can be considered sufficient wedding gifts for a princess: Daenerys receives – and cherishes – volumes of songs and histories of the Seven Kingdoms (Martin 86). The past isn’t just something for the political elite to toy with. The maesters are a Westerosi institution that can be cheesily summed up as the “knights of the mind” (Martin 484). Groan-worthy propaganda aside, maesters study for years in Oldtown before dispersing through the realm as learned advisors. They are educated in  histories, herbs, ravens, architecture, and far more (Martin 485), and their chambers are overflowing with books (Martin 615).

This knowledge – particularly the stories and songs – serve as a guide to the world for Martin’s many child characters. Bran, for instance, thinks he knows what to expect in the capital from the stories that he has heard (Martin 64). Sansa goes farther, building her life around songs, desiring nothing more and nothing less than “for things to be nice and pretty, the way they were in the songs” (Martin 119-20 This isn’t just idle dreaming about how things should be. Betrothed to Prince Joffrey, Sansa believes that her life will be just like the Age of Heroes, only with more lemon cakes.

Alas, treating life as a story ends disastrously. As Littlefinger says, “life is not a song” (Martin 395). The children learn this to their great sorrow. Bran dreamed of being a knight. Instead, he watches the knights ride to war while he sits by, crippled. Jon discovers that the legendary defenders of the realm, the Night’s Watch, are not heroes driven solely by honor. As one character Jon complains to eloquently puts it, reality likes to “piss on the stories” (Martin 153). But it’s Sansa that gets the most brutal blow. Long after the others have given up their idealized dreams Sansa becomes capable of “seeing [Joffrey] for the first time” (Martin 622). That moment of revelation comes when her gallant prince decides to display her father’s severed head for all to see.

Adults, too, suffer from their ideals. Ser Hugh came to participant in the Hand’s Tournament, the tournament that, to Sansa, proves “better than the songs” (Martin 246). Hugh came because he was “desperately” seeking glory to justify his recent knighting (Martin 256). In the jousting, he gets a lance through the throat. If the killer’s brother can be believed, that deadly deviation from the songs was no accident (Martin 253). Indeed, knighthood falls far short of its romanticism throughout the text. One telling difference between storied battle and actual combat is how “in songs, the knights never screamed nor begged for mercy” (Martin 453). Of course, there are things to believe in besides stories. Not all of the novel’s^[3] characters go on believing their adolescent fantasies to and through their knighting. Martin delights, therefore, in showing that these mature ideals are just as impractical and illusory Eddard believes in honor. When he gains documented proof that King Robert supports him, he thinks the battle won. Cersei tears the document to pieces. “Is this meant to be your shield, my lord?” she asks him. “A piece of paper?” (Martin 441) His honor, and even the king’s legal will, are as much paper shields against reality as a cherished book of childhood stories. No storied knowledge or grand virtues, it seems, matter in the face of the real (Westerosi) world and the men in it with swords.

The final source of disillusionment is the greatest, and it is also where the disillusionment moves from the histories created by the people of the world to the very history of the world and the world itself. The world of Westeros is not what the Westerosi believe it is. The children delight in Old Nan’s stories of Others and other fantastic creatures. But the rational adults know that these stories are just stories, irrelevant to today’s modern (medieval) world even if they might once have had some grain of truth. As Ned says, “The Others are as dead as the children of the forest, gone eight thousand years. Maester Luwin will tell you they never lived at all” (Martin 20). The Maesters confidently state that “magic ha[s] died” (Martin 197), their only qualifier being that it may never have existed. In legends, the Night’s Watch raised the Wall to combat the Others, but everyone knows the Night’s Watch really just keeps the nasty northern barbarians out. As Tyrion mocks, the Night’s Watch is “watching for grumkins and snarks and all the other monsters your wet nurse warned you about” (Martin 104). The Others have been left with no more dignity than the monsters in a children’s movie.

But the Others are not extinct. The prologue shows three men of the Night’s Watch venturing beyond the wall. Ser Royce, a knight new to the Watch, leads them, and, before long, they are slaughtered by the Others. On the surface, this seems the typical story of an inexperienced and overconfident commander leading his men to ruin. That is true, but it is also insufficient, because the good Ser Royce is not really a buffoon. He is intelligent enough to realize that the temperature was too warm for the men they were pursuing to have simply frozen (Martin 4), and he is courageous. He alone stands and “bravely” face the Others (Martin 7). He was out of his depth, but any commander would have been. Only silly stories passed down through the ages shed any light on the Others, and the three are forced to rely on tales from their “mother[s]” and “wet nurse[s]” as soon as they pass the Wall (Martin 3). ^[4]

The supernatural was likely dismissed from official records and general belief for political reasons. Dragons, unlike Others, are not from the Dawn Age or the Age of Legends but from the Targaryen Conquest a mere three hundred years ago. Nonetheless, characters confidently assert that “dragons are gone,” and “it is known” that they are not coming back (Martin 197). Part of their reasoning is that the last known dragons are dead. Similarly, when proving that Others do not exist and maybe never did, Eddard says “no living men has ever seen one” (Martin 20). But the dismissal of dragons is also political. When the Targaryens ruled, they kept the memory of dragons alive, for the symbol of the dragon was tied to their power and reign. When King Robert dethroned the Targaryens, he took down the dragon skulls that adorned the throne room (Martin 102). It was in his interest to forget the old, to have the people dismiss dragons as a relic of the past that could never recur, and to embrace his new reign. The same reason could explain why Others are so categorically dismissed despite ancient evidence. When the Targaryens took over three hundred years ago, it was in their interest to have the people forget their prior rulers and the legendary foes those rulers strove against. Unfortunately, neither Others nor dragons care much for Westerosi politics. The Targaryens may have reduced the Others to a laughingstock, and Robert may have stuffed all the dragon relics out of sight, but both beasts are returning in defiance of all the rational learning of the maesters.

Admittedly, these supernatural beasts are not yet in Westeros, and the maesters are correct for the moment that magic is dead in the world. After all, they define the world as Westeros. The Wall marks the “end of the world” (Martin 173), no matter that there is plainly territory beyond it. But while the Others and other magic are still outside the world, they are coming. A Song of Ice and Fire could be called the story of magic gradually but inexorably returning. In A Game of Thrones, we have direwolves returning to the realm for the first time in two hundred years (Martin 15). Outside Westeros, we see Others, dragons, and Wights, the last of which end up attacking the Wall itself. By the second volume, A Clash of Kings, one of the faction’s competing for the throne has a sorceress of sorts. In the third, A Storm of Swords, we have the Night’s Watch battling Others. The progression continues from there.

A Song of Ice and Fire, therefore, becomes something like a secondary world intrusion fantasy. This can be seen in contrast with The Worm Ouroboros. E. R. Eddison’s sub-creation is wholly consistent and integrated. Its denizens know the rules of the world and what is possible. They might express amazement at the exploits of the wondrously named Brandoch Daha or at the spells of one of the many Gorices, but their awe would be like our awe at someone who climbed Mount Everest. These are incredible feats, but they are not impossible feats. It would not be like our reaction to someone who claimed they could fly. No fundamental (or seemingly fundamental) rules of the world are violated by their exploits. It is not so in Martin’s work. The seemingly impossible does happen. The maesters are convinced that magic is gone, but what could be accurately described as a frozen zombie attacks the Night’s Watch. Now, this does not actually violate the rules of the world. By starting with his prologue and the Others, Martin makes sure to let the reader know the real rules of the game. But the characters do not have that luxury. Their worldview is incomplete, and it is violated by what is (to them) the supernatural. From the Westerosi viewpoint, the Others marching south of the Wall is the quite literal intrusion of the fantastic into the world. Martin’s characters are subjected to something akin to Cthulhu rising from the Pacific.

This does not, of course, mean that A Game of Thrones or A Song of Ice and Fire is not an immersion fantasy. It is set in a detailed secondary world and, save the paratexts^[5], contains no hint of Earth. Its story is certainly one about the world of Westeros. In fact, the idea of ancient evils returning – essentially, intrusion fantasies – is not a rare one in immersion fantasies. Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time – another recent, sprawling, and best-selling fantasy series – uses the same concept. Even The Lord of the Rings plays on similar ground. Suaron, after all, is a foe from past ages, though characters like Galadriel that can speak about that ancient history with perfect accuracy complicate the effect in Tolkien. The techniques of an intrusion fantasy are compatible with the world of an immersive fantasy and allow an author to create a different effect than can be had from simply establishing one set of rules and never toying with them.

For Martin, this technique is the final hammer he can use to hit his characters’ illusions. A Game of Thrones and the books that follow it set out to prove to their cast that nothing is what they thought it was. The characters’ songs, stories, and ideals of honor and knightly valor hide the truth of death screams and begging for mercy. Even their world, Martin reveals, is vastly more complex than they imagined.^[6]

Works Cited

Martin, George R.R. A Game of Thrones. New York: Bantam Books. 1996. Print.

---

^[1] Westeros is the continent on which the vast majority of the series’ action is set. It is also (somewhat confusingly) the name of the world.

^[2] In later volumes, Martin does include the words to some of these songs, such as the Rains of Castamere, but none are present in A Game of Thrones.

^[3] Though A Game of Thrones has many aspects of a romance, Martin’s too concerned with “character development” and the psychology of his narrators to not be considered a novelist. Indeed, it is precisely that character development that he so often uses to poke holes in romance and romantic ideals. [Note: a central issue in our class was whether works of Fantasy qualified as true Novels as opposed to as Romances.]

^[4] It’s too simple, therefore, to say that Martin thinks all knowledge – songs, stories, books – is misleading. In the first place, he seems to divide between cultural lore or stories and what is critical, studied. The former is a very poor guide to the day-to-day world, while the maesters really are valuable advisors. But the maesters are worthless against supernatural menaces that defy all reason.

^[5] Though it’s never stated in the text itself, an argument could be made that the genealogies in the back are in-world texts. They never explicitly address an out of world reader, and, as we see Ned reading The Lineages and Histories of the Great Houses, we know that there are genealogies created by and for Westerosi.

^[6] Finally, I should note that A Game of Thrones did, thankfully, hold up to my memories of it. I can no longer quite call it the greatest book of all time, but my fears of finding out that everything I’d loved about it were just cool due to having read less at the time proved unfounded.

Kameron Hurley - God's War

Nyx went on (p. 286).

Kameron Hurley's debut novel, God's War, got widespread coverage and acclaim across the blogosphere last year. Having now read the novel, I can say that the attention is certainly deserved.

The far future world of Umayma has been shaped by the never ending war between Nasheen and Chenja. In many ways, this conflict is reminiscent of our world's recent past, not only with the term and tactic of the "suicide soldier" (p. 167) and the lone man armed with some horrific contagion but with sentences like: Countries at war lived in a state of perpetual fear (p. 197). But, on Umayma, the war has gone farther than ours, has become overwhelming and omnipresent. It has led to strange technologies and powers like the magicians' ability to control bugs or the shifter's morphing. It has led to new societal patterns, new permutations of faiths, and new structuring of gender.

The war has set the course of Nyx's life as much as anyone else's, if not more. She has served her time at the front, has served Nasheen as a bel dame by keeping the populace in line, and has fallen more than once for Nasheen. But she refuses to surrender her autonomy to the war. Those around her know the events and the people that have made them. Some even go so far as to believe they have made Nyx, can take responsibility for her actions. She rejects that:  How many men had made her? […] They were just men. They were just people. […]It wasn't what was done to you. Life was what you did with what was done to you. (p. 240) In the face of the world and war around her, Nyx still demands responsibility for herself, insists upon her own course. She refuses the idea of submitting to anyone – not Fatima, not the magicians, not the queen, not God (p. 171).

Nyx's ferocious individualism is contrasted with Rhys, a religious man who fled Chenja to take refuge in Nasheen and has now found himself a member of Nyx's team. Rhys submits himself to God utterly and often. Yet, no matter how far he is from Nyx, the novel never removes the heart of weight of his position. Hurley's treatment of religion is one of the fairest I have encountered. Both Nyx and Rhys are complete characters with reasons for their faith or lack thereof, and, though each has potentially overwhelming problems as a result of their outlook, those problems do not easily rob their souls of validity. Furthermore, Nyx and Rhys' interaction is a mixture of conflict and care that feels real.

Nyx and her team are recruited to hunt down a woman from the stars and the game changing technology she possesses. This could have been the easy foundation for a simple, Thriller style plot. Instead, this quest doesn't come until nearly a hundred pages into the novel. The hunt will prove brutal for its undertakers. It will take them to and perhaps beyond their limits. But it is not the whole story of God's War, for Nyx's life began before it and will continue after it. The hunt is just one more part of it, something to further explore Nyx and the war rather than to constitute the whole of them.

The hunt at God's War's center, if viewed as a Thriller style chase, is not particularly successful. Much is made of Nyx's abilities, and she is indeed dangerous and possessed of a ferocious will. But she is ambushed and captured. Endlessly, again and again. Hurley can write a gripping action scene, but the grand arc of her plot basically consists in the reader sitting back without ever seeing much of the investigation itself and waiting for Nyx to get kidnapped the next time. Luckily, though she doesn't display the tightest plotting skills, Hurley does excel at character and at world building, and her characters' interactions and needs drive the reader and the story on as its futility becomes clearer.

As one might expect, the scale widens as the novel progresses. Or, at least, it seems to. Often, in God's War, what seems a new vista is simply a vast new continuation of the old. It's not long into the book that we get a sense of Umayma's place in the larger universe. There are many ships and factions out there, many so alien in their level of technology they couldn't have put in at the old port if they wanted to (p. 11). For all that space, though, the simple truths of strife are not escaped. After all, "They fight another of God's wars out there in the dark, can you believe it?" (p. 9)

So it is with the game changing technologies that Nyx chases. They could, perhaps, end the war. But they would not end it with peace but with incredible suffering and destruction. By the novel's end, Nyx is doing her best to destroy that technology, to ensure that neither side can wreak such havoc. But hers, even should she succeed, will not be a victory like that of the secret agent who keeps the nuclear bomb from the terrorist. Nasheen and Chenja are already quite capable at the whole death and destruction thing. At best, Nyx is sparing her world the fire by holding it down in the frying pan.

As Nyx's life swallows her hunt, the war comes to swallow not only the hunt but Nyx and everything in the novel. As we close, the war has not been changed, and even our protagonists have not been saved from its darkness. The novel ends with two sentiments. The first comes from the Queen when she says: "Know that what I do, I do for the good of Nasheen." (p. 283) The reader has no reason to doubt her, and the argument that she presents seems logical. But after so much destruction and pain, the words seem beyond hollow. Finally, the queen says:

"There are no happy endings, Nyxnissa."

"I know," Nyx said. "Life keeps going." (p. 285)

Life keeps going and so does the war. In its cracks, Nyx and those like her exist, tied inextricably to the war and yet determined to make their own path through it. Following them is not a cheery experience, but it is a powerful one.