Long would I hesitate before calling any literary work of the past century great. That word, so abused in our day, seems to me best reserved for the highest prose and poetry of the literary sphere, and I am of the opinion that precious little of such is to be found in these latter days. Yet in at least a single case I would leap on this word as the only just description of the work in question. I speak of The Worm Ouroboros, by E. R. Eddison, book untimely as a Peace rose in the snowfields. Reading this work one is transported to a higher view of things, a perspective utterly foreign to this democratic milieu surrounding us. One enters into a beauty which is at once old, old unto antiquity — and perchance new, utterly novel and innovative upon our time.
My readers should be forgiven if they have heard nothing of this work. It so little becomes our day, it is quite unsurprising that it should be ignored. It is commonly relegated to a niche in the shelves of the “Fantasy Section,” so that anyone who has not sacrificed the time to burrow through the childishness therin contained to discover its few hard jewels, cannot be blamed for having never discovered Eddison. This is sad commentary on our times: stocking this book with “fantasy literature” seems to me as irreverent as placing Beowulf therewith, merely because it contains a dragon. I encourage any new reader of this work to approach it as if he held in his hands, not some contemporary fairytale, but rather the noble opus of a distant past. Only then, I believe, can one enter rightly into the spirit of this work, and begin to appreciate its archaic and eternal beauties.
Or again, and perhaps better yet: it is helpful, for those well familiar with his writings, to take this book as a manifestation or a transference of Nietzsche’s thought, and thus as much a book of tomorrow as yesterday, as much the transfiguration of this present moment, as its evasion and its dismissal.
A note before commencing: I do not hesitate here to reveal the plot of The Worm Ouroboros, convinced as I am that in a case like this it can little compromise our delectation to know how the tale ends. The contrary: even as one is unlikely to fully understand, for example, Elgar’s incidental music for Grania and Diarmid at first hearing, but rather one must listen many times before its charms and secrets begin to show forth, so it is with the glories of this book.
This review limits itself to a discussion of the warrior ethos in the narrative of The Worm Ouroboros. It seems to me that this theme contains the most timely “lessons from Demonland” for those who are engaged in a long and perchance desperate struggle. And Eddison’s narrative, more surely than any other contemporary work of which I am aware, embodies the warrior ethos and does not quail before drawing its necessary conclusions.
I divide my review into four parts. In the first, which follows hereafter, I give an overview of the narrative, together with some general indications of why this story might be of interest to the New Right. In the second, I consider the ideas of war and the enemy in the narrative. In the third, I move to an analysis of the characters of Lord Gro and Lord Juss, and what their contrast might suggest regarding the relation between the warrior ethos and the intellectual ethos. And in the fourth and final part, I close with a consideration of the mystery from which this book derives its name.
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The Worm Ouroboros chronicles the mighty war between two rival kingdoms, Demonland and Witchland. The arc of the narrative covers four years precisely, beginning and ending with the thirty-third birthday of one Lord Juss of Demonland, who is the foremost protagonist of the narrative. The narrative (which most significantly is divided into thirty-three chapters) follows the deeds and travails of the Demons, but from the start it is made clear that this is a mere question of perspective; our witness is deliberately impartial in the conflict between the rival parties of the war — at least, is not partisan in any way we are accustomed to. We are encouraged rather to adopt the spirit of the poet, who, as poet, is given the gift of entering into all the points of view of the narrative, and through them of attaining a global overview.
Already at the beginning, in the very names of the kingdoms involved, we are made aware that the author has no intention of pandering to our present-day morality. The people of Demonland, called variously Demons or devils, are surely no meek and treacly children of Christianized humanitarianism, though they in fact are deeply rooted in the archaic Christian ideal of chivalry and the Christianized myths of the North. Even beyond the indication given with the name, these are no meek “angels,” for they are martial and mortal, limited in knowledge; but still less are they hell-spawn, for they are beautiful in form, candid to a fault, generous as rulers, and magnanimous with those they conquer. They reside in a universe, one might say, uncontaminated by the lowly morality of Modernity. They might find place amongst the host of fallen angels in Milton’s Paradise Lost, save that there is nothing fallen and nothing lost about them.
The four Lords of Demonland — Juss, his two brothers Spitfire and Goldry Bluszco, and his cousin Brandoch Daha — are of abounding physical comeliness, puissant of body and noble of visage. They surround themselves with finely wrought things: halls crafted of pure marbles and enormous jewels; statues and paintings and tapestries celebrating the gods and the deeds of their ancestors; artful arms and armors; founts and gardens and castles. They take much joy in these things. They are intelligent, studied, and delightfully eloquent men, Juss and Brandoch Daha in particular, although their education is ever subservient to their martial prowess. It is primarily their lofty probity which differentiates them from the other peoples of Eddison’s narrative.
And here one discovers the first of the qualities of this narrative which must appeal to this polemical, hopeful outlook known as the New Right: it is unapologetically ethnic in its view of the world. The many peoples of Eddison’s imagination are distinguished from one another by differences of physiology and custom, from the gods they worship to the temperaments of their souls to the views they take of reality. There is no hint here of our contemporary evasions on this issue, not the slightest trace of moralistic equivocation between the races. There are distinctions to be made between these peoples which cannot be got around: there are great peoples, such as the Demons and the Witches, and lesser peoples, such as the Foliots, the Fairies, and the Goblins. One people in particular — the Ghouls — was loathed by all “polite nations” (“Argument: With Dates”), and it is considered one of the most glorious feats of the Demons to have extirpated them from the face of the world, and one of the most glaring derelictions of the Witches to have given no aid to that cause. There is no free admixture of these races, save in occasional marriages between the scions of noble households — and even in such cases as these, there are accompanying difficulties due to the clashing customs, ideals, and allegiances of the spouses’ peoples.
The narrative takes the Demons as its protagonists, and it thus follows that the Witches must be regarded as the enemies. Yet here again our contemporary expectations are thwarted; for one will not find, as one is wont to find, wicked and contemptible foes for our protagonists to defeat. On the contrary, though the Witches are extremely different from the Demons, and perhaps in certain respects inferior (their lords tend toward drunkenness and lack of self-control, their physical splendor is not of a level with the Demons, and several of them are shown to value their lives over their honor), they are nonetheless treated throughout as noble and worthy opponents. The best parallel that might be drawn is with the Iliad, in which the Trojans are anything but despicable — nor could be so, without diminishing the glory of the Greeks. The Witches are admired and feared for their prowess. Their King is described as mighty and terrible, and is respected universally for his his mastery of the dark arts — which does not stop him from being a formidable adversary in wrestling matches and melee combat.
Indeed, the narrative begins with a challenge from the Witches to the Demons to decide their long-standing rivalry through a wrestling match between King Gorice of Witchland and Lord Goldry Bluszco of the Demons. The challenge is met, and its issue propels the plot: Goldry Bluszco slays King Gorice in the contest, compelling Gorice’s successor to summon a power from the underworld in revenge. This summoning destroys the fleet of the Demons and bears Goldry Bluszco away to a magic realm, from which Lord Juss may save him only by overcoming a series of nigh impossible perils. The larger part of the book is dedicated to the resolution of these two matters: Lord Juss’ rescue of his brother Goldry Bluszco from the weird, and the great battle between Demonland and Witchland for apotheosis over all the world, which concludes with the razing of Carcë, the capitol of Witchland, and the Demon’s annihilation of the Witchland lords.
Throughout all its events this book remains an unabashed celebration of the masculine virtues. Here one finds a second aspect which must appeal to the New Right. This is not to say that there are not noble and finely wrought female characters in this book: very much the contrary is true. Never shall anyone who has loved this book forget the soul-wrenching suicide of Princess Prezmyra upon the corpse of her husband, nor the glory of the warrioress Lady Mevrian’s lone defense of her brother’s castle against the invading armies of Witchland, nor this same Mevrian’s sublime defiance before the Witchland lord who intends her rape. There is also Sriva, the shameless flirt, who does not hesitate to use her body to gain her way, and Queen Sophonisba, granted by the gods endless youth, whose divine beauty and wisdom (this last echoed also in her name, from the Greek σοφία) directs so much of the plot. But despite the color and virtue of these feminine characters, despite their distinct magnetism, despite even the centrality of the feminine to this book, which we will consider in due time — despite all this, the driving force behind the events of this story is unequivocally masculine: the hunger for adventure, the desire for a warrior’s glory, the virile but essentially chivalric craving after beauty, the will to conquer and to be master, and the pure, undiluted lust for the good fight.
Let us state the matter as candidly as would a Lord of Demonland: the New Right is in no way a timely movement. The very name of the worldview, New Right, suggests constant opposition to the day at hand. Truly, the men of the New Right are as those salmon which against all probability, ease, and good sense, travel hundreds of miles up the stream of angry rivers, to lay the seeds of a new generation and win the continuation of their kind. Yet it is still easy for them to fall into the small ideals and petty, decayed pacifism of our epoch, without so much as realizing it. Books like The Worm Ouroboros are a specific against that illness; they awaken us most viscerally and most palpably to the limitations of our present societies, and grant some revelation of visible beauty to our sometimes vague hopes. They remind us of the fallow possibilities still remaining to this Occidental race, and provide us distinct vision of at least aspects of the world we are striving to prepare.
And I suggest, as I will explore in the coming parts of this essay, that the best lessons we may take from this noble book in particular, are these: that it is good to be born into hard times, which demand of us the betterment of our souls; that it is good we do not permit ourselves to become ourselves flaccid and dull in peace and comfort; that it is good we lack the kingdom we love — for thus we must make ourselves into its worthy builders.
We lovers of the Occident are upon a hard battle, difficult of the winning; before the end of it, we will be tried in ways we might not even now imagine. All of us, no doubt, perceive as much. We know that before conclusion comes to the struggle into which we have flung ourselves, and certainly if we are to be in any way victorious, we will have to summon from our spirits qualities which now lay dormant and untried within us. The West has long grown over-quiet and soft; its swords have rusted, its once bright spirit has dulled. This is cause not consequence of the time of warlessness it has lately enjoyed: the West needs renewal.
Here, in the mouth of Lord Volle in Book XIX on the eve of a lost battle, is fit speech for the sons of the Occident in their present evil hour:
Lift up thine eyes … and behold the lady moon. … [A]s little as earthly mists and storms do dim her, but though she be hid awhile yet when the tempest is abated and the sky swept bare of clouds there she appeareth again in her steadfast course, mistress of tides and seasons and swayer of the fates of mortal men: even such is the glory of sea-girt Demonland, and the glory of thine house. … And as little as commotions in the heavens should avail to remove these everlasting mountains, so little availeth disastrous war…to shake down our greatness, that are mightiest with the spear from old and able to make all earth bow to our glory.
But all of this presupposes, of course, the fall or diminution of that glory — the veiling of the Western moon behind mists and dark clouds. Our task, stated in the widest possible terms, may be posited thus: to rekindle the dying flame of Occidental glory. That is the struggle upon which we are embarked, and it is my proposal that The Worm Ouroboros expresses, as only poetry may do, the qualities requisite to our task.
Item: the speech of the Lords of Demonland, when they are told in Book X that the land they are to enter to recover their lost kinsman, the dreaded Moruna, is certain to destroy them: “Do not too narrowly define our power … restraining it to thy capacities. Know that our journey is a matter determined of, and it is fixed with nails of diamond to the wall of inevitable necessity” — by which necessity, they mean nothing more than their will. Well? Shall we not respond this way to those doubters and scoffers who mock our cause as a doomed one? This will seem to some ears mere boastfulness. It is rather to be regarded as a promise. As Brandoch Daha says — the beautiful Brandoch Daha, to eyes a dandy, but to the heat of war a devil of martial prowess, “I was never so poor a man of my hands that I need turn braggart.” The trial of words is in deeds; by speaking willfully of our cause we are speaking in oaths, and the realization of these oaths depends on our fortune and our will. But we may prove our will only in the effort we put toward the realization of our oaths: oaths are the tests of will. For an oath is a kind of imaginary principality, an ideal built upon the air, which we can found solidly on the earth through right action alone.
Even supposing our cause is as hopeless as some believe, shall we not speak then as Brandoch Daha to the Queen Sophonisba, when in Book XIV he returns, at the limits of his energy, from a doomed journey, bearing on his back the half-dead Lord Juss? “Blame us not overmuch, dear Queen,” quoth he. “Who shoots at the mid-day sun, though he be sure he shall never hit the mark, yet as sure he is he shall shoot higher than who aims but at a bush.” There is a certain glory to be had even in a brilliant failure, supposing only that one has aimed at the highest. It is sure not the part of a noble man to go tossing for bushes; he seeks the best, even when he cannot have it.
Indeed, these Demons in their high struggle reveal to us a subtle truth about the world: the world is a testing stone for the power of the soul. In good fortune and in ill, experience can be made into a school for the heart and the head. This is not necessarily to suppose any cosmic schoolmaster; it is rather to insist relentlessly on our ability to school ourselves — on the capacity of the human being to reform himself by and within his own powers. This is the very opposite of a doctrine of cheap self-help egalitarianism, for it implies that there are iron limits set upon each of us beyond which we may never stray. But the knowledge of those limits can only be had in the trying of them.
The greatest enemies of this attitude are cowardice and complacency, as one of the more laughable characters of the narrative teaches us. Mivarsh Faz of the Goblins accompanies Lord Juss and Lord Brandoch Daha across the Moruna on their hazardous quest to rescue Goldry, but he goes in constant terror of the prophecy he once received from an oracle, that he should be eaten by a crocodile. His life is governed by the obsession with this prophecy. His dearest wish is to evade his fate and his death, rather than confront it with the manful stoicism which, as we have seen, characterizes the Demons. The result of all his pains is that he plummets into a crocodile-ridden lake from the back of the hippogriff which he thought would bear him to refuse, and is duly devoured. We become aware in Mivarsh’s death that the prophecy was not realized merely at the end of his life, but rather was his fate as such, throughout the whole of his life: Mivarsh Faz’s entire existence was a perpetual “being eaten by a crocodile.”
By seeking the heights with all our power, we begin to sense the barriers surrounding us; more, we begin to comprehend where those barriers be flexible, and where they be rigid: we begin to determine what points we may expand and perfect, and which are fixed merely. This book teaches a radical method of discovering oneself, of becoming oneself.
In this attempt, moreover, we are brought to love of life and love of victory, and we begin to understand why the Demons, despite their high warrior ways, are perennially full of jest and mirth. The love of life and of victory is the very opposite of the mere fear of death and of defeat, though atimes they coincide. The love of life and of victory is a masculine attitude which presupposes a degree of self-overcoming and self-mastery, contempt of death and detestation of the mere possibility of defeat. For even in noble defeat a warrior retains that which is most precious within him; and if he fails to attain that for which he has fought and suffered, he is rewarded even then with the chance to demonstrate a sublime cheer in defeat, which is triumph of a different kind.
The Demons, who understand this, are liberal men in an elder sense of that word. We note here that Demonland lacks a king, while Witchland is unambiguously a monarchy, not to say tyranny. The four Lords of Demonland exist as equals, superior over all their subjects, but on par with one another. They are bound to each other, not by mere political allegiance, but principally by bonds of affection and kinship. In consequence, none of them must swear fealty to any single head; they are all of them proudly free in the true and original sense of freedom — not this modern etiolated notion of being at one’s liberty to behave like a slave, but rather in the sense of possessing a liberal spirit, which means, at its highest, a soul liberated from common bonds and common prejudices. Such a one lives as a complete human being, in the health, serenity, and felicity of that completeness.
This is incompatible with quiet subjugation to any authority. As Lady Mevrian says to the Witchland general who offers to make her queen that he may bed her, “The dominion of the Demons hath used to soar a pitch above common royalty, and like the eye of day regarded kings from above” (Chapter XXIV). That is superb manner to refuse a crown, and it reveals the overview of a great soul. It is well for us to remember this attitude in our own strife and our own battles. To stand as part of our ranks is to be branded with a bad sign. One can well be ostracized for holding certain opinions today, and among these unspeakable beliefs are most of those that we hold. For those of our kin who have talent and ambition, the temptation will thus present itself now and again to soften our principles or bend to convention, even halfway, that we may attain the honors and the acknowledgment which in a just society would come to us of its own accord. When such temptations are presented to us, we would do well to recall what Brandoch Daha responds, when Corund of Witchland attempts to bribe him to betray his people: taking the offer that Corund had written, Brandoch Daha swears himself to a great oath:
“This shall be a keepsake for me of thee, my Lord Corund. Reminding me,” and here his eyes grew terrible, “so long as there surviveth a soul of you in Witchland, that I am still to teach the world thoroughly what that man must abide that durst affront me with such an offer.” (Chapter XI)
I have thus far revealed but scattered excerpts from the narrative, mere passages which indicate the virtue of the Demons, and from which we poor moderns might take a sup of inspiration and refreshment. But there are more pressing lessons to extract from these pages. This too, my friends, may we learn from the Lords of Demonland: the art of loving one’s enemy. Needless to say, I speak not in the bloodless modern theme; I speak of loving one’s enemy, because he is a worthy and honorable enemy who presses one to great achievement, or else because he furnishes the conditions in which one’s mettle can show. I speak of that chivalry and delicacy of high mind, which permits King Juss to send the very leader of the opposing army home safe after the Demons conquer him in battle, saying, “O Laxus, I give thee not thy head only, but thy sword. … For thy dealings with us in the battle of Kartadza, let time that hath an art to make dust of all things so do with the memory of these. Since then, though hast shown thyself still our noble enemy; and so shall we account thee still” (XXVI).
This chivalrous magnanimity is accounted by the Witches to be a weakness of the Demons which might be exploited. There is thus a constant pressure on the Demons to make them more calculating, to make them forgo their high honor for a little low and pragmatic gain. But the Demons perceive that there are matters in this world worth more than victory. There are conditions under which merely winning a war becomes contemptible and detestable to right minds and elevated souls. It is not sufficient to emerge triumphant: one must be triumphant by one’s own standards. Nietzsche reminds us of this most forcefully when he tells us that “whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.”
We must bear this firmly in our minds, for it is often enough true that we cannot account our enemies so noble as the Witches. We are often thrust against foes contemptible, unworthy certainly of anything like love, and hard enough atimes to respect. Alas, but it is often the rabble that speaks through our adversaries. All the greater then is the temptation to fight our opponents in a manner befitting, not our rank, but theirs. But this belittles us, and bespeaks an unworthy desperation. One who corrupts himself to win the war loses the better part of his triumph even as he attains it. Let us then never stoop for our victory, else our muscles cramp, vice-like, and we lose the power of upright standing.
Better instead to learn the art of interpreting the world in a nobler light. Eddison’s book is surely exemplary as an education in this art: for in The Worm Ouroboros, we are made visitors and spectators to a lofty reality which is not our own, and we may therefore learn something of our own lives, looking down on them from such unruly heights. And thus we might learn that there are other reasons yet to love even such enemies as the most despicable. For I ask you, my comrades in this battle, what manner of lives you should have lived without this struggle? It is good to laud peaceful times, and to wish that these troubles had never come to us: it is the mark of a great and insatiable soul that it knows to savor the nectar of tranquility as much as the heady draught of war, and to favor whichever should come. But the fact that we are here reveals a certain desire in our hearts to find some worthy enterprise on which we might set our hands and our wills. Why should we hide this? Or, why not celebrate it?
When the war with the Witches is concluded and the Demons return home, and the fruits of victory and peace hang heavy on the bough, this proves an unhappy season for these Demons, who without the war and the possibility of noble deeds fear the long remainder of their lives will become wretched waste. They are as the Crusaders of old, who would march forth on Holy War though it cost them peace and gold and land, life and limb. Their thirst for warfare, for the heat and trial of combat — shall this not enliven us, too, given our present battle? Shall we not drink long of this fount, and glean therefrom some vigor for the coming travail? Shall we not take heart, as these Demons do, and thank the God of hosts that these troubles have come to us?
Much in the fire is lost to the ash. That which survives is however hardened for its passage. We are not scrap-metal nor stray bones that have been but cast into a furnace. We are human beings, endowed also with that most parlous and ambiguous prerogative of human beings, to make of ourselves something we have never yet been and to play the smithy to our own mettle. Whatever heat and pressure our day exerts on us, is also exerted by us on ourselves; let that be our pride and let it inform our task. We could issue of this trouble pettier and fiercer and more miserably cynical, forced to become small so that we could winnow through the tightening spaces about us: or we may learn by these troubles to anneal our virtues, and to make of ourselves, insofar as it be possible, such citizens as we would see in some new society, yet unstamped by human will and yet unchristened with divine grace.
That choice remains but our own. May we take this lesson then from the Demons: that he who barters his virtue to attain his victory — he who rides the hippogriff but to flee the crocodile — has in truth lost not only the war but his life as well.
The blood which binds one to one’s family and to one’s people is treated throughout The Worm Ouroboros as one of the strongest and least questionable motivators of human action, and proves to be finally decisive in all the characters to whom we are presented. All, that is, save one.
This is a most intriguing case, the case of Lord Gro — so far as I know, the first noble turncoat in all our literature, and outside of Socrates the profoundest poetic representation of a philosopher of which I am aware. This Gro belongs neither to the Demons nor to the Witches. He hails from the kingdom of the Goblins, which he betrayed for the good of faltering Witchland, on the eve of the Goblins’ victory — a truly anomalous proclivity which lands him on both sides of the war between the Demons and the Witches, depending on who is further behind in the game. He is described as being enamored of lost causes. Lord Juss of Demonland relates Gro to us thusly: “[He is] a philosopher. I knew him well of old in Goblinland, and I judge him to be one who is not false save only in policy. Subtle of mind he is, and dearly loveth plotting and scheming, and, as I think, perversely affecteth ever the losing side if he be brought into any quarrel; and this dragged him many times into misfortune” (VIII). Not false — save only in policy! That is a remarkable statement, and bears pondering.
Lord Juss, one might say by contrast, is not false in anything, including his policy. He is a man of his promises: when he makes a great oath to rescue his brother Goldry, he is willing even to thrust aside the exigency of war with the Witches to fulfill his word. Lord Gro has a very different idea about oaths: “But he, rising up, said, ‘Madam, this and thy noble words hath given such rootfastness to the pact of faith betwixt us that it may now unfold what blossoms of oaths thou wilt; for oaths are the blossoms of friendship, not the root’ ” (XXV).
One is reminded of the furious argument between Pike and Dutch in Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch over whether an oath depends on the man that gives it or the man that receives it — whether it is permissible to break an oath made to a worthless person. Gro’s belief that it is permissible, his strange numbness to ideals, seems related to his philosophical spirit, the spirit of wandering, which owes neither love nor allegiance nor fidelity to anything or anyone. Indeed, those words that Gro whispers to his horse are among the finer descriptions of the philosophical mood that I have found: “Come, gossip, we must on, and marvel not if thou find no rest, going with me which could never find any steadfast stay under the moon’s globe” (XXV). To such a vagabond as that, the oath can have no binding value, save as it is bolstered by truer considerations. In and of itself, it is a hollow thing, merest words that one speaks easily and can as easily unspeak.
Juss’ Christian sense of oaths as binding on the oath-maker, notwithstanding any and all external circumstance, seems related to his martial spirit. It is unbecoming for a man of honor to rescind his word. Lord Gro is utterly unconcerned with this warrior’s honor which governs all the other protagonists of the narrative. Twice he recommends sneaking up on opponents and pinching the breath out of them as they slumber, and once again he counsels snaring the enemy generals in a trap with promise of parley.
This lack of martial virtue extends also to Gro’s physical person and to his habits. He is a thin and pallid man amongst a host of brawny warriors, and is referred to several times as being little fit for battle, even womanish. (The high and beautiful Queen Prezmyra, for instance, who otherwise thinks well of Gro’s intellect and character, says he is “too feminine” to make a fit husband.) Like Juss, Gro is somewhat versed in alchemy and conjuring, which renders him fearless before illusion and evocations. He knows aught of natural philosophy, on one occasion winning a bet over the outcome of an encounter between four spiders and a toad. His counsel is much sought and generally heeded — at least when it does not infringe upon the honor or the arrogance of those who receive it. When he is not stabbing the winning powers in the back, he wanders the lands, passing a long period in all solitude in the strange and desolate beauty of the Moruna, where mortals fear to tread, and composes learned books upon his discoveries and investigations there. He, even more than most of the warriors of Witchland, is inured to death: as he himself most stoically says, after receiving portents of his own demise, “Fate will not be cheated, cog we never so wisely. I do not think there be not many extant that in a noble way fear the face of death less than myself” (XXVII). His death proves that these words are not wholly boast.
Given this point of similarity between Gro and the Lords of Demonland, the question arises as to what causes his disdain for the warrior ethos, or better say his obliviousness toward it. We risk this interpretation: Juss’ warrior spirit is permitted precisely by his love of his land, his people, his family. His bonds with other human beings, bonds established by the merest accident of blood, but strengthened to iron over years of mutual experience, shared customs and views, and the common overcoming of challenges, grant him the right to posit goals and ends, to make oaths, and to respect the binding quality of his own word. All of this would become impossible for him were he severed in space and sentiment from his brethren. One cannot build a world if one’s heart does not crave as much. Juss’ honesty in particular cases does not depend on his kith and kin — he is willing, for example, to defy even Brandoch Daha when he decides to free his brother before tending to the war — but without his brethren, probity should lose its decisive value for him, as indeed it does with Gro. Honor, we may say, is a social virtue, even if, at its height, it may flout society.
Gro, meanwhile, is numb to the pull of blood, is too wise to share the erroneous opinions of his peers, and has no desire to conquer in war, neither for riches (he has the philosopher’s fine contempt of material things), nor for power (he is promised a kingdom by King Gorice of the Witches, but this proves insufficient to secure his loyalty), nor for victory itself (he is, as said, incurably enamored of the losing side). His independence from blood and brethren detaches him fundamentally from honor, and this is shown as a dearth, a barrenness, in his soul.
The one passion which might substitute the love of blood and brethren in Gro, is the impartial philosophical love of truth. But this is manifestly insufficient, for Gro is ever seeking to join himself to the human world. He is plainly enamored of Lady Prezmyra, and he asks the hand of the Lady Mevrian, but in both cases he is denied the favor of woman. And his last act is a final act of betrayal, this time inspired directly by the merest hint of human affection: when in the midst of battle Lord Corund of Witchland calls Gro an erstwhile friend and laments his joining with the Demons, Gro is “moved in spirit” and forthwith turns against the Demons he so lately joined, cutting down one of their men, thus compelling Lord Spitfire to destroy him by driving a sword through Gro’s brain, the philosopher’s intellectual organ. Eddison’s last word on Gro beautifully encapsulates the aloof ambiguity of the philosophical way:
In suchwise and by such a sudden vengeance did the Lord Gro most miserably end his life-days. Who, being a philosopher and a man of peace, careless of particular things of the earth, had followed and observed all his days steadfastly one heavenly star; yet now in the blood battle before Carcë died in the common opinion of men a manifold perjured traitor, that had at length gotten the guerdon of his guile. (XXXI)
Regarding his tendency toward treachery, Gro makes the following remarkable soliloquy:
He that imagineth after his labours to attain unto lasting joy, as well may he beat water in a mortar. Is there not in the wild benefit of nature instances enow to laugh this folly out of fashion? A fable of great men that arise and conquer the nations: Day goeth up against the tyrant night. How delicate a spirit is she, how like a fawn she footeth it upon the mountains: pale pitiful light matched with the primeval dark. … And who dares call me turncoat, who do but follow now as I have followed this rare wisdom all my days: 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. (XXV)
Thus the word of the philosopher. In large part thanks to this vision of things, Gro does not survive the war. Lord Gro is the very opposite of a cyclical creature; he is disconnected from the wellsprings of life at a dozen points. He is impotent as a warrior, failed as a wooer, eternally alone. His speeches on the vanity of life are profound and dark:
“In the hills is wisdom’s fount. … [I]f their large philosophy question not if [their snows] be a bridal sheet or a shroud, hath not this unpoliced calm his justification ever in the returning year, and is it not an instance to laugh our carefulness out of fashion? of us, little children of the dust, children of a day, who with so many burdens do burden us with taking thought and with fears and desires and devious schemings of the mind, so that we wax old before our time and fall weary ere the brief day be spent and one reaping-hook gather us home at last for all our pains.” He looked up and she met the gaze of his great eyes; deep pools of night they seemed, where strange matters might move unseen, disturbing to look on, yet filled with a soft slumbrous charm that lulled and soothed. (XXV)
One is tempted to say that the philosopher Gro sees the smallness of human things more deeply than anyone, Juss included, and that his seemingly melancholy thoughts are the result of his unique wisdom. But this is belied by the fact that Juss confronts the same terrible insight, and overcomes it, in his quest to recover his brother Goldry. At the climax of that quest, a voice speaks within Juss, saying,
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.” 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.” (XXVIII)
Most strikingly and most insightfully, Eddison does not permit Juss’ nihilistic despair to induce thought of suicide; nihilism rather clouds his spirit and his mind so totally that he becomes willing to follow the deadly illusion of a beautiful woman who guides him to her chamber and denudes herself before his eyes. The bleak sight of the void Nothing, the emptiness of all human striving or ambition, does not bring one to crave death as such, but rather brings the death of the heart, and prepares one for merest sensualism and basest hedonism. And upon the very brink of perishing in this oblivion of mindless desire, “fortune, or the high Gods, or his own soul’s might, woke yet again in [Juss’] drugged brain remembrance of his purpose, so that he turned violently from that bait prepared for his destruction, and strode from the chamber up to that roof where his dear brother sat as in death” (XXVIII).
Three possibilities: “fortune, the high Gods, or his own soul’s might.” The question of which is the true savior of Juss, would be fit work for a long discourse. But one may perhaps derive some insight by concluding this contrast between Juss, the kin-loyal warrior, and Gro, the kinless philosopher.
Gro’s particular inhumanity belongs specifically to the philosopher — his detachment from the pleasures of the flesh, his inveterate frigidity to the idea of honor, his utter lack of bonds with his kin, his king, his kingdom, his fearlessness in the face of death but his simultaneous disregard of glory — his godless and roving pursuit of something he, in the end, realizes he can never have:
To [Gro’s] sick imagining, the blackness of Carcë which no bright morning light might lighten seemed not as of old the image and emblem of the royal house of Witchland and their high magnificency and power on earth, but rather the shadow thrown before of destiny and death ready to put down that power for ever. Which whether it should so befall or no he did not greatly care, being aweary of life and life’s fevers, wild longings, and exorbitant affects, whereof he thought he had now learned much: that to him, who as it seemed must still adhere to his own foes abandoning the other’s service, fortune through whatever chop could bring no peace at last. (XXXI)
It is this sense which would seem to lead him, in the course of the fray, to commit an act as ambiguously suicidal as Socrates’ defense before the Athenian jury — an act, that is, which directly brings about his death, and in a manner that one so wise must surely have foreseen, and been able, had he wished, to avoid. The philosopher’s very detachment from all human allegiances renders him in a certain way unfit for life, unable to extract the truth he seeks out of existence. While it is Juss’ love of his brother that carries him past despair, Gro’s break with his people, his lack of rootedness, his indifference to his blood and his gods, destroy his ability to discover a purpose strong enough to overcome the terrible vision of the vanity of life. He is a “man of peace,” as no one attached to a people and a nation can unequivocally and always be. He who is in no way a warrior does not adore war; and so the continuation of war, the necessity that war will carry on despite all, should strike him, the philosopher, as a final argument against life. It is weariness that speaks here; it is a physiological deficit within the ill-formed Gro — a failure, not of “fortune” nor certainly of the “high Gods,” but of might. And it is the very excess of strong and vital will which permits Lord Juss to persist where Lord Gro falls: Juss adores the battle and the turning of these cycles, and would perish in his soul, not if the war should prove boundless, but if the peace should prove final.
Any man who has pursued with sufficient discipline and sufficient love, enough intensity and enough duration, the winding paths of philosophy, shall well feel the edge of this critique; he shall perceive that Nietzsche was most certainly right, when he claimed that truth, too, wants only a warrior.
We have reserved this mystery for the final part of our review: the question of the meaning of ouroboros, sign and signal of the book we have set ourselves to contemplate.
We begin with the end. After the fall of Witchland and the return of the Demons to their kingdom, a time of peace descends upon the land. Queen Sophonisba, who had aided Juss in his rescue of his brother, comes to be the guest of the Demons in the peaceful enjoyment of all the good things over which they lord. Magnificent catalog is furnished of the gardens and the treasures of the Demons and the marvels of their lands. And yet despite all this earthly splendor we are made aware that something is awry: when the Queen expresses her happiness that peace is come to Demonland, Juss responds, “Yet think, madam that we be young of years. And to strenuous minds there is an unquietude in over-quietness” (XXXIII). Then, in sequel, he delivers a remarkable speech to Sophonisba, in its sentiment rare in modern literature, and so far as I know utterly unique in the mouth of a conqueror on the eve of his triumph:
Thou, Queen, canst scarcely know our grief; for to thee the blessed Gods gave thy heart’s desire: youth forever, and peace. Would they might give us our good gift, that should be youth forever, and war; and unwaning strength and skill in arms. Would they might but give us our great enemies alive and whole again. For better it were we should run hazard again of utter destruction, than thus live out our lives like cattle fattening for the slaughter, or like silly garden plants. (XXXIII)
Lord Gro, we have seen, perished of the necessary interconnection of war with life; the Demons are but the mirror image of Gro, who would perish of the necessary interconnection of life with peace.
Though she is utterly bemused by his desire, Queen Sophonisba, out of her love for Juss, makes a prayer to the gods that it should be as Juss has wished it; and this prayer most enigmatically comes to fruition. The narrative ends precisely as it has begun, with a messenger come from a resurrected Witchland, inviting the Demons to a wrestling match with King Gorice to determine preeminence over all the world. The end of the narrative swallows its beginning; it itself is the poetic representation of the worm ouroboros, the snake that eternity-like consumes its own tail. And so the Lords of Demonland are given a new task, and their dearest wish: to live forever in youth, and forever in war.
It is difficult enough for the moderns even to approach so shamelessly bellicose a finale. It will strike some of them as terribly unrealistic and terribly cruel. Unrealistic, because such a resurrection of a fallen nation could of course never come to pass in the real world; cruel, because it seems to doom the characters of the narrative to constant suffering, violence, and death, and calls into question moreover the status of an enormous segment of their own lives, which they do not pass in the fire of any war. There is a mysterious barrier standing between them and right appreciation of this end: the moderns have forgotten the meaning of glory.
Yet even supposing we revel in this ending, there are many more difficulties abounding just below the surface. The eternal return of the Demons is not identical to Nietzsche’s recurrence, the perfect repetition of the cycle of becoming. For one thing, it cannot be; for even should Witchland be resurrected in precisely the same conditions as it stood before the beginning of the narrative (and there is reason to believe it is not), still the Demons now, through their memory of events, would have foreknowledge of what is to come, and thus would break the perfection of the cycle. This is essential to the wish of the Demons: the joy and the exultation of warfare depend decisively on the uncertainty of what will come of them. Combined with foreknowledge of one’s own acts, the merest repetition of what has been before, the repetition of all things unto eternity, would be tedious, every bit as ruinous to the spirit as the end of history and perpetual peace. The Demons’ eternal return is therefore not the amor fati of him who wants the same eternally, but rather of him who wants the new eternally, novel chance to show his mettle and to win novel victories. Rather than presenting itself as dead ring, the worm ouroboros takes instead the form of the living cycle or spiral. It is the unabashed love of war which leads the Demons to this end; the worm ouroboros is the representation of life itself — life as unending struggle, life as a perpetual feeding upon itself and growing from its self-feeding, an eternal out-growth and in-growth of the world.
Now, our aesthetic appreciation of the choice of the Demons to live forever in war, and of their warrior ethos more generally, can only come in a time of peace. Were we engaged in true war, we would have no leisure even to contemplate the choice of the Demons. We can therefore admire the Demons only insofar as we live in a way they would find intolerable and perhaps even contemptible. It would therefore seem that there is nothing prescriptive in Eddison’s work, nothing which suggests how our lives ought to be — no lessons to be taken from Demonland after all. Yet what then is the pleasure or benefit we may derive from this story? Does it not contradict itself in the telling? Does it not reveal itself, at the very end, contrary to Eddison’s first word, as nothing but a fable, perchance fit to while away a stray hour, but certainly not to aid us in the refashioning of our ideals, or our lives?
More trouble yet. This book itself was not written by a Demon; it was written by E. R. Eddison, who seems to have passed, by all biographical evidence, an exceptionally dull history. He was a lifetime civil servant — about as far from battle and warcraft as one can come — and though the arc of his days contains both the World Wars, he never saw a battlefield nor so much as dressed a soldier’s wound. This would seem to cast grave doubt on his fitness to speak of war and of the virtues of the warrior. It certainly permits us to ask how seriously he took his characters’ fates, and to what extent all of this is merely the fantasy of a dilettante writer. Yet Eddison, by all accounts, took his writing and the meaning of his writing very seriously indeed. Then one must ask, was he merely a hypocrite? Or is there something deeper in this business?
To enter this question, to begin to unseal all of these many riddles, we must address a feature of the book we have not so much as mentioned. We must return to the true beginning. The narrative of The Worm Ouroboros is not given to us, just so, from the lips of the poet: there is rather a segment at the commencement of this book within which the whole of the narrative is framed. The story comes to us as the dream of a man named Lessingham. This Lessingham does not live in Demonland nor Witchland nor any of the lands surrounding; he is a child of the Earth, our Earth, and his home and his life seem, in the main, to pertain to the “real world.” He appears a gentleman of good standing in Wastdale, England, and is presented to us in a domestic scene with his wife, as he reads aloud to her from Njal’s Saga in the evening light. His life certainly has none of the hard high elements of the Demons’; he is to appearances “one of us.” He lives in a time of peace; we are told in the very first sentence that his home is “set in a gray old garden where yew-trees had flourished that had seen Vikings in Copeland in their seedling time” (The Induction). The Vikings, prototypical warriors, are long gone from the land in which he lives. The book he reads, a saga of Icelandic blood feuds, confirms again by contrast the pacific nature of his existence. There is good reason to suspect that this Lessingham is in some way the embodiment of Eddison in this book; he is the fictional stand-in for the poet, and his dream is in fact Eddison’s dream.
Now, Lessingham’s is no ordinary dream; we are to understand that he is rather witness to true events on the planet of Mercury. Yet these events last four years, and his witness, only a single night. The events are historical events, but for the time involved they cannot be historical events; they are simultaneously real, but unreal. They partake of the realm of poetry, which itself is eternally ethereal and of ambiguous reality. Lessingham accesses this other realm by sleeping in a certain room of his house, called the Lotus Room, which in a certain lunar phase, has the power of transporting its denizens to far away places. The reality of this journey is indicated also by the fact that Lessingham’s wife is afraid and bids him wait for her, so that, if some ill should befall, it should befall the both of them together. Eddison might not return from his flights of fancy; he could become lost in his own poetic imaginings, lost to the “real world.”
Lessingham, despite his wife’s plea, departs alone. His departure is linked to the music of Couperin, Les Barricades Mystérieuses, whose enigmatic title, as he claims, only he and his wife understand. We are thus led to ask — what are these “mysterious barriers” to a man who is on the verge of such a voyage? “It is another world,” his wife protests. “It is too far.” His response: “Nothing is too far.” He proves the issue in his going. He is awakened deep in the night in the Lotus Room, called also the House of Postmeridian, the House of Peace, and the House of Heart’s Desire (thus indicating, once again, its connection to poetic imagination). From this room he is borne by a hippogriff to the distant planet of Mercury.
The means of his going are most significant. The hippogriff is the same animal which bears Juss to save his brother. It is furthermore called by Lady Mevrian of Demonland “that high bird which presideth from old over the predestined glory of our line, to point us on to a fame advanced above the region of the glittering stars.” It is thus twice connected with the Demons, pointing us imperiously toward kinship between the Demons and Lessingham — and through him, Eddison. The beast is described by Queen Sophonisba thus:
And thus cometh this steed to the birth: when one of might and heart beyond the wont of man sleepeth in this land with the egg [of the hippogriff] in his bosom, greatly desiring some high achievement, the fire of his great longing hatcheth the egg, and the hippogriff cometh out therefrom, weak-winged at first as thou hast seen a butterfly new-hatched out his chrysalis. Then only mayst thou mount him, and if thou be man enow to turn him to thy will he shall bear thee to the uttermost parts of the earth unto thine heart’s desire. But if thou be aught less than greatest, beware that steed, and mount only earthly coursers. For if there be aught of dross within thee, and thine heart falter, or thy purpose cool, or thou forget the level aim of thy glory, then will he toss thee to thy ruin. (XIV)
Now, in what sense could such high rhetoric possibly apply to the peaceable gentleman Lessingham — not to speak of Eddison, this lifetime civil-servant? What could this character, and this man, possibly have in common with the greatness, the will, the glory of the Demons?
The highest warfare is the warfare of the “strenuous mind,” the warfare of ideas, the continual, cyclical, aye, eternal return, which lasts so long as a thinking man’s life should last, and permits him to see past the illusion of our “real world,” built on its utterly deceptive prejudices and its utterly limited morals, to perceive higher, nobler, more complete, albeit essentially mysterious, vistas. Rare is that man who may approach this: the philosopher and poet alone. The philosopher is a wooer of wisdom. The poet seeks not wisdom primarily, but primarily the adventure of the soul, because it is beautiful. The philosopher craves the cool still waters of knowledge and truth; he wants peace, not only externally, but within himself as well. The poet within his own soul wants war. Gro is described as having the eyes of an ox, that slow-moving ruminating beast of the field; Lessingham meanwhile is lead to Demonland by a martlet, a mythical bird with no feet, whose life must therefore be swift restless movement and flight.
Lessingham is not mentioned in the final pages of the book. We are to understand he is yet witness to the travails of Demonland, but we are also to understand that, as at the beginning, he is a bodiless witness who cannot touch anything he sees. He may learn of these events, but he may not participate in them. His real life is elsewhere, on the earth that he has left behind. There is a great ambiguity in this ending, an unstated ambiguity, a question which will escape the notice of all but the most attentive readers and those most sensitively attuned to the problem of the poet: shall Lessingham remain there in Demonland, deathless witness to the eternal return of the Demons, student only and observer, but never actor in his own right? Or shall he return with what he has seen and what he has learned, now that this first cycle has concluded? Is Lessingham compelled by the mystery of the worm ouroboros to remain on Mercury, merely drifting like a river? Or shall this child of the Earth return to the Earth, enriched by a deeper and nobler understanding of life and of virtue? Will he become a “warrior” in his own right? And in what will his war consist?
The narrative does not answer this question; the book emphatically does, for the book exists, it was written. Eddison did not remain in the vision of Mercury; he descended to earth to write his poetry, and thus to bring its influence to the Earthlings. And we who enter his book, enter this vision with him, and, when the book is finished, return to our lives, bringing with us however the lessons that Eddison himself gleaned from Mercury. Moreover, we are invited to return to Mercury, to live this vision again from the very beginning, but now knowing all that will happen, and thus perceiving aspects beneath the surface of events which we could not have perceived the first time around. Our lives here on earth are real insofar as we live them; they are unreal insofar as they are based upon countless unspoken and unrecognized presuppositions and dogmas which build walls about our views and barriers about our souls. In visiting Mercury, we perceive a radically different set of possibilities. These possibilities, to be sure, are poetic; no gods will come to this Earth to see to it that a kingdom destroyed by war is rebuilt miraculously on the morn following. But these possibilities point us nonetheless to truths and nobler ways of being. The vision of the poet, the vision of eternal warfare, and thus of eternal strife, eternal drama, eternal triumph and eternal defeat, is to his delighted eyes an invigorating sight, and informs his entire existence and all his works. His transference of this vision to the world surrounding him informs and enlivens in turn the existence of his fellow human beings. The poet is not disconnected from his land, his race, his people; therefore he may propose, he is obliged to propose, novel ideals. Lessingham, to say it again, is a married and propertied gentleman, who has given his oath to his wife that he will return for breakfast. This simplest domestic fact, this most basic hu-
man obligation of the poet, after his impossible soaring spiritual adventure, after his witness of such halcyon glory, is sufficient to bring him earthward once more.
But this, far from being the end, is but the beginning again: it is the completion and inauguration of the true and deeper cycle of ouroboros, which cycle is linked to the daily life of the poet and the regularly irregular turnings of the moon. The philosopher Gro would have married, but was rejected; Lord Juss, meanwhile, seems to have absolutely no interest in marriage, but even as Queen Sophonisba is drawn nearer to him, he is casting his own mind back to the battlefield and away from that domestic tranquility which would form the necessary precondition for his wooing, his wedding, and his procreation — to say nothing of his building a kingdom. Juss furthermore becomes immortal, eliminating an essential motive for producing an heir. Lessingham, meanwhile, is happily wed, and father of at least one daughter. The first mention of his wife is prefaced by description of the Gloire de Dijon roses about their bedroom window, recalling the poem by D.H. Lawrence of the same name, in which a woman’s beauty in the morning light is praised. Once more, at the very beginning, we are reminded of the morning, of the morning after the poet’s nocturnal flight, of the promise of Lessingham to return for breakfast. The poet’s anchor in this life — an anchor which is fittingly nothing other than woman and love and silence, or the same female, lunar principle which the philosopher Gro fails to attain and Juss fails to crave — is the link between the heavens and the earth, between Mercury and the hearthfire. The female, as is shown throughout the entire book, is both the object of warlike desire and of peace-loving desire; she is as ambiguous as life itself. The poet alone is of strength sufficient to live all cycles of life, all periods of ouroboros, because of his unique relation to the feminine.
With this word we approach the end. Yet a final thought is permitted, is perhaps even obligatory, after all that has been said. One can predict the reaction of many of my readers to these reflections on The Worm Ouroboros. These Demons — they will give me to understand — these Demons whom we have dedicated so much time to comprehending, are
in the end not real. They are but figments of the poetic imagination, fictional inventions to charm a stray hour. No human being today is like that, and so it stands to reason that no human being has ever been so, nor ever will be. Then treating of these matters with too much seriousness is not a little frivolous and perhaps even irresponsible of us.
I have long been suspect of this pragmatist’s logic, which takes not even man as such but modern man as the measure of all things. Much do I prefer the rich ambiguity of The Worm Ouroboros itself, in which we do not know if we are witness to dream or history, to divine sending or to the invention of another poet — we do not know, but are touched by the vision nonetheless. And I say, in our lives, even here and now, in this most concrete and workaday world surrounding us, matters stand not so very differently. Each life is eminently its own, and cannot be judged according to the limitations of any other. Its own barriers can be discovered only as they are pressed; in the absence of such experiment, one cannot say what is possible and what is not. This is the eternal return for us merest Earthlings, this, our “youth for ever, and war.”
Then I close with repetition of what seems to me the most urgent lesson from Demonland for us, which is a simple lesson, but which bears the full brunt of our will and trial: we do not know the limits of our own souls, nor the properties imbued in our natures, and we can learn these things only through the dream itself, midst the fires of necessity, in the struggle even now upon us. Then let us be grateful, that the time in which we live is as a testing stone to these hearts and spirits of ours.
As is only fitting, I tender the last word to Eddison, through the speech of Lord Brandoch Daha. I extend this word now to the Occident in coming times, and to my friends in the New Right in particular, who are up against hard odds these days, and who atimes must despair of the future when gazing on the multitudes of those who stand against them: “If that they be in number more than we, what then? They are in hope, quarrel, and strength far inferior.” (XXIX)
I could wish no better virtues upon them than these: quarrel, hope, and strength.