{"collection":"Sources of Lord of the Ring","full_text_available":false,"graph_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/api/page/sacred_texts_v1_ring_two_two06_htm/graph","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/page/sacred_texts_v1_ring_two_two06_htm","id":"sacred_texts_v1_ring_two_two06_htm","license":"unknown_pending_legal_review","rights_basis":"sacred_texts_v1_preview_gate_primary_text_only; acquisition-method/ToS and compilation-copyright questions still open, not resolved by this gate","source":"sacred_texts_v1","source_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/browse/ring/two/two06.htm","summary":"*The Worm Ouroboros* (1922) opens with a frame prologue to E. R. Eddison's high fantasy novel, written in a deliberately archaic, richly ornate prose style that draws on Norse saga, Jacobean English, and Romantic landscape writing. The passage introduces Lessingham, a gentleman living in an idyllic house in the English Lake District, who shares an evening with his wife reading aloud from Njal's Saga \u2014 a passage about an ominous supernatural vision \u2014 before the two discuss a mysterious \"Lotus Room\" in their house that apparently transports its occupant to another world. Despite his wife's reluctance to go alone, Lessingham spends the night there and is collected by a speaking black bird (a martlet) that arrives under moonlight and whisks him away in a winged chariot to a distant island realm. The distinctive feature of the excerpt is Eddison's unapologetic maximalism: the prose is dense with sensory detail and antique diction, the domestic scene is painted as an almost mythic idyll, and the transition from English countryside to fantasy world is handled with dreamlike abruptness rather than explanation. This prologue functions as a thin frame device \u2014 Lessingham largely disappears after this opening \u2014 that gestures toward the novel's deeper roots in Norse heroic tradition and Eddison's idiosyncratic vision of an aristocratic, amoral fantasy world.","tags":[],"text":null,"title":"The Worm Ouroboros: The Induction","tradition":"Sources of Lord of the Ring","translated_text":null,"word_count":1338}