Sources of Lord of the Ring

The Worm Ouroboros: Introduction

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This is a literary review (or preface) by Irish writer James Stephens, praising E.R. Eddison's 1922 fantasy novel *The Worm Ouroboros*. Stephens argues that Eddison wrote the book under a kind of superhuman creative compulsion analogous to that of Blake and Shelley — not as allegory or fable, but as pure world-building for its own sake, set on the planet Mercury and following wars between two great kingdoms there. The review makes an extravagant claim for the novel's prose style: that it is Miltonic in scale but Celtic in spirit, driven by beauty and daring rather than moral message, and that only such a grandiose register could suit characters of such colossal stature. Stephens illustrates this by quoting several passages ranging from the tender to the terrific, arguing the prose rises and falls perfectly with its subject. He singles out for praise the villainous figures — Gorice the Twelfth, Corund, Corinius — as well as the traitor Lord Gro and a vertiginous mountain-climbing sequence, and concludes that Eddison has added a genuine masterpiece to English literature.

The Worm Ouroboros: Introduction

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