The Worm Ouroboros: XIV. The Lake of Ravary

This is a chapter from E. R. Eddison's high fantasy novel *The Worm Ouroboros* (1922), written in an archaic, Jacobean prose style that deliberately echoes Elizabethan romance and Norse saga. The excerpt follows two Demon lords, Juss and Brandoch Daha, as they are guided by the immortal Queen Sophonisba through an enchanted mountain realm called Zimiamvia to a hidden lake, where she reveals a way to rescue Juss's brother Goldry from the cursed, unreachable peak of Zora Rach. The central mechanism is a hippogriff's egg, which can only hatch when held by a person of exceptional will and burning desire — and the creature, once born, will carry its rider to their heart's desire or destroy them if they falter. The chapter's climax turns on an act of comic pathos: the minor character Mivarsh, a frightened foreign servant longing only to go home, steals the egg in the night and inadvertently hatches it himself, becoming the accidental rider of a creature meant for heroes. Eddison's distinctive achievement here is the combination of genuinely elevated, sensuous landscape description — the lake, mountains, and light rendered with Pre-Raphaelite intensity — with dry irony at the expense of the ordinary man caught up in epic events. Readers drawn to ornate secondary-world fantasy in the vein of Morris or Tolkien's more archaic influences will find this richly rewarding; those put off by densely stylized prose should be forewarned.

The Worm Ouroboros: XIV. The Lake of Ravary

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