- EDDISON, E(ric) R(ucker)
- (1882-1945)UK civil servant, writer and scholar of Old Norse. His first work of fiction and most considerable single work, The Worm Ouroboros (1922), is an erudite HEROIC FANTASY written in archaic English; the initial protagonist, Lessingham, is transported from Earth to a fantasy MERCURY, where it will be his function to observe mighty conflicts, heraldic battles and quests, and magical turns of plot, all destined to recur forever, as the title implies. The Zimiamvian trilogy, whose internal chronology reverses that of publication, is made up of The Mezentian Gate (1958), posthumously assembled, A Fish Dinner in Memison (1941 US) and Mistress of Mistresses: A Vision of Zimiamvia (1935). Beyond the presence of Lessingham, who has become (like all the cast) an avatar of the divine, the sequence's main connection with The Worm Ouroboros is that it is set in the (Platonic) heaven of the earlier novel. The tales are discursive, metaphysical, learned, linguistically adventurous and engrossing. ERE's influence on the sf genre, as with writers like Lord DUNSANY and J.R.R. TOLKIEN, lies mainly in the powerful example of his language and the sustained "otherness" of his creation.JCOther works: Styrbiorn the Strong (1926); Egil's Saga: Done into English Out of the Icelandic with an Introduction, Notes, and an Essay on Some Principles of Translation (trans 1930).About the author: "Superman in a Bowler: E.R. Eddison" in Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers: The Makers of Heroic Fantasy (1976) by L. Sprague DE CAMP; "The Zimiamvian Trilogy" by Brian Attebery in Survey of Modern Fantasy Literature (anth 1983) ed Frank Magill.
Science Fiction and Fantasy Encyclopedia. Academic. 2011.
