The Worm Ouroboros
Jacobean prose, magnificent and amoral heroes, and an ending that turns back to the beginning.
Eddison published this in 1922 in deliberately archaic Jacobean prose, and it repels or captivates within a page. The lords of Demonland go to war with Witchland across a world of enormous mountains and formal courtesies, and the heroes are magnificent, vain and largely amoral. Tolkien admired it; so does most of the epic fantasy that followed. The ending, which loops, is where the title comes from.
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Christopher Paolini
That is how your name will live on. It’s your form of an afterlife, of immortality. Of course, that’s drawn right from Beowulf and a lot of the Nordic and Anglo-Saxon traditions. So it’s incredibly immoral in some ways. There are peasants who are just slaughtered by the thousands on the battlefield, and no one cares. No one cares that things are not moral in the normal, everyday sense: but there’s greatness to it.
Interview · January 2026
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