The Worm Ouroboros

Eric Rucker Eddison (1882-1945) was an English civil servant and author, writing under the name "E. R. Eddison. " Eddison was educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge and joined the Board of Trade in 1906, retiring in 1938 in order to work full time on his fiction. During a distinguished career he was awarded the CMG Companion of the Order of St. Michael and St. George in 1924 and the CB Companion of the Order of the Bath in 1929 for public service with the Board of Trade. He is best known for his early romance The Worm Ouroboros (1922). His other works include Poems, Letters and Memories of Philip Sidney Nairn (1916), Styrbiorn the Strong (1926) and Egil's Saga (1930). He also wrote three volumes set in the imaginary world Zimiamvia, known as the Zimiamvian Mistress of Mistresses (1935), A Fish Dinner in Memison (1941), and The Mezentian Gate (1958). The Zimiamvia books were not conceived as a trilogy but as part of a larger work left incomplete by Eddison's death. In fact, The Mezentian Gate itself is unfinished, though Eddison provided summaries of the missing chapters shortly before his death.