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Eric Rucker Eddison Biography |
Eric Rucker Eddison (1882-1945) was an English civil servant and author. He is best known for his romance books:
E. R. Eddison (1922). The Worm Ouroboros. London: Jonathan Cape
and his three volumes set in the imaginary world Zimiamvia:
E. R. Eddison (1935). Mistress of Mistresses. London: Faber and Faber.
E. R. Eddison (1941). A Fish Dinner in Memison. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co.
E. R. Eddison (1958). The Mezentian Gate. London: Curwen Press.
These early works of high fantasy drew strong praise from J. R. R. Tolkien (see especially Letter 199 in the collected letters), C. S. Lewis (see the Tribute to E. R. Eddison in On Stories and Other Essays on Literature), and Ursula K. Le Guin (see the essay "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie" in The Language of the Night). They are written in a meticulously recreated Jacobean prose style, seeded throughout with fragments, often acknowledged but often frankly stolen, from his favorite authors and genres: Homer and Sappho, Shakespeare and Webster, Norse Saga and French medieval lyric. They exhibit a thoroughly aristocratic sensibility; heroes and villains alike maintain an Olympian indifference to convention. 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. Some additional material from this book was published for the first time in the volume
E. R. Eddison (1992). Zimiamvia: a Trilogy. New York: Dell Publishing. ISBN 0-440-50300-0.
Eddison wrote three other books:
E. R. Eddison (1916). Poems, Letters, and Memories of Philip Sidney Nairn. London: Printed for Private Circulation.
E. R. Eddison (1926). Styrbiorn the Strong. London: Jonathan Cape.
E. R. Eddison (1930). Egil's Saga. London: Cambridge University Press.
The first was his tribute to a Trinity College friend who died in his youth. The other two relate to the saga literature; the first is a retelling of a story alluded to in Eyrbyggja Saga and Heimskringla, while the second is a direct translation from the Icelandic, supplemented with extensive notes. |
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