Ring Composition and The Worm Ouroboros

In this post I want to talk about an interesting example of ring composition in E. R. Eddison’s fantasy novel The Worm Ouroboros. Ring composition is a figure of speech, though it isn’t listed in any of the handbooks of figures of speech that I’ve looked at, nor is it discussed in any of the books about rhetoric. The terminology of the figures of speech is a mess, but it’s safe to say that most of the figures of speech were named and described long, long ago—many are mentioned by Aristotle or by other ancient authors, such as Cicero in the first century BC or Quintilian in the first century AD—and something like a standard list was more or less settled by the early modern period, say around 1500 or so. (One of the best lists and descriptions of the figures is Lee A. Sonnino’s A Handbook to Sixteenth Century Rhetoric.) But there are several devices of composition which aren’t included in the standard list, some of which haven’t even been named, and one of my projects is the identification and description of these unlisted figures.

Ring composition isn’t unnamed—it was named in the 1940s—but it isn’t in the standard lists. It’s quite important and it deserves more attention than it has received. I’ve mentioned ring composition in some of earlier posts and I’ve written about it at some length in some of my books, but I just found an interesting example in The Worm Ouroboros and I thought it was a good opportunity to talk about rings again.

The basic idea of ring composition is that the beginning and the ending of a passage are the same or similar. Here’s a lovely ring from the beginning of Katherine Ann Porter’s story “Pale Horse, Pale Rider”:

“In sleep she knew she was in her bed, but not the bed she had lain down in a few hours since, and the room was not the same but it was a room she had known somewhere. Her heart was a stone lying upon her breast outside of her; her pulses lagged and paused, and she knew that something strange was going to happen, even as the early morning winds were cool through the lattice, the streaks of light were dark blue and the whole house was snoring in its sleep.”

Here the ring is formed by “In sleep” at the beginning of the paragraph and “in its sleep” at the end. Porter could have ended the paragraph with “and the whole house in its sleep was snoring”, but she wrote it the way she did to emphasize the ring. A simple ring, like this one, is an ABA structure, but rings can be more complicated: ABBA, ABCBA, ABCCBA, and so on. Rings come in all sizes, from paragraphs to chapters to episodes to entire plots. It’s easy to find rings; if you start to look for them you will find them all over the place; in How to Reread a Novel and From Paragraphs to Plots I give lots of examples. My impression is that rings are rarely mentioned in English courses, though they are discussed by classicists and Biblical scholars.

After we identify a figure we should try to understand what it means or how it functions in particular instances. Rings very often mark out a passage as somehow different or special. In the example from “Pale Horse, Pale Rider” the paragraph is marked off from the rest of the story because it’s a dream and dreams are little pockets of time different from the rest of life. But each ring must be examined in context.

I will come back to rings in a moment, but now I move on to E. R. Eddison’s fantasy novel The Worm Ouroboros, published in 1922. (The worm ouroboros figures in various mythologies as a dragon that swallows its own tail, so it has no beginning or ending.) When I was young, back around 1960, I tried to read this book and failed. I had read Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and I loved it, so my Father suggested that I might like some other fantasy novels, such as The Worm Ouroboros and Mervyn Peake’s Titus Groan and James Branch Cabell’s Jurgen. I liked Titus Groan (and its sequels); I loved Jurgen (and its companions in Cabell’s series The Life of Manuel), but I did not like The Worm Ouroboros and I didn’t get very far into it before I put it down. I never got back to it until about a month ago, when I was doing some reading about fantasy fiction for a project I’m working on and I came across several references to it. I discovered that Eddison was a major influence on Tolkien (and also on C. S. Lewis). Eddison was about ten years older than Tolkien; they knew each other, and Eddison was an occasional participant in the discussion group known as the Inklings. So I thought I should give The Worm another try. I’m glad I did. I still don’t love the book but I recognize its virtues now, as I didn’t when I was young.

What bothered me most then, and what still bothers me now, is the style. For some reason Eddison decided to write the whole novel, all 440 pages of it, in a false archaic style, which really gets on my nerves. Here’s a random passage to give you an idea of the style:

“Wondrous fair was the great four-posted bed of the Lord Juss, builded of solid gold, and hung with curtains of dark-blue tapestry whereon were figured sleep-flowers. The canopy above the bed was a mosaic of tiny stones, jet, serpentine, dark hyacinth, black marble, bloodstone, and lapis lazuli, so confounded in a maze of altering hue and luster that they might mock the palpitating sky of night. And therein was the likeness of the constellation of Orion, held by Juss for guardian of his fortunes, the stars whereof, like those beneath the golden canopy in the presence chamber, were jewels shining of their own light, yet with a milder radiance, as glow-worms sheen or dead wood glimmering in the dark.”

Some people may like this kind of writing, but I don’t, at least not for 440 pages. Tolkien sometimes uses a kind of high style, but never for very long, and only at special moments in the story. When I was young Eddison’s style defeated me; now I was able to persist and see that the story does have virtues. Its greatest virtue—one of the greatest virtues that any story can have—is that is it kept me turning the page—once I got over the style. The story is action-packed, from start to finish, more action-packed than The Lord of the Rings. It may be too action-packed—you hardly ever get a chance to catch your breath. The Lord of the Rings has great action passages, but it also has contemplative sections, and in some of these the characters stop to think about what they are doing and why. I think it’s fair to say that the characters in The Worm Ouroboros never think about what they are doing—they just do it. It’s full tilt boogie all the time.

The basic plot of the story is simple. It takes place in a fantasy world—it’s identified as the planet Mercury, but that makes no difference to the story at all. The world of the story is divided into a several kingdoms; the two most important are Demonland and Witchland, but the demons are not what we think of as demons and the witches are not what we think of as witches. These are really just two different ethnic groups that are vying for power. The Demons are the good guys and the Witches are the bad guys. The episodes are battles of various sorts—Eddison is quite good at devising different kinds of battles, from duels to great battles of armies on land or sea.

The story begins (after a short passage of transition from our world to the world of the fantasy) when an ambassador from Witchland comes to Demonland. The ambassador is announced by three blasts of a trumpet: “As [the heroes] were going forth, a trumpet was sounded without, three strident blasts.” His message is a demand that the Demons recognize the Witch King Gorice XI as their overlord. The Demons of course refuse and the rest of the book is the succession of battles until the Witches are thoroughly defeated.

At the end of the story everyone should be happy, because the bad guys have been defeated, but the great heroes of the story are oddly discontent. They are, in a word, bored. They love to fight, fighting was the whole justification of their existence, and now that the bad guys have been defeated they have nothing to do. One of them says, “We may well cast down our swords as a last offering on Witchland’s grave. For now must they rust; seamanship and all high arts of war must wither; and, now that our great enemies are dead and gone, we that were lords of all the world must turn shepherds and hunters, lest we become mere mountebanks and fops.” At this point some magic happens, magic that I don’t need to explain, but at the very end, as the heroes are gathered, “a trumpet sounded at the gate, three strident blasts”. A servant comes to tell them, “it is an Ambassador from Witchland and his train. He craveth present audience.” And so the story starts all over again—the Worm has its tail in its mouth. The shape of the book is a ring: at the beginning, three strident blasts of a trumpet announcing an Ambassador from Witchland, and likewise at the end.

The ring here is marked by the repetition of the arrival of the Ambassador, but also by the repetition of the word “strident” to describe the blasts of the trumpet. Rings often have this kind of verbal repetition as a marker. This ring, like most rings, creates symmetry, which tends to give a sense of satisfaction; that satisfaction may create closure, but this ring suggests that the story is not over, it’s not closed, it’s just getting ready for another turn. The heroes won’t have to suffer the boredom of peace—they can look forward to fighting the whole thing over again, and then perhaps over again and again.