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(The Zimiavian Trilogy ==Zimiamvia and Ouroboros==

The relationship between the Zimiamvian novels and Eddison's earlier and more famous work The Worm Ouroboros is peculiar and by no means clearly explained. In The Worm Ouroboros, Lord Juss describes Zimiamvia as a land south of the high mountain of Koshtra Pivrarcha on Eddison's "Mercury"; "no mortal foot may tread it, but the blessed souls do inhabit it of the dead that be departed, even they that were great upon earth and did great deeds when they were living, that scorned not earth and its delights and the glories thereof, and yet did justly and were not dastards nor yet oppressors." The Zimiamvia of the Trilogy, so far as can be told from the novels themselves, fits this description only in a very broad sense, in that it seems to be a world specially created for an incarnation or avatar of Lessingham, whose life in our own world fits Juss's description. Our own world may also be such a creation.

Ouroboros and the Trilogy share references to one character, this same Lessingham. He appears in the "Induction" to Ouroboros, and as a sort of ghost or immaterial astral being in the first chapter, but then disappears. An apparently identical character appears in Mistress of Mistresses and is much more fully described in A Fish Dinner in Memison. Another character, also called Lessingham, is a main character in Mistress of Mistresses, but the Lessingham of Zimiamvia and the Lessingham of Earth, though connected, are two different people. Judging from Fish Dinner, we should perhaps regard the Lessingham of Zimiamvia as the original and the Lessingham of Earth as a projection of him. This makes it even harder to imagine Zimiamvia as being on Mercury, but then the Mercury of Ouroboros could certainly never have been imagined as being in any sense the astronomical planet Mercury.

Ouroboros and the trilogy share an elaborate and deliberately archaic prose style. In Ouroboros it is much like that of 16th- and early 17th-century English, while in the trilogy the style is more Latinate and more convoluted. There are similarities between the attitudes and behaviours of the principal characters in all four novels. )

sites: https://www.ereddison.com/fantasy-novels/mezentian-gate/ https://the-other-eric-walker.com/ https://www.dianeduane.com/outofambit/tag/zimiamvia/ https://greatsfandf.com/Authors/Individual/EREddison.php (by Eric Walker) https://greatsfandf.com/Miscellaneous/your-host.php https://www.sfsite.com/12b/mm118.htm https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/eddison_e_r https://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/~susan/sf/dani/019.htm

Comparing The Worm Ouroboros and the Zimiamivan Trilogy
In essence, "The Worm Ouroboros" is an adventure story, conceived when Eddison was a child. It contains direct references to applied magic and only hints of higher powers ("the gods") that influence the story. The story covers about three years. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction suggests that "the most direct influence on its actual structure may be H. Rider Haggard's Eric Brighteyes (1890)" which is a book that Eddison might have read as a child or in his early teens.

The Zimiamvian books, which began to be published more than 10 years after "The Worm" contain sophisticated adventure, politics, intrigue and power struggles over a much longer period -- about three generations -- and are a vehicle to expound Eddison's philosophy. The magic in them, such as the creation of the bubble-world at the fish dinner, is directly tied to this philosophy by the statements of the characters. This philosophy also somewhat explains the existence of Lessingham both in the contemporary world of Earth and in Zimiamvia, and by implication in 'The Worm Ouroboros.'

Diane Duane, in what she admits is a "rant," calls "The Worm Ouroboros" an "incredibly complex and lush — swashbuckling fantasy" and the Zimiamvia books "something else... an extraordinary set of universes between which certain lucky human beings pass to and fro, not always knowing how or why."