A tale told backwards and never finished. So was it ever truly begun?

E.R. Eddison is best known for The Worm Ouroboros (hereinafter Worm.) Yet he also wrote a partially completed series compiled in Zimiamvia: A Trilogy, consisting of Mistress of Mistresses, A Fish Dinner in Memison, and The Mezentian Gate. The trilogy is, in a very loose sense, a sequel to Worm. Very loose. A jailbreak of eels loose. So, Zimiamvia, what’s it all about then? An easy question to ask, a hard one to answer.

It is, at heart, a philosophical work. Words such as “arete” and “aristocracy” seem appropriate when considering Zimiamvia, But those are lesser aspects, secondary or tertiary to the central thesis. But before considering the themes, let’s address what a reader of Worm will encounter upon picking up Mistress of Mistresses.

In a nutshell, questions and mysteries. We commence with a narrator describing the recent death of Edward Lessingham, a narrator (who, much like Lessingham himself in Worm) disappears after the Overture, never to appear again. We learn something of the elusive Lessingham. He is revealed as a man of more heroic substance than was hinted at in Worm.

The narrator paints a picture of an adventurer, a man of command. We find he spent the final years of his life as the virtual monarch of an island chain off the coast of Norway, where he died the night before the government of Norway was to commence military action to claim the territory. Lessingham was a consummate Renaissance Man, a beneficent prince, gifted artist, naturally talented military leader, reluctantly brilliant man of commerce, etc. He dies, peacefully, contentedly at 90 — in bed with a beautiful woman. We get an idea of his philosophy — and thus the first hint as to “what it’s all about” — Goodness, Beauty, and Truth. For Lessingham, Goodness and Truth are both lesser included aspects of Beauty, for which conception he would “...bend error and self-deception to high and lofty imagination.”

Now, in chapter one, the narrator of the Overture having gone, never to return, we find ourselves encountering Lessingham. Or a character named Lessingham. The questions and mysteries begin. Is this Edward Lessingham? Didn’t he die? So who is this Lessingham, who appears to be alive in a sort of secondary fantasy world of a Renaissance aspect. (Or that timeless, Shakespearean conception of the Now in which it is possible for Theseus, Duke of Athens to share idiomatic expressions with Julius Caesar and Henry VIII while all are attired and accoutered in the height of late sixteenth, early seventeenth century fashion.) Readers of Worm might recall that Zimiamvia is supposed to be a paradise of sorts, that “no mortal foot shall tread it.” A mystery. Has Lessingham gone to paradise? Is paradise in fact a land of Machiavellian intrigue, conflict, and assassination?

We get a hint of sorts, that perhaps such is not the case. That perhaps this Lessingham is not, in fact, Edward Lessingham in the afterlife. Lessingham is told that “...you and Barganax are not altogether as the common rout of men. This world is yours, yours and his, did you but know it.”

Intriguing stuff. And we get more clues as Lessingham has flashes of memories of a different (previous?) life. Eddison doles these out along with suggestions as to who exactly the Mistress of Mistresses is. But Mistress of Mistresses is in the business of asking questions rather than providing clear answers. It is an exercise in inscrutability. And that is fine, since what we get is romance, intrigue, betrayal, military action, detailed worldbuilding, fantastic characterization, and those inimitable Eddison rococo descriptive passages.

Relax. Enjoy the ride. All (or enough) will be revealed in the next volume.

Eddison, it seems, was penning these romances in an attempt to search for meaning in a cold, apparently meaningless universe. He seemed to be disinclined to accept the resigned cynicism of a James Branch Cabell. Instead he conceives a philosophy, or a religion of sorts: the worship of Goodness, Truth, and Beauty, as intimated by Lessingham at the beginning of volume one. But worship of ephemeral concepts necessarily leads to reification as concrete reality; embodiment as God or Gods, or — in Eddison’s case — as a Goddess, Aphrodite herself. (As an aside, I wonder if John Myers Myers had Zimiamvia in mind when he wrote The Moon’s Fire Eating Daughter?)

Eddison himself explains what he is attempting to answer in the “A Letter of Introduction” that opens A Fish Dinner in Memison. I’ll quote part of his query here, and note that he kindly does provide his thesis in full in the Letter before proceeding on to his fictional exegesis.

“...Who am I? Who are you? Where did we come from? Where are we going? How did we get here? What is ‘here’? Were we ever not ‘here,’ and, if so, where were we? Shall we someday go elsewhere? If so, where? If not, and yet we die, what is Death? What is Time, and why? Did it have a beginning, and will it have an end? Whatever the answer to the last two questions (i.e., that time had a beginning or that it had not, or an end) is either alternative conceivable? Are not both equally inconceivable? What of Space (on which very similar riddles arise)? Further, Why are we here? What is the good of it all? What do people mean when they speak of Eternity, Omnipotence, God? What do they mean by the True, the Good, the Beautiful? Do these ‘great and thumping words’ relate to any objective truth, or are they empty rhetoric invented to cheer or impress ourselves and others: the vague expressions of vague needs, wishes, fears, appetites of us, weak children of a day, who know little of (and matter less to) the vast, blind, indifferent, unintelligible, inscrutable machine or power or flux or nothingness, on the skirts of whose darkness our brief lives flicker for a moment and are gone?”

All the big questions. And since Eddison declined to accept existential meaninglessness, he worked out his own answer. Eddison’s reading of philosophy suggested to him that nothing can be known, that there is no fundamental, provable reality outside individual consciousness. Nothing is provable. But, conversely might not anything be possible? We cannot know through pure reason. Therefore, meaning must be looked for through methods other than reason, through — Eddison declares — a poetic determination of values. He writes cleverly of the reduction of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty to simply Beauty. Thus meaning is condensed to Beauty. To live according to this philosophy one must adapt some numinous object of desire. Zimiamvia is Eddison’s artistic invention of just such an object. In a sense it is a deliberate exercise in godmaking and idolatry.

Eddison explains this in greater detail, and more intelligibly than does my inadequate attempt at summary. And then goes on to write a book embodying this philosophy. To give a taste, another answer to the question “What is Zimiamvia?” I will borrow the words of the naiad Campapse to her own question regarding the identity of King Mezentius and his bastard son Duke Barganax, “...they are one and the same, even as She in Her shapes is one and the same; and yet other. And this world his world, even as it is the King’s. And by Her giving.”

One and the same. This drives the exegesis of Eddison’s mythos: A Creator (or Zeus, given Eddison’s penchant for Greek myth) and a Demiurge, Aphrodite. Masculine and Feminine, incarnate in sundered selves: aspects or avatars embodied in certain characters, often characters interacting in the same scene. It can make the reader’s head spin.

As far as the narrative of Fish Dinner, we go back in time to events preceding volume one. Lessingham does not figure. Edward Lessingham, however, does. We get the relationship between Duke Barganax and Fiorinda, and (during the course of the eponymous Fish Dinner that — notably — lasts the entirety of the existence of our universe from soup to nuts, so to speak) the relationship between Edward Lessingham and Mary. Fish Dinner is replete with romance, philosophy, and tragedy. It holds little of the Machiavellian intrigue and action of Mistress, though what action it does contain is well done and suspenseful. It is a work of somber beauty and allows Eddison to unveil his philosophy in full. (We also get more of one of the most intriguing, and never truly explained characters, Doctor Vandermast. If anyone has any theories about the good magus, I’d be eager to hear them.)

With the third volume The Mezentian Gate, we return to the Shakspearean majesty and Machiavellian intrigue of Mistress. The work is sadly incomplete, but the outline Eddison drafted does fill in most of the blanks. The beginning and end are finished, if occasionally lacking the polish and expected glamor on some facets. This is a work of fictional history, going back some eighty years or so and detailing the events leading up to and about a year past Fish Dinner. It is also a tragedy, partaking of both the Greek and the Norse strains of that dramatic form. The Norse is particularly fitting, given Gate’s nod to Hamlet.

Reading Gate becomes somewhat of an academic exercise as one peruses page after page of dry outline, giving the bare bones of who did what to whom and when. The philosophy is mostly more of the same from Fish Dinner. The final eleven or so pages delve into a partially explored realm of metaphysics, involving the nature of God. Can God allow himself to die? If so, what might be the repercussions? You might consider this intriguing, or perhaps more in the waltzing-angels-on-a-pinhead-ballroom-floor vein of frivolous contemplation. I found it an interesting end to the book, as if the fate of the universe hinged on the outcome of a philosophical debate among the characters of Hamlet at the fatal banquet.

I think that if one read Mistress, then “A Letter of Introduction to Fish Dinner”, one might reasonably claim some familiarity with Zimiamvia without reading the rest. But then one would lose out on Eddison’s luxurious prose, occasional subtle, earthy humor, and bold, larger-than-life characters. And that would be tragic.

Ken Lizzi is the author of several novels (including most recently the four volume Semi- Autos and Sorcery series) and numerous short stories. Find him at kenlizzi.net, or on various and sundry social media platforms.