Saturday, September 16, 2023

Finding E.R. Eddison in an Unexpected Place

Chance brought me to view a copy of an anthology Great Stories of Sport (1931), edited by Thomas Moult. Scanning the contents I was surprised to see E.R. Eddison's name, with an eleven page piece titled "The King Wrestles with Goldry Bluszco"--it is self-evidently a section from The Worm Ouroboros (1922). Actually it is the bulk of chapter two of that book, "The Wrastling for Demonland." The bibliographically-inclined may be interested to know that it runs from the 19th paragraph of that chapter (beginning "Now began a great company to come forth from the palace...") on to the very end of that chapter (pp. 19-28 in the 1922 Jonathan Cape edition). Moult credits its appearance as "By special permission of the Author and Messrs. Jonathan Cape Ltd." I wonder if any readers of a sport anthology went looking for the full of Eddison's classic fantasy.