In 'The Worm Ouroboros', what is the name of the author?

The author of “The Worm Ouroboros” is E. R. Eddison. The English writer published this influential heroic fantasy novel in 1922, several decades before the modern fantasy boom associated with Tolkien and later authors.

Eddison’s full name was Eric Rücker Eddison. He worked as a civil servant and studied Norse literature, interests that strongly influenced his fiction. “The Worm Ouroboros” follows a prolonged war between the Lords of Demonland and the rulers of Witchland in an imagined world filled with warfare, sorcery, and courtly intrigue.

The novel is especially notable for its deliberately archaic prose, modeled on seventeenth-century English, as well as its debt to Norse sagas, Shakespeare, Homer, and medieval poetry. The title refers to the ouroboros, the serpent or dragon that consumes its own tail.

James Branch Cabell is an easy distraction because he wrote a foreword for an American edition. Lord Dunsany and Mervyn Peake were also important fantasy writers, but neither wrote this novel.