#zimiamvia

[smbhax]

Cover illustration by Barbara Remington, with decorations by Keith Henderson

Info from ISFDB

[jacques-le-fataliste-23]

Maps of Zimiamvia, Mistress of Mistresses: A Vision of Zimiamvia, by Eric Rücker Eddison, illustrated by Gerald Ravenscourt Hayes (1967)

[gilgalahad]

Covers to the new reprints of the Worm Ouroboros and the Zimiamvia trilogy by E. R. Eddison. So glad to finally be able to have new editions of these sitting on my shelves. Art by John Howe.

[querubax]

She is delicious and aloof: delighted with all, partial to everything (Je m'amuse, she says). She is greedy, and treacherous, and imperturbable: the mistress of man, and the empress of life: wearing, merely as a dress, the mouse, the lynx, the wren, or the hero: she is the goddess, as she pleases, or the god; and is much less afraid of the god than a miserable woman of our dreadful bungalows is afraid of a mouse. And she is all else that is high, or low, or even obscene, just as the fancy takes her: she falls never (in anything, nor anywhere) below the greatness that is all creator, all creation, and all delight in her own abundant variety.— Je m'amuse; she says, and that seems to her, and to her lover, to be right, and all right.

James Stephens' preface to E.R. Eddison's "A Fish Dinner in Memison"

[querubax]

Some Absolute? Some universalized Being? The Self resumed like a drop of water into a river, or like the electric lamplight into the general supply of electrical energy, to be switched on again, perhaps, in new lamp-bulbs? Surely all these conceptions are pompous toys of the imagination, meaning the same thing—Death—from the point of view of the Me and You: from the point of view, that is to say, of the only things that have ultimate value. Futile toys, too. Abstractions. Unrealities.' 'Futile toys,' Mary said, under her breath. '"Love is stronger than Death",' Lessingham said. 'How glibly people trot out these facile optimisms, till the brutal fact pashes them to pieces. "The spirit lives on": orthodox Christian ideals of love. Well,' he said, 'goodness counts.' He painted in silence for a time. 'And, in this world, goodness fails.'

E.R. Eddison - A Fish Dinner in Memison

[querubax]

My dear Charles, what we're really up to is —if we can— to make the world safe for big business: for a new kind of slave state: that's the first deep current under the surface, evolution towards Hobbes's Leviathan and away from the individual. And your unhaired woman and your unmasculated man, are part of the engine, worker ants, worker termites, neuters: worthless lives to themselves, which only exist to run the engine, which itself exists only to run. Until it runs down. And then sink with stink ad "Tartara Termagorum".

E.R. Eddison - A Fish Dinner in Memison

[querubax]

Or be born, say, six hundred years ago: have a dukedom in Italy: arts of peace and art of war, both "in excelsis". War was part of the humanities as the condottieri waged it, until the French and the Spaniards came down over the Alps and showed them what. I should have enjoyed myself in the skin of our maternal ancestor, Frederick II of Hohenstaufen. Or go back a thousand years, to the days of our ancestor on the other side and your namesake: Eric Blood-axe. Or the Persian wars. Or Troy. But what does it matter, the time one is born in? A man can build his freedom in any age, any land.

E.R. Eddison - A Fish Dinner in Memison

[querubax]

Fiorinda drew nearer. 'Let me consider your grace, then, and try: suppose you skin-changed to the purpose: rid away the "she" in you: more bone in the cheekbones: harder about the forehead: this dryad cast of your eyebrows masculated to a faun: up-curled mustachios: more of the wolf about the mouth:—no, truly, I think there is something in a woman's mouth is lost in a man's. Kiss me.

E.R. Eddison - A Fish Dinner in Memison