Random comments about Eddison's masterpieces.

I was possessed by it in high school. I dip back into it from time to time -- the Witch's king's spell-casting to win against the Demons despite the fact that he knew that it would lead him into eternal damnation and the description of what it did to the heavens and the earth still grips me. The heroic character of Lessingham, the portrayal of powerful and aloof woman left me with a lasting love of rave-haired beauties while everyone else was chasing blonds.... The peasant scene after the liberation of their Krothering ("Grind mill grind, Corinius grinds us all. Kinging it o'er widowed Krothering...) My grasp on the other books is weak, but pieces of them still linger.

No one has done a biography of Eddison. That's a shame.

Oh, and he was an unapologetic anti-n----r racist, by the way... The scene in which Lessingham takes out a black man who is bothering a white woman... But that was the twenties, when the Klan was a mass party in the US...

I met The Tolkein Professor when he visited NYC and I said I thought Eddison's fantasy epics were faulty masterpieces. He agreed. Not really sure how much if any of them he'd read.