Zimiamvian Trilogy
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The Zimiamvian Trilogy is the title given to a collection of three novels by the author Eric Rucker Eddison: Mistress of Mistresses, A Fish Dinner in Memison, and The Mezentian Gate.
[edit] Zimiamvia and Ouroboros
The relationship between the Zimiamvian novels and Eddison's famous work, The Worm Ouroboros is peculiar and by no means clearly explained. In The Worm Ouroboros, Zimiamvia is seen as a land south of the high mountains of the Koshtra Pivrarcha on Eddison's "Mercury"; but it is also referred to as a kind of Elysian Fields, where the shades of dead heroes walk. The Zimiamvia of the Trilogy, so far as can be told from the stories themselves, shares neither characteristic with the Zimiamvia of Ouroboros.
Ouroboros and the Trilogy do share references to one character, Lessingham; he appears in the "Induction" to Ouroboros, and - as a sort of ghost or immaterial astral being - in the first chapter, and thereafter discreetly disappears. An apparently identical character appears briefly in Mistress of Mistresses and is much more fully described in A Fish Dinner in Memison. Another character, also called Lessingham, is a main character in Mistress of Mistresses, but the Lessingham of Zimiamvia and the Lessingham of Earth, though connected, are two different people. Judging from Fish Dinner, we should perhaps regard the Lessingham of Zimiamvia as the original, and the Lessingham of Earth as a projection of him. This concept makes it even harder to imagine Zimiamvia as being on Mercury, but then the Mercury of Ouroboros could certainly never have been imagined as being in any sense the astronomical planet Mercury.
Ouroboros and the trilogy, however, share similarities in terms of the elaborate and deliberately archaic prose style, and evidence of a philosophical likeness between the behaviour of the principal characters in all four novels.
