I finally finished The Worm Ouroboros. What a neat book. I loved the language and the use of real life poetry, the very vivid descriptions, the author's obvious passion for nature trips. The structure of the book would have definitely needed some restructuring though, and I'm not even talking about the dropped framing device in the beginning. There was an entire chapter of mountain climbing, which I did enjoy, but I felt like at least half of it could have been spent on characters and their interactions. Speaking of which, Gro was naturally the most interesting, despite his rather chaotic development in the second half and weird death. Prezmyra was the second most interesting.
The ending in itself was sort of expected, but it was also a bit unnerving, I guess. I can understand why Tolkien didn't agree with Eddison's philosophy. What's even funnier is that he was correct about the names, but he couldn't have known Eddison had come up with most of them when he was 10 and was most likely too attached to them to change them.
Now that I think about it, Worm is closer in tone to The Silmarillion rather than The Lord of the Rings. The influence of the sagas, chansons, etc. is quite obvious, especially in the way the characters are written. It's hard to get attached to anyone, but at times they will have a very striking moment, like Prezmyra's death next to her husband, Juss finding his brother and thinking he's dead etc. The saga influence also made it more violent than I had expected. Violent might not be the right word, at least not physically violent, but for some reason I had expected it to be more fairy tale like, in the vein of The King of Elfland's Daughter, and not Volsunga Saga.