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Originally Posted by Pitchwife
Quite understandable. It's sort of interesting as a twist of convention, but that's it. What I liked about TWO wasn't the plot but, as I said above, the characters and, horribile dictu, the writing.
I've got to add a disclaimer here: I haven't yet read TWO in the original, only in two German translations, one of which was in more or less modern literary German while the other tried to reproduce Eddison's artificial archaism, but of these two I preferred the latter. I got the impression that E. uses archaism successfully to create a certain atmosphere both lofty and remote - e.g. calling a crocodile a crokindrell takes us back to a time where a crocodile wasn't to be seen in every zoo and made into handbags, but a mythical beast of the same order as a manticore or a hippogryff. But I withhold final judgment of his prose until I've read him in his own language (praise be to Project Gutenberg!).
One thing I dislike about the book is how he uses Demon, Goblin, Imp etc. as mere names for various humanoid races which don't seem to differ that much. When I hear Demon I expect to see a being of the under- or otherworld, not just a handsome heroic humanoid with decorative horns slapped on.
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I understand, it's sort of like the cringe I get everytime I see any anime (and there are a lot of them) that has a natural born creature that happens to be made of rock and decides to call it a Golem. Not every rock based creature is a Golem, just as not every monster that sucks blood is a vampire.
It's really silly, but when you talked about an archaic German version, I suddenly had images of a version written in the old Gothic blackletter type (actually depending on when the book was fist translated into German, a blackletter version may actually exist; a lot of German publishers were still using that typeface for books in the 1920's)