Release date is 2026-03-06

Tom Trussel, Tim Lindell and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)

The weird of the wanderer by Frederick Rolfe and C. H. C. Pirie-Gordon is a novel written in the early 20th century. Framed as “papyrus records” discovered in a rock-tomb, it blends occult fantasy with classical and archaeological intrigue, following Nicholas Crabbe—presented as the reincarnation of Odysseus—whose magical rites propel him back into antiquity to live as King Balthazar. Expect a heady mix of time-slip, reincarnation, and esoteric ritual, all mediated by scholarly notes and letters that heighten the tale’s found-manuscript verisimilitude.

The opening of The weird of the wanderer presents a prologue of letters describing an Armenian rock-tomb unearthed with startling anachronisms—a modern revolver and watch beside a perfectly preserved youth—along with papyri for scholarly translation. The translated “papyri” then begin in the first person: Crabbe, also Odysseus and King Balthazar, swears a solemn oath and recounts his occult training, a Nile voyage for ritual tools, and a moonlit ceremony at Korte where he endures a scorching-staff ordeal to summon Amenemhat, a priest of Tanis, as his familiar. Guided to Thebes’s hidden subterranean halls, he crosses an underground river to a radiant white temple, dismisses a ragged ghost-warden, and repeats the ordeal to invoke a greater power. Near death, he experiences a visionary unmooring of his senses and a backward rush through time’s “rolling wheels,” hears a voice granting him multiple lives, and witnesses the gods of Egypt. Recovering, he finds the temple newly draped and realizes he has slipped back many centuries; he conceals his modern effects, emerges into ancient Thebes under Ptolemy Auletes, overawes Macedonian guards, and hires a barge by summoning crocodiles, setting his course downstream despite reports of mutinous mercenaries. This is only the beginning, positioning Crabbe at the threshold of adventures in Ptolemaic Egypt. (This is an automatically generated summary.)

Originally published: London: William Rider & Son, 1912