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  Especially haunting to the imagination is Dante’s description of Hell, which is famously entered through a gate marked with an inscription ending: “Abandon all hope, you who enter here.” Beyond are nine circles in which the punishments that sinners endure are matched to their sins. The lustful are whirled forever around the Second Circle by a mighty wind. Tyrants scald forever in lakes of boiling blood in the Seventh Circle. False prophets in the Eighth Circle shuffle endlessly around, unable to see where they are going because their heads have been turned backward on their shoulders, and Flatterers forever drop filth from their mouths. The Ninth Circle is reserved for the treacherous, with the deepest division named Judecca after Judas Iscariot, the apostle who betrayed Jesus.

  Not only sinners are to be found in Hell. Dante also imagines many strange creatures with roles to play there. As in Classical mythology, Charon is the ferryman who takes the souls across the river of Acheron. Minos judges each soul and wraps his tail around them, the number of coils corresponding to the circle to which they are assigned, and flings them to their place. In Canto XII Dante and Virgil meet the centaurs who guard the lake of boiling blood, and who give them further guidance. Very different are the horned demons that plague the barrators (corrupt judges and politicians) in the Eighth Circle. The demons there have names like Evil-tail, Swineface, and Scratchdog. They haul the sinners out of the boiling pitch with their hooks and are barely under the control of their commanders. The monstrous Geryon carries the travelers down from the Seventh Circle. With a human face, a lion’s paws, and a scorpion’s poisonous sting in his tail, Geryon is the personification of Fraud.

  Purgatory, like Hell, is organized in levels that correspond to the sins being expiated. The stiff-necked proud have their necks weighed down by stones, the envious have their eyes stitched up, the gluttonous are disciplined by thirst and hunger, the lustful learn to greet with no more than a holy kiss. The demons and monsters of Hell are, however, replaced by angel-pilots and guardian angels. Near the peak of Purgatory, Dante enters the earthly Paradise. Here, Virgil cannot enter and must return to First Circle of the virtuous heathen. Dante’s guide to the celestial spheres is Beatrice, a personification of theology in the form of idealized beauty. In Heaven, finally, Dante meets those who show the virtues of their spheres. In the sphere of the Sun are the wise and the theologians, Mars has the brave commanders and Jupiter the just rulers, rising upward to the Church Triumphant in the Eighth Sphere, the Angelic Orders in the Ninth, and the Beatific Vision of the Tenth.

  The vivid description and poetic craftsmanship of The Divine Comedy has ensured that it remains in the collective conscience today. Its influence within Western art and culture is simply immeasurable, inspiring numerous writers, from Chaucer and Milton to Balzac, T. S. Eliot, and Samuel Beckett.

  THOMAS MALORY

  LE MORTE D’ARTHUR (1485)

  Malory’s evocative and enthralling text provides the touchstone for all later explorations of Arthurian legend, charting the ancient king’s ascendancy to the throne and the adventures of the Knights of the Round Table.

  If there was a historical King Arthur, he would have lived in the centuries after the withdrawal of the Romans from Britain (CE 407), a period for which we have almost no documentation. A Welsh author, writing in Latin and known as Nennius, provides an account of the king that can be dated to around 830, and Arthur is given an impressive, if bogus, biography in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain written in the 1130s. The enduring legend of quests, castles, and tournaments that we know so well today, however, was not cemented in the collective imagination until the fifteenth century with Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur (written around 1469 and published in 1485).

  Malory’s main source was the long sequence of French prose romances known as “the Vulgate Cycle,” themselves the culmination of centuries of Arthurian invention. In Malory these monastic works were given a strong personal slant. He was not a monk, but a knight, and seems to have written the Morte while in prison for a whole string of violent crimes during an eventful career dating as far back as the 1430s. The extent of his guilt is unknown since his accusers could have been politically motivated—the Wars of the Roses were raging at the time, new grudges were created daily, and ancient affiliations were frequently tested. The work was printed in 1485, and is one of the few medieval English works to have remained continuously familiar ever since.

  Le Morte d’Arthur gives us a full account of the whole Arthurian legend, including Arthur’s sinful conception, the incestuous birth of his son Mordred, Excalibur the “sword in the stone,” Merlin the magician advisor, and introduces the many Knights of the Round Table, among them Sirs Lancelot, Gawain, Geraint, Percival, Bors, Galahad, and Tristan. Despite, or possibly because of, the bloody upheavals, factionism, and opportunism of the Wars of the Roses, there was a strong interest in chivalric legend and history at the time. Arthur’s knights were symbolic of virtues—such as loyalty, bravery, honor, and gallantry—that were seen as being eroded by the political infighting of the Wars.

  Yet there is far more to the enduring appeal of Malory’s text than contemporary relevance. The tales are filled with a heady mix of prophesy, predestination, sex, danger, and magic; and the bucolic English settings of streams, lakes, meadows, and castles are at once both familiar and strange. In numerous stories the knights arrive at unknown castles where unusual practices and customs are the norm, their virtues are put to the test, and complexity of character is revealed.

  The core of the story is the tragic, romantic triangle of Arthur, his wife Guinevere and the noble knight Sir Lancelot, which is made even more strained by the mystical presence of the Grail—the cup that, according to legend, was used by Christ at the Last Supper and in which his blood was collected at the Cross. The Grail mysteriously appears at Camelot, Arthur’s court, and provides sustenance for a feast, beginning a series of quests by knights hoping to recover the lost vessel. Lancelot’s own attempt to approach the Grail is prevented by a fiery breath and unseen hands: his sinful love for Guinevere has made him unworthy.

  Lancelot’s relationship with Guinevere then becomes uneasy, as if he blames her for his failure, but she continues to need him as a protector, in circumstances of increasing doubt and guilt. When Sir Mellyagaunce accuses Guinevere of adultery, Lancelot challenges him, which, given Lancelot’s prowess, comes close to murder. Finally, Lancelot is caught in Guinevere’s room and although he fights his way out, she is sentenced to death. In the rescue he kills his friends, Sir Gawain’s brothers Gareth and Gaheris. Gawain vows eternal revenge, the Round Table breaks up, and in the confusion Mordred, Arthur’s son and nephew, tries to seize the throne, leading to the Last Battle and Arthur’s removal, badly wounded, to Avalon. Lancelot and Guinevere die as penitents.

  Christian interpretations of the Grail and Lance compete with pagan ones, which see them as fertility and phallic symbols, and the Christian moral that chivalry is irrevocably made imperfect by lust and pride ran counter to Malory’s evident sympathy with his main hero, Sir Lancelot. Malory portrays Lancelot as a man caught between love of Guinevere, loyalty to Arthur, and a desperate attempt to be worthy of the Grail, in all of which endeavors he ultimately fails. The Morte is remarkable for its acute psychological insights, expressed in original scenes of great tension.

  The legends of Arthur, Merlin, Excalibur, the Lady of the Lake, and the brave and valorous knights continue to be re-told by novelists and by movie-makers. The numerous adaptations range from Mark Twain’s fusion of time travel and legend A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889, here), to T. H. White’s The Once and Future King (1958), which reinterprets the story for a postwar audience, and the surreal humor of Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975).

  LUDOVICO ARIOSTO

  ORLANDO FURIOSO (c.1516/32)

  A playful Renaissance fantasy that adds the theme of passionate love to the old stories of the paladins of Charlemagne, while also employing a host
of enchanters, magic rings and lances, hippogriffs, and sea monsters for pure imaginative entertainment.

  The main rival to the great cycle of Arthurian romances was the body of legends centered on Charlemagne and his paladins (his foremost knights). Their historical basis is clearer than the Arthurian stories, with the defining incident being the death of Roland, Count of Brittany, at the battle of Roncevaux Pass in 778. The stories never achieved the popularity of the Arthurian legends, and the Italian Renaissance poet Matteo Maria Boiardo (1441?–94) proposed this was because they lacked lust and passion. His long poem Orlando Innamorato (“Roland in Love”) set out to resolve the issue, but Boiardo died leaving his work incomplete. Around ten years later, the poet Ludovico Ariosto (1474–1533) continued the story in his epic Orlando Furioso (“The Frenzy of Roland”), first published in 1516, with a final version in 1532.

  The background for the poem is the clash between Christians and Muslims, which had continued in Spain and the Balkans up to the time of both authors. This real-world scenario, however, is overlaid with centuries of magnificent romance and magic. Keeping track of the plot is difficult because it moves at a furious pace, with one narrative thread after another being followed and dropped, frequently in cliff-hanger style. The backdrop of war is offset by honorable missions and magic props, such as the beautiful maiden Angelica’s ring that defends her from enchantment; the shining shield of the magician Atlante, which strikes everyone who sees it unconscious; the magic horn of the English paladin Astolfo, which fills all hearers with terror; heroine Bradamante’s invincible lance; and Atlante’s winged steed the hippogriff, which Ruggiero the pagan champion rides when he rescues Angelica from the “orc” or sea-monster to whom she is to be sacrificed in one of many damsel-in-distress sequences.

  The characters’ main motivations are love, lust, or infatuation, but these threads are, however, perhaps less significant than the digressions. The poem is designed as pure entertainment, with a constant flow of marvels and surprises. Its world is one where anything can happen, exciting, horrifying, sexually explicit, gruesome, but above all unexpected. Characters may travel anywhere—to Cathay, Taprobane, the Moon, Hell, or a Terrestrial Paradise; be threatened by demons and monsters, including the terrible creature born of necrophilia in Boiardo’s “Castle Cruel”; and are protected or attacked by a gallery of good and bad magicians. The author C. S. Lewis declared that the poem made for ideal convalescent reading: always amusing, light-hearted, and never too difficult or morally taxing—the ancestor of a whole modern genre of romantic fantasy.

  Much of the success of Orlando Furioso springs from its air of freewheeling irresponsibility, enlivened by constant sexual allusion. In 1591 Sir John Harrington translated an improper tale from canto 28 to amuse the maid-attendants of Queen Elizabeth, was caught by the Queen, and banished from court. The poem proved highly influential to Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1590–1609, here) and a few years later Shakespeare would find inspiration in it for the plot of Much Ado About Nothing (1612). Cervantes also makes reference to Orlando Furioso when detailing the romances that have so enchanted Don Quixote (1605/15, here).

  In the twentieth century, the poem inspired the “Incomplete Enchanter” fantasy series written by L. S. de Camp and Fletcher Pratt (1940), in which two American academics gain the ability to travel into imaginary worlds and become magicians. In recent years the novelists Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, and Salman Rushdie have all turned to Ariosto for inspiration and, more specifically, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s Ariosto: Ariosto Furioso, a Romance for an Alternate Renaissance (1980), also plays with the idea of moving between worlds, including the world of the poem, an imagined Renaissance Italy, and a fantasy America.

  THOMAS MORE

  UTOPIA (1516)

  More’s vision of a faraway island where society is perfected and people live in harmony gave rise to the entire genre of Utopian fiction. Utopia, however, means “no place,” revealing the work as a criticism of the failings and corruption he observed in society.

  Utopia, written in 1516 by the English humanist Thomas More (1478–1535), has been so influential as to give its name to an entire literary genre, and the notion of a civilization perfected by social engineering has fascinated writers and artists ever since. More’s intentions in creating his idealized land, however, are far from straightforward.

  Utopia is divided into two books. The first begins with More on official business in Antwerp, where he is introduced to Raphael Hythlodaeus. Hythlodaeus describes his travels to More and a colleague, and their talk turns to rules of governance and issues such as poverty, the death penalty, and enclosure laws (where arable land is closed off and converted for more profitable sheep farming to the detriment of agricultural workers). In the end, Hythlodaeus announces abruptly that the only satisfactory arrangement is to abolish private property altogether. How this would work is then set out in Book II, as being already practiced by the citizens of Utopia.

  Utopia is an island around the same size as England. It has fifty-four towns, all built to the same plan. Citizens live in houses that are all the same, and every ten years they are re-allocated, so no one comes to feel ownership. Farms produce enough food to sustain the entire country. Everyone works, but only for six hours a day. Food is drawn from central stores, and like everything else, is handed over without payment. Everyone wears the same serviceable clothes, silver and gold are despised, and only babies play with jewels.

  Later verdicts on the Utopian system have been negative: dull, uniform, harsh, and regimented. Utopians keep domestic or foreign criminals as slaves. Anyone engaging in premarital sex is sentenced to a lifetime of celibacy. Marriage is for life, and adulterers are punished by slavery. Divorce is possible, but only under strict conditions. Utopians are allowed to play, but the games described seem drearily educational. You need a passport to travel inside the country; improper documentation results in enslavement.

  These monastic arrangements might have seemed more tolerable in a time when many starved to death or were hanged for theft of food, and where there was little social provision for the poor; but seen through the lens of the twenty-first century More’s island seems alarmingly totalitarian and authoritarian. More’s reason for inventing Utopia is a question that has plagued scholars for centuries. More is aware his ideal society could never exist, since the island’s name is created from the combination of the Greek words ou, “no,” and topos, “place.” Utopia is satirical in places, and some of the practices in Utopia, such as euthanasia and married priests, actively contradict More’s own Catholic faith. More repeatedly invites comparison between Utopia and the failings of the real world. His overriding purpose is perhaps not to provide an answer, but to ask the simple question: Can we not do better than we do?

  H. G. Wells tried to update More in A Modern Utopia (1905) and The Shape of Things to Come (1933), but his ideas were soon discredited by war and Stalinism. George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949, here) presents a kind of Communist Utopia gone horribly wrong, while Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932, here) satirizes a consumerist technological utopia. The most thoughtful fictional comment is perhaps Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974), which describes a community that follows many of the rules of More’s Utopia, including abolition of money and private property, and which, like More’s vision, was triggered by poverty and injustice. But this society is shown as beginning to crumble, unable entirely to suppress human nature.

  EDMUND SPENSER

  THE FAERIE QUEENE (1590–1609)

  An extended allegorical poem by one of the finest writers of Elizabethan England presents a grand vision of an Arthurian courtly landscape populated by the gods and monsters of classical and British legend.

  In a 1590 letter to his friend Sir Walter Raleigh, Edmund Spenser (1552–98) described how he planned for The Faerie Queene to comprise twenty-four books, but the project was never completed. Three books were published in London in 1590 and three more in 1596, w
ith a part of a seventh appearing in 1609, ten years after Spenser’s death. All are set in what Spenser calls a “delightfull land of Faery,” which combines the castle-studded forests of Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur (1485, here) with the enchanted whirl of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (c.1516/32, here).

  Indeed, Spenser’s epic poem imitates Orlando Furioso in many ways: His maiden-knight Britomart closely resembles Ariosto’s heroine Bradamante, and her rescue of Sir Artegall, Spenser’s Knight of Justice, parallels Bradamante’s rescue of the hero Ruggiero; Ariosto’s fair lady Angelica, always seen in flight from would-be ravishers, is echoed by Florimell; and both romances have the same supporting cast of enchanters, giants, dragons, damsels, and tournaments.

  There is also a strong influence of English folklore and the Arthurian tradition. Prince Arthur (not yet king) appears in each completed book, along with, in the last of them, the Blatant Beast, modeled on Malory’s Questing Beast. In his letter to Raleigh, Spenser claimed to be in the tradition of Homer and Virgil, but an even more prominent debt is owed to the Bible. The hero of Book I for example, the Red Cross Knight, is undeniably emblematic of Saint George, the patron saint of England, but, as Spenser stated in the Raleigh letter, the armor he wears is the “armor of God” (Ephesians 6:10–18). Even without the letter, it is clear that Red Cross represents the idealized Christian, since the book is dedicated to the virtue of Holiness and contains many hints toward religious conflicts such as the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, just two years before Books I–III were published. In addition, Spenser’s deceitful sorceress Duessa bears comparison to the Whore of Babylon (Revelations 17) and Protestant commentators saw allegorical parallels between Duessa and the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots.