The Faerie Queene (1590)

This is the beginning of all the cool books that are being published today IMO. There are fairies, morality lessons, bad characters pretending to be good, a quest, love - it has it all! ( )

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2029672.html

This is one of the curiosities of the English language, a long poem written in its own peculiar verse structure in which archetypal figures based on myths of many different origins contend for mastery of spoils, women and virtue in a fantasy landscape which resembles the north of County Cork. Some of the allegory is pretty straightforward, as when Prince Arthur springs to the defence of the cruelly oppressed lady Belge; other parts are more layered and/or obscure.

It has taken me five months to read this. I found I could not proceed faster than one canto every day, and on many days I did not manage any cantos at all; and there are 74 of them, plus the proems and the two concluding verses. It's not that it is particularly difficult to read, compared even to Shakespeare; the style is generally consistent, and a good edition (mine is the Longman edited by A.C. Hamilton) helps you through the more obscure words or usages. But it's dense and moves both rather slowly and rather fast at the same time.

I found that one of the biggest barriers to my understanding of the poem was Tolkien. Spenser writes of elves and dwarves in a parallel fantasy world, but these are not Tolkien's separate races; the elves are effectively just a fantasy nationality, and the dwarves just short guys (who tend to appear as servants). I was also subliminally expecting some Big Bad villain, but in fact we have a chain of more or less loosely connected stories, with the main linking character Prince Arthur, who is intended to be King Arthur (and yet didn't fit for me too well into my own vision of Arthurian legend). So I found myself unnecessarily distracted by my attempts to fit it into fantasy genres with which I am more familiar.

What does come over with extraordinary vigour is Spenser's love of the Irish landscape. Subsequent history shows him as one of the many adventurers who descended on Munster to occupy land confiscated from the Desmonds and their affiliates, who then lost it all in a subsequent rebellion; it's worth being reminded that from Spenser's point of view, he had come to stay, and expected his descendants to live on at Kilcolman for many generations. County Cork was his home and the focus of his imagination. It's not too difficult to believe that he died essentially of a broken heart after losing it all.

As for the actual meaning of it all: I think it is possible to over-analyze. Sometimes the allusions are pretty obvious, or indeed the description may be pretty much what it appears to be (thinking for instance of the house whose chambers correspond to organs of the human body, or the personified rivers of Britain and Ireland). The only one of the six virtues where Spenser has much interesting to show about the virtue itself, for my money, was Courtesy; I felt he let his pen wander aside from the point as his fancy took him elsewhere. The best character in it is Britomart, who is obviously the model for George R.R. Martin's Brienne of Tarth.

And there's a robot. ( )

I struggled with reading The Faerie Queen for quite a while until I got the hang of the language. Once I did, I was able to wallow in Spenser's imagination! ( )

Paradise Lost aside, at around a thousand pages this is probably the most prominent English epic in poetry, not that there are many contenders. It is divided up into 6 main books, each of which contains tales on a specific virtue of chivalry; Holiness, Temperance, Chastity, Justice, Friendship, and Courtesy. Each of these has a main character, or characters, which represents the virtue, and stories to illustrate it. These contain tales which are generally about them overcoming foes that represent the opposite of the virtue, such as the courteous knight defeating a rude one. They are all good moral tales, except that a lot of people get killed, and are full of allegory, though it is thinly veiled. The storys interweave with each other, with the main characters reappearing, and encountering one another, which stops it from feeling like a disjointed group of separate stories, which it is not.
I think Spenser does very well to keep up the poetical form he uses, over the lenght of the book, and slips up in metre only rarely, which can be excused. The poetical imagery is a bit repetitive, but in a work of this lenght containing many tales of a simple formula - good knight goes on quest to kill infidel foe/save fair damsel - it cannot be avoided.
Some readers unused to 16th Century language may struggle a bit, but those who do not mind it should find it interesting. Many of the words are out of usage now, or have changed since, in the text a lot more of the Germanic influence on our language is visible, which is not noticible in the same way in modern English. There is a big list of the unfamiliar words and phrases at the end of the second volume, which is useful to consult when you come across something unfamiliar.
Some of the stories, I found, were more engaging than others. I doubt a lot of people will have the patience to read both volumes front to back, it is not the same as reading a novel, and due to the lack of a strong overarching plot, the reader is unlikely to find themselves unable to put it down. ( )

Perhaps the weirdest, wildest, and wooliest book ever written. ( )