Ludovico Ariosto (1474–1533)

A ripping yarn!

Ariosto's purpose, according to the introduction, was to entertain -- and he admirably succeeded.

This verse epic has everything: knights, evil sorcerers, good sorcerers, Christians, Pagans, love, lust, rape, sodomy, and even some virtue here and there.

Cross-dressing knights? Check. Visit to the Underworld? Check, followed by a trip to the moon (to recover lost wits, naturally). Gender-bending female knight who's constantly saving her boyfriend? Check and check (and show more mate).

There's a manipulative damsel-in-distress who blueballs each knight in turn, with each new suitor doing the dirty work of ridding her of the previous. The titular Orlando spends half the work rampaging through Europe like the Hulk, naked and unstoppable. There are so many characters in this thing that even the swords have names -- as do the horses, and possibly even a saddle or two.

Barbara Reynold's translation is a lot of fun, and a remarkably fast read given its length. show less

This early sixteenth century poem is a wonderful reading experience: some claim it to be at the pinnacle of Italian Renaissance literature and I would not disagree. It certainly is an epic: 46 cantos of varying numbers of stanzas written in ottava rima(a stanza of eight lines, in iambic pentameter, rhyming abababcc) resulting in a poem of 38,728 lines. Barbara Reynolds translation maintains the poetic rhyming scheme and it flows along so beautifully that the reader can easily get so lost in show more the sheer enjoyment of the reading that the length of the poem does not become an issue. It is longer than the Illiad and the Odyssey together and it was 26 years in the making with the first results published in 1516 and was an instant success.

There has been critical disagreement over the main themes of the poem and Reynolds in her excellent introduction claims them to be chivalry, war and love, but my first impression is that the overarching theme is one of love and the human condition. It is a narrative based on a war between the Christians and the Saracens some time in the chivalric past. Each side has it's heroes and heroines (the female warriors are just as skilled and fierce as the men) who fight and love throughout the poem with a number of set pieces such as: the siege of Paris, the madness of Orlando, the infighting in the Saracen camp, Astolfo's trip to the moon, the final duels to the death between the Saracen and Christian champions and then the resolution of the love affair between Ruggiero and Bradamante. However there are so many stories within stories that the sheer variety will keep most readers amused; there are bawdy tales, moral tales, magic realism, fantasy stories, and some of the most brutal battle scenes all interwoven to provide a tapestry that is both rich and human.

This is the poem that signals the real break from the medieval literature of the past. Although one of it's major themes is chivalry it is couched in a realism that speaks volumes to the modern reader, as the thoughts fears and emotions of the characters come vividly alive. Gone are the lists of characters and the obsession with pedantic heraldry to be replaced with real story telling. Ariosto was a student of human nature and he takes time out in many of the opening stanzas of the canto's to expound on a particular theme, The fickleness of men in love for example:

Be on your guard against those in the flower
Of ardent youth, whose amorous desires
Blaze up and die away in a brief hour,
Just as burning straw at once expires,
The hunter, chasing hares, will gladly scour
The Land, up hill, down dale, through brakes and briars,
In cold and heat, but, once a hare is caught,
He chases others, for this caring naught.

There is much more condensed philosophy; on honour, jealousy, loyalty, hypocrisy, love, the treatment of women and they have a ring of truth about them so that we can identify with Ariosto's thoughts.

A poem that features magic swords, magic rings of invisibility, hippographs (winged horse) a shield that renders enemies unconscious, a magic horn that frightens people into submission and monsters on land and in the seas is rich in the fantasy tradition. It is all due to the art of Ariosto that he can weave these fantasy elements into the sometimes brutal realism of battle scenes and the tragedy of love and death that makes this poem such a joy to read. Astolfo's trip to the moon is a case in point; a chariot piloted by St John Evangelist takes Astolfo on his journey where he meets the inhabitants of the moon who are guardians of the wits of men and women who are insane on earth. they are guardians of many other things that have been lost on earth and are also involved in weaving a sort of tapestry of lives and the fates of human kind. All fantastical stuff but interwoven into the story because here Astolfo recovers the wits of the insane Orlando (he has been driven to insanity by unrequited love)

There is much irony in Ariosto's writing perhaps the supreme example is to name his poem Orlando Furioso, when although Orlando is one of the Christian heroes, he hardly features in the climax to the poem once he is cured of his insanity. The panegyrics dedicated to Ariosto's patrons become increasingly over the top as the poem proceeds and certainly today they read with more than a hint of satire. Irony and a lightness of touch in some of the writing serve to give the poem an added dimension, but it is the deep felt human emotions and the realism of some of the fighting that leaves a lasting impression; here is a stanza from the final epic battle between Ruggiero and Rodomonte:

On cheek and shoulder he receives the blow,
The impact makes him reel from left to right,
He staggers, off his balance to and fro,
And scarcely can he hold himself upright.
Now is the moment for the pagan to
Close in and take advantage of his plight,
He tries to do so, but too hastily:
His thigh wound brings him down upon one knee.

Ariosto enjoys himself with much authorial intervention; either entering his story to encourage or chide his readers or speaking through the voices of one of his characters. Many of the Canto's end with cliff hangers as Ariosto makes some excuse why he cannot continue with this particular thread to the narrative. There are many threads to the narrative and many of the characters have stories to tell of their own, that fly off at a tangent from the main narrative and one suspects that this is Ariosto not being able to resist the sheer delight of story telling. There are two other essential features in this poem that speak to its feeling of modernity. Women are treated on an equal footing to men in many of the battle scenes and Ariosto has no time for the view that women are a lascivious and fickle sex that is so predominant in much medieval and renaissance writing. When he tells a bawdy tale in the vein of Boccaccio he apologises for its depiction of women in the story saying that this is not how they really are, but is how many male authors depict them. He also treats the Christians and Saracens on an equal footing. The Saracen heroes are as well rounded in character representation as the Christians and perform equally brave and chivalric deeds on the battlefield. They have one monster in the brutal Rodomonte, but his excesses are balanced out by Orlando during his period of insanity. Here is Rodomonte creating havoc inside the citadel of Paris:

His cruel sword the Saracen rotates
And few there are he does not leave for dead
A foot with half a leg he here truncates
There from a torso spins a severed head.
He splits them to their haunches from their pates,
Or cuts them clean across with transverse blade
Of all he kills or wounds or seeks to chase
Not one delays to look him in the face

The penguin classic edition with a translation by Barbara Reynolds is in two books, each running nearly to eight hundred pages. There is an excellent introduction and mercifully a list of characters so that the reader can keep a track of who is doing what to whom in the narrative. The list also contains a description of the magic swords, the named horses and other magical items. There are good notes and a copious index. I loved the flow to the translation that Reynolds achieves. When I initially approached this poem I had a couple of other books of lighter reading beside me, but I got so caught up in this magical poem that I stayed with it right to the end. A five star reading experience. show less

translation: from Italian by [[Guido Waldman]] (1974)

The poem is a continuation of [[Matteo Maria Boiardo]]'s [Orlando Innamorato] (Inamoramento de Orlando, 1495) and resumed the plot at the very point where Boiardo had stopped. Together, they merge the Carolingian cycle (Charlemagne and his paladins) and the Breton cycle (the knights of the Round Table), although Ariosto is mostly focused on Charlemagne. He tells of the adventures of Charlemagne, Orlando, and the Franks as they battle show more against the Saracens with diversions into many sideplots.

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Back in 2011 when I was reading and fell in love with [[Edmund Spenser]], all the essays talked about Tasso and Ariosto as his primary influences. Then in 2021 when I was reading Edith Wharton's once successful but now overlooked [Valley of Decision] from 1902, she talks about people singing Tasso and Ariosto in the streets in 18th-century Italy. That year, 2021, I bought this used use copy off a Half-Price Books discard rack, a 1974 prose translation of early 16th-century Italian verse epic. Now, as I'm slowly cycling my way back to Spenser, I finally picked it up and read it.

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The myth of Orlando, also called Roland, which ties into the 11th-century [The Song of Roland], and to Virginia Woolf's 1928 novel, [Orlando], and to the archival researcher Roland Mitchell in A.S. Byatt's 1990 novel, [Possession], and likely into every book that has a character with these names, begins with historical trivia. Charlemagne crossed the Pyrenees into to Spain in 778. He made his deals, won a treasury, failed to conquer anything, and then pulled back out of Spain. His rear-guard with all the spoils of these wars, led by a military commander named Roland, was ambushed in the Pyrenees mountains by a Basque army and was wiped out, leaving Charlemagne with surprise a financial hit.

That's not how the mythology plays out. Here Charlemagne has lost a great battle to the moors of Spain and now must withstand a massive Islamic invasion. Paris goes under siege. The armies are immense in size. The invading army pulls from Spain and North Africa. Charlemagne pulls in vast Christian support from all of France, and England and Scotland. His army is led by his paladins, his heroic set of knights, of whom Orlando is one. The invading army has their own collection of heroes, one of whom wears the army of Hector from the Iliad. Another, Ruggiero, has Hector's sword.

These are not mere little Chistian and Muslim knights. They kill enemies and civilians in massive numbers. In a medieval painting where the important people are larger, they would overshadow the armies. In a contemporary videogame you would need to shoot them over and over again with your most powerful weapon to defeat them. But they when fight each other, completely armored, attacking with jousting lances and swords, they basically make massive swings at invincible, often enchanted, armor, occasionally giving each other concussions. Something especially epic has to happen in order for them to get hurt. They do not spend a moments contrition about killing tens or hundreds of common soldiers or civilians.

They also fall in epic love. Orlando abandons Charlemagne for his lover. Rodomont, the most powerful "Saracen" warrior, abandons his army 1st because another knight captured his fiancé, and later because she is finally given a choice and chooses the other knight (the one in Hector's armor). He stalks off, sulking.

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Mixed in all this crazy mythology, Ariosto does not take himself too seriously. He has some fun, pulls out some very entertaining satire and plenty of absurd stuff. He also has that self-awareness that touches on modern. This is not Sir Thomas Malory, but he's read Malory. Early in the book he has one knight, Rinaldo, go to Scotland where he encounters a comic variation of King Arthur's knights of the round table. Rinaldo rants against them for their antiquated injustice in wanting to put Guinivere to death just because she enjoyed an extramarital affair. He's also not too religious, and almost even handed in his cultural and gender divides. Saracen and Christian knights are equally valorous, equally dangerous, even if he must ultimately undermine the Saracens and let Charlemagne win. His woman heroic knights, there are two, are equally as powerful as his men. But that's not to say this doesn't have its fill of sexism.

Ariosto was also writing under the sponsorship of his ruler, the De Este family that ruled Ferrara for hundreds of years. In the various Italian wars of his lifetime, Ferrara would be involved in numerous bitter battles for and against Venice, Florence, France and papal armies of Rome, who sometimes brought in Spanish armies. He must praise the entire De Este line to a ridiculous extent. And his Saracen Ruggiero, who carries Hector's sword, will convert and marry the female knight Bradamant, founding the De Este line. But Ariosto can and does criticize the brutal warfare of the era, damning the guns (a Ferrara specialty) and the civilian massacres. That is to say, he was not only having fun, he was earning his sponsorship and also being deadly serious in his contemporary critiques.

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My reading experience was compromised by this old, prose translation. But Ariosto is fun. He takes his story every which way, uses magic flying animals, good and evil male and female magicians, some, like Merlin, with posthumous magic, convenient storms at sea, along with outlandish and more traditional monsters. One character goes to the moon, marking a little nascent science fiction. He finds our lost wits. A few times we will have a character tell a story apparently just to tell a good story, maybe letting know he's read the Decameron. He covers the known world, with characters come from Cathay (Indian), Ethiopian (Nubians), an obscure far-off Irish Island, and the still powerful Greek empire based in Constantinople. There is a battle outside Belgrade. The feeling for the reader is directionless. We just read the story of the moment and try to enjoy whatever wacky thing he's doing.

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This is a book mainly for the curious and patient and will reward these readers. My advice to English readers is to find a better translation than what I used.

2026
https://www.librarything.com/topic/384249#9219147 show less

I read the 1831 verse translation by William Stewart Rose. However there are a small number of pieces missing in that translation which i filled in using the 1591 translation by John Harrington.

Epic italian poem, featuring knights, damsels, magic and the occasional monster. Its not so much a single story as an entire library of them all mixed together. Set against the backdrop of the Moors invading France. This gives the work a lot more cohesion than other epics like the Faerie Queene.
The show more author does a pretty good job of reminding you who's who and whats been happening, whenever he switches characters. This helps a lot and i wasn't often confused about which character was which.
The best thing about this is the moral greyness of it all. It really is almost 'Game of Thrones' in places. Heroes lie, make bad deals to save their own skin, kill hundreds of soldiers or farmers, and in one intance tried to rape some woman who they just rescued.
I do have to say it has a LOT less attempted sexual assaults than the Faerie Queene, but a lot more consensual sex. It also has less monsters and magical creatures than than Spenser's work but i like that, it means that when things do get strange it has more of an impact.
A few of minor issues, one is the lists of famous people rammed in to the work here and there, these are only of interest to people of the day or historical scholars, but are easily skippable.
The other thing that can annoy is the structure, most of the switches between character are fine but occasionally it happens at an exciting moment and instead of hearing what happens next your forced to get through a completely unrelated plot before getting back to the action.
Also this is a direct sequel to the unfinished 'Orlando Innamorata' and while the version i read contained a quick summary of events from that work i still felt confused at the start and on occasions when it refers back to previous events from Innamorata.
Overall despite not being able to read it in its native language, its REALLY good. There's just so much in here and some of it is just the right amount of morally gray for a modern audience to appreciate. Oh and there's some kick ass females in here aswell. show less