EPICS
for Students
EPICS
for Students Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism on Commonly Studied Epics
Sara Constantakis, Project Editor Meg Roland, Columbia Gorge Community College, Advisor Foreword by Helen Conrad-O’Briain, Trinity College, Dublin
Epics for Students, Second Edition, Volume 1 Project Editor: Sara Constantakis Rights Acquisition and Management: Margaret Chamberlain Gaston, Savannah Gignac, Tracie Richardson, Jhanay Williams Composition: Evi Abou El Seoud Manufacturing: Drew Kalasky Imaging: John Watkins Product Design: Pamela A. E. Galbreath, Jennifer Wahi Content Conversion: Katrina Coach Product Manager: Meggin Condino
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Table of Contents GUEST FOREWORD . . (by Helen Conrad O’Briain) INTRODUCTION
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LITERARY CHRONOLOGY .
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AENEID (by Virgil).
. . . Author Biography . . Plot Summary . . . . Characters . . . . . Themes . . . . . . Style . . . . . . . Historical Context . . Critical Overview . . . Criticism. . . . . . Sources . . . . . . Further Reading . . . Suggested Search Terms
BEOWULF (Anonymous) .
Author Biography Plot Summary . . Characters . . . Themes . . . . Style . . . . .
xix
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS CONTRIBUTORS .
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1 2 2 5 8 11 12 15 17 24 24 24
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C o n t e n t s
Historical Context . . Critical Overview . . . Criticism. . . . . . Sources . . . . . . Further Reading . . . Suggested Search Terms
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THE CANTOS (by Ezra Pound) .
Author Biography . . Plot Summary . . . . Characters . . . . . Themes . . . . . . Style . . . . . . . Historical Context . . Critical Overview . . . Criticism. . . . . . Sources . . . . . . Further Reading . . . Suggested Search Terms EL CID (Anonymous) .
. . Author Biography . . Plot Summary . . . . Characters . . . . . Themes . . . . . . Style . . . . . . . Historical Context . . Critical Overview . . . Criticism. . . . . . Sources . . . . . . Further Reading . . . Suggested Search Terms
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DIVINE COMEDY (by Dante Alighieri) .
Author Biography . . Plot Summary . . . . Characters . . . . . Themes . . . . . . Style . . . . . . . Historical Context . . Critical Overview . . . Criticism. . . . . . Sources . . . . . . Further Reading . . . Suggested Search Terms
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36 38 39 49 49 50
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124 125 126 130 131 133 135 137 139 152 152 152
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153 154 154 157 159 162 164 166
EPIC OF GILGAMESH (Anonymous) .
Author Biography Plot Summary . . Characters . . . Themes . . . . Style . . . . . Historical Context Critical Overview .
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E p i c s
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Criticism. . . . . . Sources . . . . . . Further Reading . . . Suggested Search Terms
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187 188 189 191 193 195 196 198 199 215 216 216
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217 218 219 221 223 225 226 227 228 246 247 247
THE FAERIE QUEENE (by Edmund Spenser). .
. . Author Biography . . Plot Summary . . . . Characters . . . . . Themes . . . . . . Style . . . . . . . Historical Context . . Critical Overview . . . Criticism. . . . . . Sources . . . . . . Further Reading . . . Suggested Search Terms
GERUSALEMME LIBERATA (by Torquato Tasso) . . .
Author Biography . . Plot Summary . . . . Characters . . . . . Themes . . . . . . Style . . . . . . . Historical Context . . Critical Overview . . . Criticism. . . . . . Sources . . . . . . Further Reading . . . Suggested Search Terms
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ILIAD (by Homer) .
. . . Author Biography . . Plot Summary . . . . Characters . . . . . Themes . . . . . . Style . . . . . . . Historical Context . . Critical Overview . . . Criticism. . . . . . Sources . . . . . . Further Reading . . . Suggested Search Terms
S t u d e n t s ,
S e c o n d
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KALEVALA (by Elias Lo¨nnrot).
Author Biography Plot Summary . . Characters . . . Themes . . . . Style . . . . . Historical Context
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E d i t i o n ,
167 185 186 186
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248 249 249 253 257 260 261 263 264 282 282 282
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283 284 285 288 292 295 296
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Critical Overview . . . Criticism. . . . . . Sources . . . . . . Further Reading . . . Suggested Search Terms
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317 318 319 323 328 331 332 334 335 352 352 353
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354 355 355 360 365 367 368 369 370 376 376 376
THE LORD OF THE RINGS (by J.R.R. Tolkien) . . . .
Author Biography . . Plot Summary . . . . Characters . . . . . Themes . . . . . . Style . . . . . . . Historical Context . . Critical Overview . . . Criticism. . . . . . Sources . . . . . . Further Reading . . . Suggested Search Terms
MAHABHARATA (Anonymous, attributed to Vyasa) .
Author Biography . . Plot Summary . . . . Characters . . . . . Themes . . . . . . Style . . . . . . . Historical Context . . Critical Overview . . . Criticism. . . . . . Sources . . . . . . Further Reading . . . Suggested Search Terms
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LES MISE´ RABLES (by Victor Hugo)
Author Biography . . Plot Summary . . . . Characters . . . . . Themes . . . . . . Style . . . . . . . Historical Context . . Critical Overview . . . Criticism. . . . . . Sources . . . . . . Further Reading . . . Suggested Search Terms
LE MORTE D’ARTHUR (by Thomas Malory). . .
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. . Author Biography . . . Plot Summary . . . . . Characters . . . . . .
E p i c s
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S t u d e n t s ,
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299 301 315 316 316
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S e c o n d
377 378 378 380 383 385 386 389 390 417 417 417
419 420 420 424
E d i t i o n ,
Themes . . . . . . Style . . . . . . . Historical Context . . Critical Overview . . . Criticism. . . . . . Sources . . . . . . Further Reading . . . Suggested Search Terms
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NIBELUNGENLIED (Anonymous) .
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. . . Author Biography . . . . . . Plot Summary . . . . . . . . Characters . . . . . . . . .
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Author Biography . . Plot Summary . . . . Characters . . . . . Themes . . . . . . Style . . . . . . . Historical Context . . Critical Overview . . . Criticism. . . . . . Sources . . . . . . Further Reading . . . Suggested Search Terms ODYSSEY (by Homer) .
. . Author Biography . . Plot Summary . . . . Characters . . . . . Themes . . . . . . Style . . . . . . . Historical Context . . Critical Overview . . . Criticism. . . . . . Sources . . . . . . Further Reading . . . Suggested Search Terms
OMEROS (by Derek Walcott).
Author Biography . . Plot Summary . . . . Characters . . . . . Themes . . . . . . Style . . . . . . . Historical Context . . Critical Overview . . . Criticism. . . . . . Sources . . . . . . Further Reading . . . Suggested Search Terms
ON THE NATURE OF THINGS (by Titus Lucretius Carus) . . .
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428 430 430 432 433 455 455 456 .
457 458 458 466 469 472 473 474 476 484 484 484
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485 485 486 490 494 497 498 500 501 514 514 514
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515 516 517 520 523 526 528 530 531 547 547 548
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549 550 550 552
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Themes . . . . . . Style . . . . . . . Historical Context . . Critical Overview . . . Criticism. . . . . . Sources . . . . . . Further Reading . . . Suggested Search Terms
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578 579 580 583 587 589 591 593 595 608 608 609
SONG OF ROLAND (Anonymous) .
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610 611 611 614 616 618 620 622 623 643 643 644
SUNDIATA (by Djeli Mamoudou Kouyate´) .
645 646 647 650 656 659 659 662 663 681 681 681
TA´ IN BO´ CU´ AILNGE (Anonymous) .
PARADISE LOST (by John Milton) .
Author Biography . . Plot Summary . . . . Characters . . . . . Themes . . . . . . Style . . . . . . . Historical Context . . Critical Overview . . . Criticism. . . . . . Sources . . . . . . Further Reading . . . Suggested Search Terms
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PHARSALIA (by Marcus Annaeus Lucan) .
Author Biography . . Plot Summary . . . . Characters . . . . . Themes . . . . . . Style . . . . . . . Historical Context . . Critical Overview . . . Criticism. . . . . . Sources . . . . . . Further Reading . . . Suggested Search Terms POETIC EDDA (Anonymous) .
Author Biography . . Plot Summary . . . . Characters . . . . . Themes . . . . . . Style . . . . . . . Historical Context . . Critical Overview . . . Criticism. . . . . . Sources . . . . . . Further Reading . . . Suggested Search Terms
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THE SONG OF IGOR’S CAMPAIGN (Anonymous) . . . . . . . .
. . Author Biography . . . . . . Plot Summary . . . . . . . . Characters . . . . . . . . .
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552 555 555 557 558 576 577 577
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E p i c s
682 683 683 686
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Themes . . . . . . Style . . . . . . . Historical Context . . Critical Overview . . . Criticism. . . . . . Sources . . . . . . Further Reading . . . Suggested Search Terms
Author Biography . . Plot Summary . . . . Characters . . . . . Themes . . . . . . Style . . . . . . . Historical Context . . Critical Overview . . . Criticism. . . . . . Sources . . . . . . Further Reading . . . Suggested Search Terms
Author Biography . . Plot Summary . . . . Characters . . . . . Themes . . . . . . Style . . . . . . . Historical Context . . Critical Overview . . . Criticism. . . . . . Sources . . . . . . Further Reading . . . Suggested Search Terms
Author Biography . . Plot Summary . . . . Characters . . . . . Themes . . . . . . Style . . . . . . . Historical Context . . Critical Overview . . . Criticism. . . . . . Sources . . . . . . Further Reading . . . Suggested Search Terms THE TALE OF GENJI (by Lady Murasaki Shikibu)
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. . Author Biography . . . Plot Summary . . . . . Characters . . . . . .
S t u d e n t s ,
S e c o n d
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688 690 691 693 694 701 701 702 .
703 704 704 706 709 711 712 715 716 726 726 727
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728 729 729 731 735 738 739 741 742 744 744 745
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746 747 747 750 753 755 756 758 759 768 769 769
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770 771 772 775
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E d i t i o n ,
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Themes . . . . . . Style . . . . . . . Historical Context . . Critical Overview . . . Criticism. . . . . . Sources . . . . . . Further Reading . . . Suggested Search Terms
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WAR AND PEACE (by Leo Tolstoy) .
Author Biography Plot Summary . . Characters . . . Themes . . . . Style . . . . .
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S e c o n d
781 783 784 787 787 811 811 811 .
812 812 813 815 817 820
E d i t i o n ,
Historical Context . . Critical Overview . . . Criticism. . . . . . Sources . . . . . . Further Reading . . . Suggested Search Terms
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GLOSSARY OF LITERARY TERMS . AUTHOR/TITLE INDEX .
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820 822 823 845 845 845
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NATIONALITY/ETHNICITY INDEX SUBJECT/THEME INDEX
C o n t e n t s
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lvii
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Guest Foreword I am reliably informed that no one ever reads introductions these days, and it was not so very long ago that I was reliably informed that no one reads epics either. Nevertheless, this second edition of Epics for Students prompts me to hope that the epic still exerts a pull on modern readers and the introduction as a form retains its appeal as well. So in a world where entertainment does not require anything as strenuous as holding a book or turning a page, why should anyone sit down and read an epic? Perhaps the ancient Greeks had the answer: They believed all literary genres, including oratory and the various forms of lyric poetry, originated in the epic, and there is a certain truth to this claim. Greek literature, philosophy, and science, including Greek historical and geographical material, begin almost as footnotes to the Iliad and the Odyssey. Methods for establishing a correct text and principles of literary analysis were invented specifically to preserve and understand the Iliad and Odyssey. The fact that modern students study great works of literature has its origins in the ancient Greek appreciation of the Homeric epics. However, Homer and his literary descendants are not the whole of the epic tradition, nor are his works the earliest. The Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh was old long before the siege of Troy occurred in the twelfth century BCE . In India, sometime between 400 BCE and 400 CE ,
the epic Mahabharata was composed, a work as important to the Indian culture as Homer’s works have been to the West. Epics have such an important cultural role because they depict the larger patterns that shape human history and account for changes in society. In epic literature, characters may seem bigger than life, not because they are superhuman, but because they are intensely human. The most universal of stories are rooted in epic literature. Moreover, beyond being entertaining, epic literature is didactic. It is meant to leave the audience with an important lesson, a way of looking at the world, a method for meeting life with dignity. Sometimes it delivers a warning; sometime it gives concrete form to an ideal. Always it leads back to real life, not away from it. Through the centuries, people have returned to the epic because it delivers something that is true about the human condition. The epic lives. It is by no means dead, although at times between the seventeenth and the twentieth century it has seemed to be sleeping. Having turned the novel to good account in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it moved into film, for example in the trilogy based on Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, where it has used methods of visual storytelling, which derive from its traditional verbal techniques. The epic was meant not merely to be read, but to be heard. Modern readers may enjoy
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reading aloud short scenes from the epics covered in this book. Students may enliven their study by facing their epic hero’s problems and asking their fellow students to do the same. Getting into the skins of these epic characters by speaking their lines is likely to help modern readers conceptualize the ancient work, making it their own modern reality. Doing so may show students that the epic characters are not so different from modern ones and that learning about the similarities and differences may be enriching. Transposing epics into the readers’ own world and seeing the constants of human nature and societies can be fascinating. The form of the epic, rather than its content, can put off modern readers. Trying to rewrite an episode from any one of the following epics as a scene in a movie or television show may help bridge the cultural gap between the world of the literature and the media students enjoy today. Students may even try to recreate for the screen the special effects that the authors of epics produced with their words. Doing so may help readers appreciate all the more the epic author’s talent and craftsmanship. Casting even Paradise Lost (maybe especially Paradise Lost) is guaranteed to provoke rowdy discussion. Some critics, particularly when facing modern versions of epics, may say that its popularity is based on escapism, the happy ending, the clear-cut good guys triumphing over bad guys, the simple certainties. But, in fact, epics do not present these features. Rather, epics explore what is noble and what is excellent despite human limitations and self-defeating expectations; they point out what is the flawed but limitless potential of human nature, not in terms of things but in terms of spirit. Epics seldom have a happy ending, although the epic spirit does not refuse the possibility of happiness. Epics are not escapist; real aspects of human nature are included in the action and in the apparent victories. The inexorable physical laws of the earth or the galaxy, even of a remote galaxy, set the action in motion. These never go away, and they are never defeated, only contained. The Ring may be destroyed, but the human quest for power continues. Fame may last forever, but it does not bring back the dead. Lover finds beloved, but even love is challenged by an imperfect world. Victory is never final, only a temporary respite, because hate, fear, loss, and change persist, even in the mirror
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universes of literature. Odysseus makes it home, but in the process, the poet reminds the audience that the homeless man always reappears on the doorstep. Epics are both profoundly pessimistic and profoundly optimistic. The fight may be endless, the solutions temporary, but the process of simply keeping the enemy at bay creates its own energy and exuberance. The epic, for all its grandeur, expansive setting, and constant ideals, confronts readers with the larger patterns in real life that every day possesses but that people cannot always see. Epics invite people to consider ways of understanding and evaluating experience that is not their own. Somehow the epic defines a familiar place where the human heart can rest, one that looks like home. From this point of recognition, the epic enlarges rather than contracts readers’ sympathy. The far away, the long ago are no longer alien; they are now human scale and close at hand. Students who pick up any of the texts that are analyzed in this book will be swept into another world, separate from their own but surprisingly able to clarify it. The epic does not ignore the everyday or the trivial. Somehow it provides a context in which triviality is banished. Small things ignored in readers’ daily lives can be articulated beautifully in the epic. Individuals who read On the Nature of Things, by Lucretius, will never again look at dust particles moving in sunlight and fail to wonder at the implications. The epic assumption that there is more to life than the immediate insures that the immediate is filled with meaning. Does this sound just like what one would expect from a class assignment, all duty and decisions, simple pleasures and the dying of the light, with a five-thousand-word paper at the end of it? There are many ways of reading epics, and each of them in its own way is correct. Unfortunately, students usually first read these works as school assignments with an eye to papers and exams. But those individuals who have read them for pleasure know how an epic can sweep them away. If literature provides vicarious experience, there are few experiences to match those provided by the epic. There are armies as strong as forces of nature and winters that bring conquerors to their knees. There are lovers who cross death itself for the beloved. There are places of breathtaking beauty and places of stomach-wrenching horror.
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I was twelve when I first read Spenser’s Faerie Queen. It was one amazing, convoluted adventure after another, and I loved it. As an adult, I taught this epic for nearly ten years. Year after year, I found something more, something profound, something that forced me to reevaluate my own convictions or lack of them, but I could never convey to my students the zest I felt in reading Spenser’s epic for the first time, the sheer excitement of the narrative, the startling
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moments when a particularly well-written line or puzzling idea captured my imagination. Great epics pull readers along; they pull them in and pull them through. When readers finish these epics, their only regret is likely to be that however many times they reread these works, it will never again be the first. Helen Elizabeth Conrad-O’Briain Trinity College, Dublin
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Introduction Purpose of the Book This second edition of Epics for Students (EfS) is designed to provide students with a guide to understanding and enjoying epic literature. Part of Gale’s ‘‘For Students’’ Literature line, EfS is crafted to meet the curricular needs of high school and undergraduate college students and their teachers, as well as the interests of general readers and researchers. This edition contains entries on the works of epic world literature that are most studied in classrooms.
Selection Criteria The epics covered in EfS were selected by surveying numerous sources on teaching literature and analyzing the course curricula of various school districts. Some of the sources surveyed included literature anthologies; Reading Lists for CollegeBound Students; The Books Most Recommended by America’s Top Colleges; and textbooks on teaching literaure. Input was solicited from an advisor, high-school teachers and librarians, and the educators and academics who wrote the entries for the volumes. From these discussions, the final entry list was compiled, featuring the epic works that are most often studied in high-school and undergraduate literature courses.
How Each Entry Is Organized Each entry in EfS focuses on one work. The heading lists the title of the epic, the author’s name (when known), and the date that the epic first
appeared. In some cases, this date is known; in others, a range of dates is provided. The following elements appear in each entry: Introduction: A brief overview which provides general information about the epic, such as its place in world literature, its significance within its national culture, any controversies surrounding the epic, and major themes of the work. Author Biography: Includes basic facts about the author’s life. In the case of anonymous works, speculative scholarship about the anonymous author or authors is summarized here. Plot Summary: A description of the major events in the epic, with interpretation of how these events help articulate the primary themes. Characters: An alphabetical listing of the epic’s main characters. Each character name is followed by a description of that character’s role, as well as discussion of the character’s actions, relationships, and motivations. Themes: A thorough overview of how the principal themes, topics, and issues are addressed within the epic. Style: This section addresses important stylistic elements, such as setting, point of view, and narrative method, as well as literary devices such as imagery, foreshadowing, and symbolism. Literary terms are explained within each
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entry and can also be found in the glossary at the end of each volume. Historical Context: This section outlines the social, political, and cultural climate in which the author lived and the epic was created. Descriptions of related historical events, pertinent aspects of daily life in the culture, and the artistic and literary sensibilities of the time in which the work was written are provided here. Critical Overview: Supplies background on the critical and popular reputation of the epic. Offers an overview of how the work was first received and how perceptions of it may have changed over time. Criticism: This section begins with an essay commissioned for EfS, designed to introduce the epic work to the student reader. This section also includes excerpts from previously published criticism that has been identified by subject experts as especially useful in explicating each work to students. Sources: an alphabetical list of critical material quoted in the entry, with full bibliographical information. Further Reading: an alphabetical list of other critical sources which may prove useful for the student. Includes full bibliographical information and a brief annotation. Suggested Search Terms: a list of search terms and phrases to jumpstart students’ further information seeking. Terms include not just titles and author names but also terms and topics related to the historical and literary context of the works. In addition, each entry contains the following highlighted sections, set apart from the main text as sidebars: Media Adaptations: if available, a list of audio recordings as well as any film or television adaptations of the poem, including source information. Topics for Further Study: a list of potential study questions or research topics dealing with the poem. This section includes questions related to other disciplines the student may be studying, such as American history, world history, science, math, government, business, geography, economics, psychology, etc. Compare & Contrast: an ‘‘at-a-glance’’ comparison of the cultural and historical differences between the author’s time and culture and late twentieth century or early twenty-first
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century Western culture. This box includes pertinent parallels between the major scientific, political, and cultural movements of the time or place the poem was written, the time or place the poem was set (if a historical work), and modern Western culture. Works written after 1990 may not have this box. What Do I Read Next?: a list of works that might give a reader points of entry into a classic work (e.g., YA or multicultural titles) and/ or complement the featured poem or serve as a contrast to it. This includes works by the same author and others, works from various genres, YA works, and works from various cultures and eras.
Other Features EfS includes a foreword by Helen ConradO’Briain, Trinity College, Dublin. This essay provides an enlightening look at how readers interact with literature and how teachers and students can use EfS to enrich their own experiences with epic literature. An Author/Title Index lists the authors and titles covered in the volumes. A Nationality/Ethnicity Indexlists the authors and titles by nationality and ethnicity. A Subject/Theme Index provides easy reference for users studying a particular subject or theme within epic literature. Significant subjects and themes are included. Each entry features illustrations, including author portraits, depictions of key scenes, and maps.
Citing Epics for Students When writing papers, students who quote directly from EfS may use the following general forms. These examples are based on MLA style; teachers may request that students adhere to a different style, so the following examples may be adapted as needed. When citing text from EfS that is not attributed to a particular author (i.e., the Themes, Style, Historical Context sections, etc.), the following format should be used in the bibliography section: ‘‘Aenid.’’ Epics for Students, 2nd ed. Ed. Sara Constantakis. Vol. 1. Detroit: Gale, 2011. 1–24. When quoting the specially commissioned essay from EfS (usually the first piece under the
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‘‘Criticism’’ subhead), the following format should be used: Looper, Jennifer E. Critical Essay on ‘‘El Cid.’’ Epics for Students, 2nd ed. Ed. Sara Constantakis. Vol. 1. Detroit: Gale, 2011. 99–103. When quoting a journal or newspaper essay that is reprinted in EfS, the following form may be used: Sasson, Jack M. ‘‘Some Literary Motifs in the Compostion of the Gilgamesh Epic.’’ Studies in Philology LXIX, No. 3 (July, 1972): 111– 16. Excerpted and reprinted in Epics for Students. Ed. Sara Constantakis. Vol. 1. Detroit: Gale, 2011. 266–69. When quoting material reprinted from a book that appears in EfS, the following form may be used:
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Williams, R.D., and Pattie, T.S. ‘‘Virgil Today.’’ Virgil: His Poetry through the Ages. British Library, 1982. 177–80, 191. Excerpted and reprinted in Epics for Students. Ed. Sara Constantakis. Vol. 1. Detroit: Gale, 2011. 22–24.
We Welcome Your Suggestions The editorial staff of Epics for Students welcomes your comments and ideas. Readers who have suggestions are cordially invited to contact the editor via e-mail at:
[email protected]. Or write to the editor at: Editor, Epics for Students Gale 27500 Drake Road Farmington Hills, MI 48331-3535
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Literary Chronology 2000 BCE: Approximate date of the original composition of the Epic of Gilgamesh.
29 BCE : Publication of Virgil’s Georgics.
1250 BCE –1184 BCE : Traditional (approximate) dates during which the Trojan War, chronicled in the Iliad and the Aeneid and alluded in the Odyssey, probably took place.
19 BCE : Publication of Virgil’s Aeneid.
850 BCE –700 BCE : The Iliad and the Odyssey were probably composed during this span of time, as part of a long tradition of bardic composition. c. 500 BCE : Approximate date of the setting of Beowulf. 400
BCE –300 BCE : The development of literary criticism in Greece, typified by Aristotle’s Poetics, features frequent references to the works of Homer.
400 BCE –400 CE : Approximate range of dates of the composition of the Mahabharata. 94 BCE : Titus Lucretius Carus, known as Lucretius, is born in Rome. 70 BCE : Publius Maro Vergilius, known as Virgil, is born at Andes near Mantua in northern Italy. 60
BCE :
Formation of the First Triumvirate: Julius Caesar, Pompey, and Crassius.
c. 58 BCE : Lucretius writes De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things).
19 BCE : Virgil dies at Brindisi. 39: Marcus Annaeus Lucanus, better known as Lucan, is born in Cordova, Spain, on November 3. 65: Lucan writes the epic Pharsalia. 65: Lucan commits suicide at the order of the emperor Nero on April 30, following a failed assassination attempt on the Roman leader. 675–1000: Dating of the composition of Beowulf. 757–796: Reign of King Offa of Mercia, proposed by some scholars as a possible alternate era for the composition of Beowulf. 778–803: Period of historic unrest between Emperor Charlemagne and Suleiman ibnal-Arabi of Spain, which provides some historical foundation for events in the Song of Roland. 800–1100: The thirty-nine poems that comprise the Poetic Edda are written by author or authors unknown. 973: Lady Murasaki Shikibu is born in Kyoto, Japan. c. 1000: Approximate date of transcription for the only known extant copy of Beowulf.
55 BCE : Lucretius commits suicide.
c. 1000: Murasaki Shikibu’s epic-length novel, Tale of Genji, is written.
37 BCE : Publication of Virgil’s Eclogues.
1031: Murasaki Shikibu dies.
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1100: Approximate date of transcription for the earliest extant manuscript of the Ta´in Bo´ Cu´ailnge. 1130–1170: Probable range of dates for the manuscript of the Song of Roland. 1150–1250: The Poetic Edda is first written down. c. 1185: The Song of Igor’s Campaign is written. c. 1200: The Nibelungenlied is written. 1200–1400: Estimated range of dates during which Sundiata was first passed on by griots. 1201–1207: Estimated range of dates during which El Cid was probably composed. 1265: Dante Aligheri is born (probably in May). 1270: Thirty-four of the poems in the Poetic Edda are copied into the Codex Regius (King’s Book), in Iceland. 1307: Dante begins writing the Divine Comedy. 1321: Dante dies at Ravenna, on September 14. 1405: Thomas Malory is born. 1470: Malory completes Le Morte d’Arthur while imprisoned for numerous alleged criminal acts. 1471: Malory dies and is buried in Newgate, just outside London, England.
1596: Only known extant manuscript of El Cid is copied by Juan Ruis de Ulibarri y Leyba. 1599: Spenser dies in London, England, (some say of starvation) on January 13. 1608: John Milton is born on December 9, in London, England. 1643: The Codex Regius, containing the Poetic Edda, comes into the possession of Bishop Brynjo´lfr Sveinsson. 1649: In the year that rebels execute King Charles I of England, Milton publishes his Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, which defends the rights of citizens to kill tyrannical rulers. Milton is appointed Latin Secretary of Foreign Affairs in Oliver Cromwell’s interregnum government. 1658: Milton probably begins writing Paradise Lost. 1667: Milton’s Paradise Lost is published in a ten-volume edition. 1671: Milton’s Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes are published. 1674: Milton dies in London. Later this year, Paradise Lost is published in its final form in twelve volumes.
1481: Publication of the Christophoro Landino edition of the Divine Comedy, including Antonio Manetti’s detailed maps of Hell based on Dante’s descriptions.
1795: The Song of Igor’s Campaign, written much earlier by an anonymous author, is discovered.
1485: William Caxton first publishes Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur.
1802: Elias Lo¨nnrot is born in Sammatti, Finland (then a part of Sweden).
1488: The first printed edition of Homer’s works appears.
1815: First printing of an edition of Beowulf.
1544: Torquato Tasso is born in Sorrento, Italy, on March 11. 1552: Edmund Spenser is born in London, England. 1562: Tasso begins writing his epic poem Gerusalemme Liberata, which will take him thirteen years to complete. 1579: Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata first appears in a pirated edition. 1581: Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata is officially published. 1590: Spenser publishes the first three books of The Faerie Queene. 1595: Tasso dies in the convent of Saint Onofrio in Rome on April 25, following a serious illness.
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1802: Victor Hugo is born in Besanc¸on, France.
1828: Leo Tolstoy is born to an upper-class Russian family at the family’s estate in Tula province, Russia, on September 9. 1833–1834: Lo¨nnrot prepares an early manuscript version of the Kalevala (published as the Proto-Kalevala in 1929). 1835: Publication of Kalewala, taikka Wanhoja Karjalan Runoja Suomen kansan miunosista ajoista (the Kalevala; or, Old Karelian Poems about Ancient Times of the Finnish People). 1837: Francisque Michel publishes La Chanson de Roland ou de Roncevaux (The Song of Roland). This is the first published edition of the epic, although it has been known for more than seven hundred years. 1849: An enlarged second edition of Lo¨nnrot’s Kalevala is published.
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1862: Hugo publishes Les Mise´rables during a nineteen-year exile on the Isle of Guernsey in the English Channel. 1866: Tolstoy publishes War and Peace.
1939: Archaeological dig at an Anglo-Saxon burial site from approximately 625 BCE at Sutton Hoo, England, yields armaments that resemble those mentioned in Beowulf.
1871: Archaeological excavations near Hissarlik, Turkey, reveal what may be the ruins of Troy. 1884: Lo¨nnrot dies in Sammatti, Finland (then a part of Sweden).
1954–1955: Tolkien publishes The Lord of the Rings in three volumes.
1973: Tolkien dies in England on September 2.
1885: Ezra Pound is born in Idaho. 1885: Hugo dies in France. 1892: J.R.R. Tolkien is born January 3 in South Africa. 1910: Tolstoy dies of pneumonia on November 20. 1917: Pound begins work on his epic poem The Cantos, comprised of one hundred and twenty shorter poems, which he will work on for over fifty years. 1929: Publication of Lo¨nnrott’s Proto-Kalevala. 1930: Derek Walcott is born on the island of St. Lucia, the site of his later epic poem Omeros. 1936: Tolkien publishes The Hobbit, a story he writes for his children.
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Acknowledgments The editors wish to thank the copyright holders of the excerpted criticism included in this volume and the permissions managers of many book and magazine publishing companies for assisting us in securing reproduction rights. We are also grateful to the staffs of the Detroit Public Library, the Library of Congress, the University of Detroit Mercy Library, Wayne State University Purdy/Kresge Library Complex, and the University of Michigan Libraries for making their resources available to us. Following is a list of the copyright holders who have granted us permission to reproduce material in this edition of EfS. Every effort has been made to trace copyright, but if omissions have been made, please let us know. COPYRIGHTED EXCERPTS IN EfS, Second Edition, WERE REPRODUCED FROM THE FOLLOWING PERIODICALS: The Christian Century, v. 110, February 24, 1993. Copyright Ó 1993 by the Christian Century Foundation. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—The Chronicle of Higher Education, v. 54, May 16, 2008. Copyright Ó 2008 by The Chronicle of Higher Education. This article may not be published, reposted, or redistributed without express permission from The Chronicle.— Classical Antiquity, v. 15, October, 1996 for ‘‘Ethical Contradiction and the Fractured Community in Lucan’s ‘Bellum Civile’’’ by Matthew B. Roller. Copyright Ó 1996 by The Regents of
the University of California. Reproduced by permission of the publisher and the author.— CLA Journal, v. xx, December, 1976. Copyright, 1976 by The College Language Association. Used by permission of The College Language Association.—College Literature, v. 34, spring, 2007; v. 35, fall, 2008. Copyright Ó 2007, 2008 by West Chester University. Both reproduced by permission.—Comparative Literature Studies, v. 45, 2008. Copyright Ó 2008 by The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. Reproduced by permission of The Pennsylvania State University Press.—Contemporary Review, v. 288, summer, 2006. Copyright Ó 2006 Contemporary Review Company Ltd. Reproduced by the permission of Contemporary Review Ltd.—EireIreland, v. 35, spring-summer, 2000. Copyright Ó 2000 by the Irish American Cultural Institute. Reproduced by permission of the publisher.— The Explicator, v. 54, summer, 1996 for ‘‘Tolkien’s ‘The Fellowship of the Ring’’’ by James Obertino. Copyright Ó 1996 by Helen Dwight Reid Educational Foundation. Reproduced by permission of Taylor & Francis Group, LLC, http://www.taylorandfrancis.com.—The French Review, v. 54, April, 1981; v. 67, December, 1993. Copyright Ó 1981, 1993 by the American Association of Teachers of French. Both reproduced by permission.—Helios, v. 27, spring, 2000. Copyright Ó 2000 by Texas Tech University Press. Reproduced by permission.—Italica, v. 84, summer-autumn, 2007. Copyright Ó 2007
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by The American Association of Teachers of Italian. Reproduced by permission.—Journal of Romance Studies, v. 6, winter, 2006. Copyright Ó 2006 Berghahn Books. Reproduced by permission.—Journal of the American Oriental Society, v. 127, April/June, 2007 for ‘‘Looking at the Other in ‘Gilgamesh’’’ by Keith Dickson. Reproduced by permission of the author.—Journal of the Australian Early Medieval Association, January 1, 2008. Reproduced by permission.—Forum for Modern Language Studies, v. 18, 1982 for ‘‘Appearances and Reality in ‘La Mort le Roi Artu’’’ by Donald C. MacRae. Copyright Ó 1982 Oxford University Press. Reproduced by permission of the publisher and the author.— MLN, v. 108, 1993. Copyright Ó 1993 by The Johns Hopkins University Press. Reproduced by permission.—Modern Philology, v. 97, November, 1999. Copyright Ó 1999 University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.— Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, v. xix, summer, 1986. Copyright Ó Mosaic 1986. Acknowledgment of previous publication is herewith made.—Mythlore, v. 27, fall-winter, 2008. Reproduced by permission.—Of Poetry and Politics: New Essays on Milton and His World, v. 126, 1995. Reproduced by permission.—Philological Quarterly, v. 78, summer, 1999; v. 83, spring, 2004. Copyright Ó 1999, 2004 by The University of Iowa. Both reproduced by permission.—Ramus–Critical Studies in Greek and Roman Literature, v. 24, 1996. Reproduced by permission.—Raritan, v. 22, spring, 2003. Copyright Ó 2003 by Raritan: A Quarterly Review. Reproduced by permission.—Russian Literature, v. 42, 1997. Ó 1997 Elsevier Science B. V. All rights reserved. Reproduced with permission from Elsevier Science.—Scandinavian Studies, v. 73, fall, 2001 for ‘‘Narrative Expectations and the Sampo Song’’ by Thomas A. DuBois; v. 77, summer, 2005 for ‘‘Undermining and En-gendering Vengence: Distancing and Anti-feminism in the Poetic Edda’’ by David Clark. Copyright Ó 2001, 2005 Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study. All rights reserved. Both reproduced by permission of the publisher and the respective authors.—Slavic Review, v. 39, June, 1980. Copyright Ó 1980 by the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, Inc. Reproduced by permission.—Studies in Philology, Vol. 69, No. 3, 1972; v. 106, winter, 2009. Copyright Ó 1972, 2009 by The University of North Carolina Press. Both reproduced by permission of the publisher .— Twentieth-Century Literature, v. 47, fall, 2001. Copyright Ó 2001, Hofstra University Press. Reproduced by permission.—Utopian Studies,
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v. 10, spring, 1999; v. 15, winter, 2004. Copyright Ó 1999, 2004 Society for Utopian Studies. Both reproduced by permission.—World Literature Today, v. Vol. 67, spring, 1993. Copyright Ó1993 by World Literature Today. Reproduced by permission of the publisher. COPYRIGHTED EXCERPTS IN EfS, Second Edition, WERE REPRODUCED FROM THE FOLLOWING BOOKS: Anderson, William S. From ‘‘Virgil Begins His Epic,’’ in The Art of the Aeneid. Edited by William S. Anderson. Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1969. Copyright Ó 1969 Prentice-Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of the author.—Clark, George. From Beowulf. Twayne Publishers, 1990. Copyright Ó 1990 by G. K. Hall and Company. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of Gale, a part of Cengage Learning.—Duggan, Joseph J. From ‘‘Legitimation and the Hero’s Exemplary Function in the ‘Cantar de Mio Cid’ and the ‘Chanson de Roland,’’’ in Oral Traditional Literature: A Festschrift for Albert Bates Lord. Edited by John Miles Foley. Slavica Publishers, 1981. Reproduced by permission of the author.—Griffin, Jasper. From ‘‘The Poem,’’ in Homer: The ‘Odyssey’. Edited by Jasper Griffin. Cambridge University Press, 1987. Copyright Ó Cambridge University Press 1987. Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press.—Griffin, Jasper. From Homer on Life and Death. Clarendon Press, 1980. Copyright Ó 1980 by Jasper Griffin. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of the Oxford University Press.—Hollander, Lee M. From The Poetic Edda. Revised edition. Translated by Lee M. Hollander. University of Texas Press, 1962. Copyright Ó 1962, renewed 1990. By permission of the University of Texas Press.— Huston, Arthur E. and Patricia McCoy. From Epics of the Western World. J. B. Lippencott Company, 1954. Copyright Ó 1954 by Arthur E. Hutson and Patricia McCoy. Renewed 1982 by Eleanor Huston. Reproduced by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.—Jacobson, Thorkild. From ‘‘Second Millennium Metaphors: ‘And Death the Journey’s End,’ The ‘Gilgamesh, Epic,’’’ in The Treasures of Darkness: A History of Mesopotamian Religion. Edited by Thorkild Jacobson. Yale University Press, 1976. Copyright Ó 1976 by Yale University Press. Reproduced by permission.—Jones, Peter V. From an Introduction to The Odyssey. Edited by Homer. Translated by E. V. Rieu, revised
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translation by D. C. H. Rieu (Penguin Classics 1946, Revised translation 1991). Copyright 1946 by E. V. Rieu. Revised translation copyright Ó the Estate of the late E. V. Rieu, and D. C. H. Rieu, 1991, 2003. Introduction and Index and Glossary copyright Ó Peter V. Jones, 1991. Reproduced by permission of Penguin Books, Ltd.—Kay, Sarah. From ‘‘Adultery and Killing in ‘La Mort le Roi Artu,’’’ in Scarlet Letters: Fictions of Adultery from Antiquity to the 1990s. Edited by Nicholas White and Naomi Segal. Macmillan Press Ltd., 1997. Editorial matter and selection Ó Nicholas White and Naomi Segal 1997. Text Ó Macmillan Press Ltd. 1997. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.— Kenner, Hugh. From ‘‘Pound and Homer,’’ in Ezra Pound among the Poets. Edited by George Bornstein. The University of Chicago Press, 1985. Copyright Ó 1985 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Knowles, A. V. From ‘‘War and Peace: Overview,’’ in Reference Guide to World Literature, second edition. Edited by Lesley Henderson. St. James Press, 1995. Reproduced by permission of Gale, a part of Cengage Learning.—Magoun, Francis Peabody Jr. From
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The Kalevala: or Poems of the Kalevala District. Edited by Elias Lonnrot, translated by Francis Peabody Magoun, Jr. Harvard University Press, 1963. Copyright Ó 1963 by The President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Porter, Laurence M. From Victor Hugo. Twayne Publishers, 1999. Copyright Ó 1999 by Twayne Publishers. Reproduced by permission of Gale, a part of Cengage Learning.—Rexroth, Kenneth. From Classics Revisited, New Directions. New Directions Publishing, 1965. Copyright Ó 1965 by Kenneth Rexroth. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.—Rosebury, Brian. From Tolkien: A Critical Assessment. St. Martin’s Press, 1992. Copyright Ó Brian Rosebury 1992. All rights reserved. 1992. Reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan.—Rowe, William W. From Leo Tolstoy. Twayne Publishers, 1986. Reproduced by permission of Gale, a part of Cengage Learning.—van Nooten, B. A. From Mahabharata. Edited by William Buck. University of California Press, 1973. Copyright Ó 1973 by The Regents of the University of California. Reproduced by permission.
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Contributors Bryan Aubrey: Aubrey holds a PhD from Durham University, England, and is a freelance writer specializing in literature. Entry on The Song of Igor’s Campaign. Original essay on The Song of Igor’s Campaign. Greg Barnhisel: Barnhisel holds a PhD in English and is an associate professor of English and director of the first-year writing program at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Entry on The Cantos. Original essay on The Cantos. Jennifer Bussey: Bussey holds a BA in English literature and an MA in interdisciplinary studies and is a freelance writer specializing in literature. Entry on On the Nature of Things. Original essay on On the Nature of Things. Anne-Sophie Cerisola: Cerisola is a former teacher at the Lyce´e Franc¸ais de New York. Original essay on Les Mise´rables. Helen Conrad-O’Briain: Conrad-O’Briain holds a PhD in English from Trinity College Dublin where she is a research associate of the Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies and an adjunct lecturer in the School of English. Entries on Aeneid, Beowulf, Poetic Edda, The Lord of the Rings, Pharsalia, and Ta´in Bo´ Cu´ailnge. Original essays on Aeneid, Beowulf, Poetic Edda, The Lord of the Rings, Pharsalia, and Ta´in Bo´ Cu´ailnge.
Donald G. Evans: Evans holds an MFA in fiction writing from Syracuse University and is an adjunct instructor for Continuum, the continuing education program at Loyola University of Chicago, and the executive director of the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame. Entry on The Tale of Genji. Original essay on The Tale of Genji. Robert D. Hamner: Hamner holds a PhD in English from the University of Texas at Austin and is professor emeritus of Hardin-Simmons University in Abilene, Texas. Entry on Omeros. Original essay on Omeros. Catherine Innes-Parker: Innes-Parker holds a PhD in English from Memorial University in Newfoundland and is a professor at the University of Prince Edward Island. Entry on Paradise Lost. Original essay on Paradise Lost. Sheri Metzger Karmiol: Karmiol holds a PhD in English and is a lecturer in the University Honors Program at the University of New Mexico. Entries on The Faerie Queene and Le Morte d’Arthur. Original essays on The Faerie Queene and Le Morte d’Arthur. David Kelly: Kelly holds an MFA in creative writing from University of Iowa and is an adjunct instructor at Oakton Community College and at College of Lake County, both in Illinois. Entry on War and Peace. Original essay on War and Peace.
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Daniel T. Kline: Kline holds a PhD in English from Indiana University and is an associate professor of English at University of Alaska Anchorage. Entry on Epic of Gilgamesh. Original essay on Epic of Gilgamesh. Laurelle LeVert: LeVert holds a PhD in English from the University of Toronto and is the university registrar at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Entry on Nibelungenlied. Original essay on Nibelungenlied. Deborah Jo Miller: Miller received her PhD in English from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Entry on Kalevala. Original essay on Kalevala. Gail Nelson: Nelson holds an MA from the University of Chicago. Entry on Les Mise´rables. Lynn T. Ramey: Ramey holds a PhD in French literature and is an associate professor of French and chair of the Department of French and Italian at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. Entries on Song of Roland and Sundiata. Original essays on Song of Roland and Sundiata.
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Michael Rex: Rex holds a PhD in English from Wayne State University and teaches in the Department of English at Cumberland University in Lebanon, Tennessee. Entry on Gerusalemme Liberata. Original essay on Gerusalemme Liberata. Michael J. Spires: Spires holds an MA in classics from the University of Colorado at Boulder and an MA in modern European history from Northern Illinois University. Entries on Iliad and Odyssey. Original essays on Iliad and Odyssey. Daniel Terkla: Terkla holds a PhD in comparative literature from the University of Southern California and is a professor of English and the humanities coordinator at Illinois Wesleyan University in Bloomington. Entry on Divine Comedy. Original essay on Divine Comedy. Susan Andersen, Lois Kerschen, Melodie Monahan, Claire Robinson, Pam Revitzer, Carol Ullmann, and Ann Yager contributed to the preparation of this second edition.
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Aeneid When Virgil was dying in 19 BCE , he asked for the unfinished Aeneid to be destroyed. The emperor Augustus refused the request. This decision affected the course of literary history and the development of western culture. Even in his own lifetime Virgil’s poetry had become a school text. Early Christian writers who attempted to reject Virgil could escape neither his style nor his attitudes. Christian thought assimilated them both. The Aeneid and the Bible were probably the two most consistently read books in Western Europe for two thousand years.
VIRGIL 19 BC
The Aeneid was composed at least in part to promote the rebirth of the Roman way of life under Augustus. The Aeneid also universalizes Roman experience, ideals, and aspirations. It represents a pivotal point in western literature: Virgil drew on the whole of Greek and Latin literature to create this epic. He expanded the range of the Latin epic, using elements from most types of late classical literature, while refining the linguistic and metrical possibilities of the epic genre. Because of its generic inclusiveness and linguistic brilliance, the Aeneid spread its influence across every form of written discourse for centuries. In the past two thousand years the Aeneid has been a pagan bible, a Latin style manual, a moral allegory, a document of European unity, a pacifist document, and one of the most-read and studied works of world literature of all time. Entering its third millennium, the Aeneid can still speak
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Virgil was described by Suetonius as tall and dark and rather countrified in his mannerisms. He was sickly and shy as well. At least one modern biographer has suggested that he was invalided home from the army of Brutus and Cassius before the battle of Philippi. Virgil’s family property was confiscated to help settle war veterans. He had friends in high places, however, who intervened with the young ruler Octavian Caesar (later called Augustus) to restore the property. Virgil’s Eclogues were written between 42 and 37 BCE , partially in gratitude to his friends and the young Octavian. He followed with the Georgics, written between 36 and 29 BCE , a long poem on farming and country life. Virgil lived most of his later life near Naples. He became ill on a trip to Greece and returned to Italy only to die there. Suetonius suggests that Virgil was acutely concerned with leaving behind an unrevised Aeneid. He asked his friend Varius to burn the work if he died before it was finished. Varius emphatically refused. Augustus, who had heard parts of it read, ordered its preservation. He delegated Varius and Tucca, another friend of Virgil, Tucca, to edit the poem for publication.
Virgil (The Library of Congress)
immediately to the reader. One of the many translations available is that of Robert Fagles, published by Penguin Classics in 2009.
Virgil was a painstaking writer. Suetonius claims that Virgil wrote out the whole of the Aeneid in prose and then worked it up into verse.
PLOT SUMMARY AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Book 1
Virgil, also known as Publius Vergilius Maro, was born near the village of Andes not far from Mantua in northern Italy on October 15, 70 BCE . He died on September 21, 19 BCE at Brindisi on the heel of the boot-shaped peninsula. The earliest biography of the poet, written by Suetonius in the second century CE , states that Virgil was from a poor and obscure family. However, evidence pieced together from contemporary sources and from Suetonius makes it seem more likely that his family was at least of the landowning class. Further, Virgil was given an excellent and expensive education, including training for the Roman bar, which suggests that he might have been of the equestrian (middle) class and that his family was ambitious for political and social advancement. In fact, he was preparing for the same sort of career, which earlier brought Cicero, the great master of Roman oratory and Latin prose, from a country town to the consulship. Virgil gave up legal practice after pleading one case and began to study philosophy with an Epicurean master.
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Aeneas and his Trojans are seven years into their journey home from the Trojan War to Italy when Juno, queen of the gods and arch-enemy of the Trojans, has Aeolus, god of the winds, blow up a violent storm that drives their ships off course. Aeneas, with some of the Trojan fleet, lands in North Africa. Aeneas is a nearly broken man, but he pulls himself together and encourages his people. The scene switches to the home of the gods on Mount Olympus. Aeneas’s mother, the goddess Venus, begs Jupiter, her father and king of the gods, to aid her son. Jupiter replies with serene optimism. He promises the Trojans, through their descendants, not only empire, but a new golden age. Venus departs from Olympus and, disguised as a huntress, meets her son. She sends him to Carthage. There he finds the Trojans who were separated from him in the storm and meets Queen Dido, the founder of the city. Dido takes pity on the Trojans. Meanwhile, Juno and Venus, each for their own purposes, scheme to have Aeneas and Dido fall in love.
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Book 2
MEDIA ADAPTATIONS
The Aeneid was the basis for many operas, including English composer Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas. The libretto was written by Nathan Tate and the opera was first performed in 1689 in London. Many audio recordings and some filmed performances are available, including a 2009 adaptation by the Royal Opera House, directed by Wayne McGregor. It is available on DVD from BBC/Opus Arte.
The early television series Wagon Train (1957– 1965) has been compared to the Aeneid, with its similar small band of people leaving behind one way of life and traveling in search of a place where they can make another. The complete series is available on DVD from Timeless Media Group.
Scholars have suggested that the television series Star Trek (1966–1969), which has been called ‘‘Wagon Train to the stars,’’ also closely resembles Virgil’s basic plot. In the series, major characters such as Captain Kirk and Lieutenant Spock quote directly from classical literature, including the Aeneid. The three seasons of the original series is available via streaming video from the CBS Website or on DVD from Paramount. The Odyssey is an Emmy-award winning three-hour miniseries that aired on NBC in 1997. It stars Armand Assante as the titular character. Homer’s Odyssey is an important primary source for Virgil’s Aeneid. Available on DVD from Warner Home Video, the 2004 action film Troy, directed by Wolfgang Petersen and starring Brad Pitt, Eric Bana, and Orlando Bloom, tells the story of the war between the Greeks and the Trojans, depicted in part in Homer’s Iliad. Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief is a 2010 film based on a popular young adult series by Rick Riordan. Directed by Chris Columbus, it stars Logan Lerman as Percy, a boy who discovers that he is the son of Poseidon.
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At a banquet given in his honor, Aeneas narrates, at Dido’s request, the story of Troy’s last day and night. He tells the famous story of the Trojan Horse, left outside the city gates when the Greeks supposedly departed but actually filled with Greek warriors. The Trojan priest Laocoon warned: ‘‘I fear the Greeks even when bearing gifts.’’ When Laocoon and his young sons were crushed by two enormous serpents who came out of the sea, the Trojans took this as a sign from the gods and brought the horse into the city during their celebration of what they assumed was the Greek withdrawal. That night the Greek warriors emerged from the horse and opened the gates to their returned comrades. Aeneas is warned by the ghost of his cousin Hector, the greatest of the Trojan warriors (killed by Achilles in the Iliad), who tells him to flee the city. As this section ends, Aeneas watches helplessly as Neoptolemus kills King Priam’s youngest son before his father, and King Priam himself in front of his daughters and wife, Queen Hecuba. Aeneas returns home to persuade his father to leave the city. He carries the crippled Anchises. Ascanius, his son, holds his hand while his wife Creusa and the servants follow. When Aeneas reaches the refugees’ meeting point, he finds Creusa has been lost in the confusion. He rushes back into Troy frantically looking for her. Finally he is met by her ghost. The ghost tells him that the mother of the gods (Cybele) has taken her under her care.
Book 3 Aeneas continues the story of the Trojans’ wanderings. Slowly Anchises and Aeneas learn more about the promised land of Italy and the future that the gods foretell for them there. The book ends with the death of Anchises. Aeneas is left alone with his young son to carry out the will of the gods as best he can.
Book 4 Aeneas’s story is finished. Dido, touched by Venus, is now hopelessly in love with Aeneas. Her sister Anna persuades her to forget her vow of fidelity to her dead and dearly beloved husband, Sychaeus. She loses all interest in governing her city. The ongoing construction of Carthage comes to a halt. Juno and Venus arrange for Dido and Aeneas to have to shelter together overnight in a storm-bound cave. Jupiter sends Mercury, the messenger of the god, to remind Aeneas of his
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duty to travel on to Italy. Aeneas is miserable but accepts that he must follow the will of the gods. Dido begs him not to leave her and ultimately commits suicide as the Trojans set sail, cursing them with her last breath and vowing her people to eternal war with those of Aeneas.
Book 5 The Trojans land in Sicily and hold commemorative games. Aeneas relaxes briefly, but disaster strikes again. Juno, in disguise, leads the Trojan women to burn the ships. At Aeneas’s prayer, Jupiter quenches the fire, but four ships are destroyed. Aeneas is broken by this blow. He wonders whether he should give up trying to reach Italy. The ghost of his father appears. He tells him to continue and to visit him in the underworld. Leaving behind four boatloads of families who have decided to settle where they are, the remaining boats of the Trojan fleet again set sail.
Book 6 At this halfway point in the epic, the Trojans reach the promised land of Italy. This book falls into three parts: the preparations for the descent into the land of the dead, a tour of the land of the dead, and the meeting between Aeneas and the ghost of his father Anchises. In the first part, Aeneas seeks out the Sibyl of Cumaea, a priestess-prophetess of Apollo who will be his guide into the underworld. He finds her at Apollo’s temple. There she gives him instructions. He must first bury his comrade Misenus, who has just died. Then he must find a talisman, the golden bough, to present to Persephone, Queen of the Dead. In part two, Virgil sends Aeneas through the traditional geography of the underworld. Aeneas and the Sibyl encounter the three-headed guard dog Cerebrus, the river Styx, the boatman Charon, Tartarus, the abyss of hell for the vilest souls, and finally the fields of Elysium, where the blessed reside after death. Here Aeneas meets his father. On the way he meets the ghosts of Palinurus; of Dido, who refuses to speak to him and pointedly returns to the ghost of her husband; and Deiphobus, his cousin who was killed on the night of Troy’s fall. These meetings fill Aeneas with sorrow, guilt, and remorse for what his mission has already cost in human terms. In part three, Aeneas meets Anchises. His father explains to Aeneas how the souls of all but the very evil and the very good are purified of their sins and reincarnated for another chance. Those
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who have led lives of exceptional goodness and benefit to humanity are allowed to remain forever in Elysium. Finally, he shows Aeneas the souls who will return to the upper world to become the great figures of Roman history. It is for these souls and what they represent that Aeneas has suffered and will continue to suffer.
Book 7 This book opens peacefully, building to an incident of tragic reversal of fortune. The Trojans are welcomed by King Latinus, who sees their arrival as the fulfillment of a prophecy that foreigners will come to intermarry with the Latins and found a great empire. Latinus promises his daughter Lavinia to Aeneas in marriage. Juno, however, stirs up Turnus, a local chieftain and Lavinia’s suitor, against the Trojans and the proposed marriage. She also influences Lavinia’s mother, Queen Amata, who had favored Turnus for her daughter’s hand, to reject her husband’s decision. Juno organizes an incident to spark fighting between the men—the accidental killing of a pet deer by Ascanius. Virgil, however, leaves in question how much of the subsequent action is due to Juno’s meddling and how much is due to humans giving in to their anger. After war has broken out between the Italians and Trojans, the poet lists the Italian armies opposing the Trojans, in celebration of local traditions and heroes of Italy.
Book 8 Fighting is at a standstill. Aeneas visits Evander, king of Pallanteum, a little settlement on one of Rome’s seven hills. Aeneas is shown the wild landscape where the great civic landmarks of Rome will be. Evander as a teenager had met and admired Aeneas’s father, Anchises. He offers Aeneas help and sends his son, young Pallas, with a band of warriors. The book ends with Venus having new armaments made for her son by her husband, the smith god, Vulcan. Vulcan makes Aeneas a great shield on which are pictured the major events of Roman history with the battle of Actium, where Augustus defeated the forces of Antony and Cleopatra, in the center.
Book 9 The war begins in earnest. In Aeneas’s absence, Turnus attacks the Trojan camp with great success.
Book 10 Aeneas and Pallas return to the Trojan camp. Pallas enters the fighting on the Trojan side. Turnus
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immediately chooses Pallas for single combat. Pallas, promising and courageous, but still hardly more than a boy, is killed. Turnus exults over his death, wishing Evander were there to see the deed. This event recalls Neoptolemus killing Priam’s youngest son before his father and mother in Book 2. Aeneas goes into a rage when he learns of Pallas’s death. He behaves as savagely as Turnus, mowing down all who stand before him, taunting them as they die, deaf to pleas for mercy in a passion of bloodlust. Revulsion finally recalls Aeneas to reason. A young man, Lausus, attempts to defend his father against Aeneas’s onslaught. Aeneas kills him, but as he does he realizes that he would have done exactly the same. Full of anguish and regret, Aeneas carries the boy’s body to his comrades.
Book 11 The book begins with Aeneas presiding over the funeral of Pallas. A messenger comes from the opposing Italian forces asking for a truce to bury the dead. Aeneas replies that he wishes for a truce not just for the dead, but for the living. He wants to come to some sort of accommodation with the Italians. The action of the poem is now dominated by Turnus. He debates with his allies, defending his determination to destroy the Trojans. The battle begins again and focuses on the warriormaid Camilla, one of Turnus’s chief allies. When she is killed, the Italian allies fall back in retreat.
CHARACTERS
Book 12 When Book 12 opens, Turnus welcomes the challenge of settling the whole war in single combat with Aeneas. He rejects the pleas of King Lavinius and Queen Amata and arms himself with eager anticipation. Aeneas promises that if he is defeated he will leave Italy and if he wins he will not seek dominion over the Italians, but the two peoples will be united under the same laws. The Rutilians, Turnus’s people, feel it is shameful to commit their fortunes to what they believe is an unequal combat and break the truce. General fighting begins again. Aeneas tries to stop the renewal of hostilities. His attempts are ended when a chance arrow wounds him. The wound is healed by divine intervention, but it enrages him. He rages over the battlefield. Turnus does the same in a different part of the field. The description of the slaughter they make leaves very little difference between them. Juno, still protecting Turnus, keeps him away from the worst fighting. In his absence, the Trojans surround the Latin capital. Queen Amata commits
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suicide. Turnus becomes aware that his chariot is being driven by his disguised sister, the nymph Juturna, who with Juno’s help is keeping him away from real danger. Turnus learns of the queen’s suicide and the siege of the city. The single combat between Aeneas and Turnus begins but is suspended in mid-narrative as the scene switches to Olympus and a confrontation between Juno and Jupiter. Jupiter forbids Juno to intervene any further against the Trojans. She accepts this order, but she begs Jupiter for three things. She asks that the eventual descendants of intermarried Trojans and Italians be called Latins; that they speak the native language, Latin; and that they wear the native Latin dress, the toga. Jupiter grants this and more, promising that not only the Latin mode of dress but the whole way of life will be derived from the native Italians. Juno, then, is described as being responsible for the particular character of the Romans, and the audience understands at last that this is the reason for all the horror and bloodshed she caused. The narrative returns to the combat between Aeneas and Turnus. Aeneas wounds Turnus and Turnus begs for mercy. Aeneas is about to spare him when he notices that Turnus wears the vest of his victim Pallas. Overwhelmed by a thirst for vengeance, Aeneas kills Turnus.
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Adromanche Adromanche is the widow of Hector, given as a prize of war to Pyrrhus, the son of Achilles. She later marries Helenus. In a twist of fate, She and Helenus come to reign over part of Pyrrhus’s kingdom after Pyrrhus is killed by Orestes, son of Agamemnon. She never forgets either her adored Hector or their little boy Astyanax, whom the victorious Greek threw from the walls of Troy for fear he would grow up and avenge his father.
Aeneas Aeneas is a prince of Troy and chief protagonist of this epic. There are as many interpretations of his character as there are readers of the Aeneid. Virgil’s narrative repeatedly puts Aeneas into situations in which he finds his duty to the gods and to the future in conflict with his own personal desires, freedom, and autonomy—when he wants to stay with Dido, queen of Carthage, for example, and the god Jupiter sends a messenger
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reminding him that it is his destiny to leave and lead his people on to Italy. Aeneas often seems at a loss about what he should do. He sometimes makes choices that seem clearly wrong to many readers. The classic epic pattern generally shows its protagonist becoming a true hero by learning through experience the importance of wisdom, tolerance, compromise, and justice. While Aeneas shows these qualities intermittently, some interpretations of the Aeneid indicate that at the end all his painfully acquired knowledge is thrown way in an act of revenge when he slays Turnus.
Aeolus Aeolus is the god of the winds. He is indebted to Juno for his role among the gods and, at Juno’s request, causes the storm that drives Aeneas’s fleet onto the coast of North Africa in Book 1.
Amata Amata is Lavinius’s wife. The goddess Juno encourages her to think of Aeneas and the newly arrived Trojans as dangerous interlopers on Italian soil. She opposes the proposed match between Aeneas and her daughter Lavinia.
A warrior maiden, Camilla is the child of the exiled tyrant, Metabus. Her father pledged her life in service to Diana, goddess of the hunt, after Diana protected her when Metabus bound her to his spear and threw her across a river as he fled from pursuers. She is an ally of Turnus. Her death in battle is a severe blow to the Italian cause.
Cerberus Cerberus is the three-headed watchdog of the underworld. When the Sibyl escorts Aeneas through the underworld, she throws the dog a drugged honeycake so that they can pass him safely while he sleeps.
Charon Charon is the ferryman of the dead. Souls of the dead must cross the River Styx to enter the underworld. If they have been properly buried, Charon will ferry them across the river. The dead were buried with coins to pay Charon.
Creusa Creusa is the first wife of Aeneas. She is killed when Troy falls to the Greeks.
Deiphobe See Sibyl
Anchises Anchises is a prince of Troy, Aeneas’s mortal father and Priam’s second cousin. The goddess Venus visited Anchises in the guise of a mortal; their son Aeneas is thus descended from the gods. One tradition holds that Anchises was crippled by Jupiter’s thunderbolt when he boasted of being Venus’s lover.
Anna Anna is Dido’s sister. She persuades Dido that an alliance with Aeneas is in her best interest as well as that of her city, Carthage.
Ascanius Ascanius is the son of Aeneas and Creusa. He was also known as Iulus and the Roman tribe or family of Julius claims him as an ancestor. He is the founder of Alba. His boyish joke in Book 7 about the Trojans eating their tables together with their food recalls Anchises’s prophecy that his people would find their foretold home in Italy only when they were reduced to eating their tables.
Cacus Cacus, the monstrous son of the smith god Vulcan, terrorizes the kingdom of Evander from a cave on the Aventine hill. He is killed by Hercules.
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Dido Dido is a Phoenician princess who flees with many of her people from the tyranny of her ruling brother. She founds the city of Carthage and rules there as queen until, under the influence of the goddess Venus, she falls in love with Aeneas. When Aeneas deserts her to continue his journey to Italy on the orders of Jupiter, she kills herself, cursing Aeneas and the nation he will found. Her disintegration from a strong, virtuous, and capable woman and ruler to a distraught, love-sick suicide is based on her character, circumstances, and the interference of the gods in her life.
Ganymede Ganymede is a Trojan prince whom Jupiter abducted to be the cup-bearer of the gods.
Hector Hector is the greatest of Priam’s sons. He is a loving husband and father, generous and conscientious, a great warrior who does not glory in war, and the bulwark of the Trojans. He is killed by Achilles, who desecrates his body. Aeneas in many ways takes on some of his dead cousin’s attributes as well as his position of leadership among the Trojan refugees.
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Hecuba
Lavinia
Hecuba is the queen of Troy and wife of Priam. She is forced into slavery after the city of Troy falls to the Greeks and she has witnessed the deaths of her husband and son.
Lavinia is the only child of Lavinius and Amata of Italy. Queen Amata hoped that Lavinia would marry Turnus, but the gods send signs that show she is fated to marry Aeneas, thus founding the Roman line.
Helenus Helenus is a son of Priam. He is made a slave of Pyrrhus after the Trojan War. When Pyrrhus is killed by Orestes, son of Agamemnon, Helenus comes into possession of part of his kingdom where he and his wife Adromanche recreate the city of Troy on a small scale. Helenus is a prophet who assures Aeneas that he will eventually reach Italy and make a home there.
Hercules Hercules is a great hero, known for his feats of strength and bravery. He is the son of Jupiter and the mortal woman Alcmena. He rescued the people of Evander from the monster Cacus.
Lavinius Lavinius is king of the Italians. He welcomes Aeneas and the Trojans and offers his daughter Lavinia to Aeneas in marriage because he believes that it is the will of the gods.
Mezentius Mezentius is an Etruscan king, whom Virgil calls a ‘‘scorner of the Gods.’’ He rules Argylla until his incredible cruelty cause his people to drive him from the city. Turnus shelters him. The Etruscans join Aeneas, urged by Evander, in order to seek revenge on Mezentius.
Misenus Misenus is Aeneas’s trumpeter. He is killed when he challenges Triton’s pre-eminence on the trumpet. Aeneas must bury him and ritually purify the fleet before he can descend to the underworld.
Iulus See Ascanius
Juno Juno is queen of the gods, both wife and sister of Jupiter. She is the patroness of married women and of the cities of Argos and Carthage. Juno sided with the Greeks in the Trojan War because she was offended when the Trojan warrior Paris pronounced Venus rather than Juno the most beautiful of the goddesses.
Jupiter ‘‘Father of gods and men,’’ Jupiter is the king of the gods and the most powerful among them. He is bound only by his own word and by fate.
Juturna Juturna is Turnus’s sister and the spirit of springs. She was given immortality by her lover Jupiter.
Lausus Lausus is a young Italian killed by Aeneas as Lausus defends his father, the tyrant Mezentius. Aeneas regrets this killing immediately, realizing that he would have defended his own father Anchises with the same valor. When Aeneas carries the boy’s body to his companions, this act of compassion leads to a temporary truce between the warring Trojans and Italians.
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Neoptolemus See Pyrrhus
Neptune Neptune, god of the sea, favors the Trojans in their attempt to reach Italy. He is annoyed when he finds that without their consulting him, Juno and Aeolus cause the storm at sea that shipwrecks Aeneas’s fleet on the African coast.
Palinurus Palinurus is Aeneas’s helmsman. He is washed overboard just as the Trojan fleet reaches Italy and is murdered when he reaches the shore. His death is described by Neptune in Book 5 as a sacrifice to guarantee the safe landing of the rest of the Trojans: ‘‘One shall be given for the many.’’ His shade (spirit or ghost) meets Aeneas in the underworld and begs for his help in crossing the River Styx even though he was not properly buried and does not have money to pay the boatman Charon. The Sibyl who is guiding Aeneas through the underworld promises that the people who killed him will come to understand their grievous error and will bury him with the necessary honors to ensure his passage across the river to Elysium.
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Pallas Pallas is Evander’s son, a young man on his first real battle campaign. Aeneas is drawn to the father and son and acts as a mentor and protector of Pallas. When Pallas is killed in the climactic battle between the Trojans and Italians, Aeneas goes wild with grief. He had been about to spare Turnus’s life, but when he is reminded that Turnus killed Pallas, he in turn kills Turnus.
part of his kingdom comes into the hands of his slave, Helenus, a brother of Hector.
Sibyl The sibyls were priestesses and prophetesses of the god Apollo. Aeneas visits the Sibyl of Cumaea, also known as Deiphobe, in southern Italy before his trip to the underworld.
Sychaeus Paris Paris is a prince of Troy and son of King Priam and Queen Hecuba of Troy. At his birth it was prophesied that he would someday cause the destruction of Troy, so his parents sorrowfully abandon him as an infant to die on Mt. Ida. He is found and raised by a shepherd. Paris grows to be an exceptionally handsome young man, and the goddess Venus offers him his choice from among the most beautiful woman in the world. He selects Helen, unfortunately already married to Menelaus of Greece, and abducts her. Helen’s former suitors, who include all the major warriors of Greece, had sworn an oath to her husband to always protect their beloved lady. The Trojan War begins when Greek troops attack Troy to recover Helen.
Persephone Persephone is Pluto’s wife and queen of the underworld and of the dead.
Sychaeus is Dido’s first husband, murdered by her brother.
Turnus Turnus is prince of the Rutulians and a brilliant young warrior deeply conscious of his honor and standing. The Sibyl compares him to Achilles. He is a descendant of the royal house of Argos and is a favorite of the goddess Juno. Turnus seems to find war his most natural and satisfying occupation.
Venus Venus is the goddess of love and of beauty. In the Aeneid, she is also the mother of the Roman people, since it is her son, Aeneas, who finally leads his Trojan fleet to Italy where he marries the Italian princess Lavinia, thus beginning the Roman ancestral line. Venus is a devoted mother in the distant way that many of the gods who have children with mortals remain somewhat involved in the lives of their offspring.
Pluto Pluto is king of the dead and the brother of Jupiter and Neptune.
THEMES
Polydorus
Social Order
Polydorus is a son of Priam who is sent abroad to be raised in the court of the king of Thrace. When Troy falls, the king of Thrace kills him for his treasure. His ghost appears to Aeneas when the Trojans stumble upon his burial mound.
The moral center of the Aeneid is the Roman way of life, which Augustus was attempting to revitalize during Virgil’s lifetime. This system was ideally based on duty to the gods, to country, and to family and friends. It was powered by a deep sense of humanity. Virgil was aware of the social cohesion, order, even the personal happiness, which this ideal could produce. He was also aware of the sorrow and cruelty that could result from the clash of these duties. Private experience and duty are often placed in tension against public duty. This tension is at the heart of the parting of Dido and Aeneas.
Priam Priam is king of Troy. He dies while defending his family on the night Troy falls to the Greeks.
Pyrrhus Pyrrhus, also known as Neoptolemus, is the son of the famous Greek warrior Achilles, the hero of the Iliad. During the fall of Troy, Pyrrhus kills Priam’s son Polites and then Priam himself with great cruelty in the presence of Queen Hecuba and her daughters. Adromanche, widow of Hector, is forced to become his mistress. When he is killed by Orestes,
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On a historical level, Virgil expressed this tension with an allusion to Brutus, the first consul, who drove the tyrant king Tarquin out of Rome and ordered his own sons executed for attempting to reinstate Tarquin. These tensions are foregrounded
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TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY
The Etruscans, who join Aeneas as allies, also claimed to have come from Asia Minor. Research the Etruscans and the ways in which they influenced the essential character of Roman society. Write a research paper based on your findings.
Can the wanderings of Aeneas and his Trojans be found to have any basis in fact? There are strong archaeological indications that many established kingdoms were in fact destroyed around the traditional date of the fall of Troy (c. 1193). Research this period and try to determine if there is any archaeological evidence for the legends of the Trojan refugees. Using a computer, create a presentation, including a map, that shows the movement of Aeneas from Troy to Italy and shares some of the archaeological evidence that may substantiate the reality behind the Aeneid. Virgil locates the origins of Rome and Carthage’s long period of warfare in the spiteful actions of the goddess Juno and Queen Dido’s broken heart and suicide in response to Aeneas’s leaving her. Compare and contrast Virgil’s imaginative account with the more concrete historical reasons behind the three Punic wars between Rome and Carthage. In small groups, discuss your findings and prepare a presentation to share with your class.
hero with some traditional literary, legendary, or mythic considerations of what a hero must be, think, or do (handbooks of literary terms will supply some definitions). In an essay, discuss ways that Aeneas either lives up to or falls short of both your idea of a hero and the traditional view of one. Share your essay with a classmate. How are your opinions different? How are they similar?
Virgil used plot elements and even characters from the earlier Odyssey and Iliad of the Greek poet Homer. Generations of readers and critics have responded in various ways to this socalled borrowing. Is it creative license, plagiarism, or something in between? Are the events both Virgil and Homer wrote about large enough to support more than one literary retelling? Write an essay arguing your point of view. Cite examples of this kind of recycling of themes and subjects from contemporary literature.
Define the concept of a hero from your own point of view. Give historical or contemporary examples that illustrate your concept. Compare your idea of what it takes to be a
Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief (2005), by Rick Riordan, is the first book in a series that revives the ancient Greek gods and their stories for a new generation of readers. The Romans adopted many of the Greek gods as their own, giving them new, Roman names. Read this book and compare the gods and characters to those in the Aeneid. Write a short story or play that uses the Roman gods in a modern context much like Riordan did in his series.
in the poem. Nevertheless, it remains clear that Virgil believed that the ideals of Roman life and public service remain worth the often difficult struggle with oneself. In Book 1, the god Jupiter summarizes what the Roman way of life could and would give, not only Rome, but all of humanity, a world-rule which brings universal peace and humane civilization. This world is not expressed
in political terms, but ethical ones. It is available to all who follow the Roman way. Without this and similar prophecies, the suffering of Aeneas, Dido, Creusa, Palinurus, Pallas, and others are nearly unbearable. Aeneas must be brought to understand the promise that is given through him. The pageant of Roman history in Book 6 and the pictures on his shield illustrate the moral
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qualities of the Roman way of life. Nevertheless, Virgil often undercut this glorious possibility—in the lament for Marcellus in Book 6, for example, and in the end of the poem itself when Aeneas abandons his highest principles in grief for Pallas and kills Turnus, to whom he had considered granting mercy.
Sorrow The theme which dictates the tone of the Aeneid for modern readers is that of human loss and regret. The theme can be defined by two remarks in Book 1. In line 203 Aeneas says, ‘‘Perhaps even this will be something to remember with joy.’’ In the most quoted passage of the Aeneid, Aeneas exclaims, ‘‘Here are tears for things and human mortality touches the heart.’’ The first passage, however, is set in the context of promised destiny of Aeneas and his followers in lines 204–207: ‘‘Through many circumstances and various troubles we travel towards Italy where the fates point out a place of rest. There it is decreed for Troy to rise again. Endure and keep yourself for prosperity!’’ In the second passage the tears and thoughts of which Aeneas is mindful are themselves a reflex of fame. ‘‘What region is not full of our distress? Here,’’ he says in lines 460–461, ‘‘is the reward of praise.’’ The sorrows of the individual heart caught in conflicting duties are seen in the setting of a divinely granted destiny and the immortality of fame.
Private and Public Ideals The tension between Virgil’s two ideals of individual human felicity and the mission of Rome has sometime been characterized as the tension in Virgil’s own ethical ideals between Stoic and Epicurean philosophies. Stoicism was a philosophy of self-sacrifice in public service, of a heart unmoved yet rationally compassionate. Epicureanism was a form of philosophical quietism, a retreat from the world. It was not a search for sensual pleasure, as is sometimes believed, but for an absence of pain. The tension in the poem, however, is more complex. There is a tension between individual happiness and public mission and a frightening tension between the ideal and its fulfillment. Roman history was not a litany of broken loves, abandoned friends, and rage. Conjugal love, friendly fidelity, justice, and magnanimity toward strangers were, for the Romans, the essence of the Roman way of life. The Romans tended not to delude themselves about the difficulties of family life and commonwealth life. Aeneas is on one level the symbol of the difficulties that beset even an essentially decent man in maintaining the
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Illustration depicting the departure of Aeneas and Dido’s death (Ó The Art Gallery Collection / Alamy)
humanity which was necessary if Rome was going to be the great civilizing force the gods intended rather than simply another great power in a long line of great powers.
Kinship Kinship, or family relationships, are crucial to the story of the Aeneid. For example, Venus, Aeneas’s mother, asks Jupiter to intervene on her son’s behalf in Book 1. Even though she is a goddess, she wants only the best for her half-mortal child. Aeneas loses his wife, Creusa, while they are feeing Troy and soon thereafter also loses his father, Anchises, who was unwell when they fled. These losses are difficult for the hero, but coping with them make him more sympathetic and heroic to the audience. Lost is not gone as Aeneas is able to talk to the ghosts of his wife and his father to get advice. Book 7 introduces Lavinia’s family. In marriage to Lavinia Aeneas will secure a place for the Trojans in Italy. The importance of this step cannot be emphasized enough. Through marriage, Aeneas becomes kin to the Latins, and warfare alone will not get rid of the Trojans. This tension adds vigor to the fight between Aeneas and Turnus, who is also a suitor to Lavinia.
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Over and over, Virgil chooses to describe the killing of one person as it happened in front of a family member, which only heightens the pathos and horror of the moment. For example, Neoptolemus kills the youngest son of King Priam in front of his father and then kills King Priam in front of his daughters and wife. In these ways, kinship ties and devotion are dramatized and underscored.
STYLE Point of View Point of view in the Aeneid incorporates two perspectives. The personal vision, from Aeneas’s point of view, emphasizes the human element in the story. The patriotic vision, concerned with both human and divine events combining to form the genesis of the Roman Empire, is concerned with presenting a mythic and idealized view of Roman history. The tension between these two approaches creates a sense of breadth that affects both the work at hand and, because of its importance to western European culture, the development of literary expectations in the genre among countries in the West.
Protagonist and Antagonist The protagonist is the central, sympathetic character of a story. This is often, but not always, also the main character of the story. In the Aeneid, the protagonist and main character is Aeneas. He is the hero of the Trojan people, leading them on a sea adventure from the ruins of their former home to a new land, Italy, where he is fated to found an empire. Although he struggles against adversity as all heroes must, his fortune is predetermined. The antagonist in a story is the character who works against the protagonist, trying to stop the protagonist from achieving the goal. The antagonist is also often a central character and is not necessarily inherently evil just because of this opposition to the protagonist (who is not necessarily inherently good). The antagonist in the Aeneid is Turnus, although he does not appear until Book 7. Turnus is competing with Aeneas for Lavinia’s hand in marriage but also trying to keep the Trojans from settling in and taking over Italy. This motivation is understandable. Virgil has also made Turnus a bloodthirsty warrior, which makes him less sympathetic than Aeneas.
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Imitation Virgil drew heavily on Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey in composing his own epic. Almost the whole of the first book is constructed from the Odyssey. The storm, the despair of Aeneas, the landing on a strange shore, the meeting with a disguised goddess, the reception by the ruler of the foreign land, the banquet, the minstrel’s song leading up to the hero’s narration of his adventures—all these elements are patterned on events in Odyssey. In addition to repeating these key elements, Aeneid shows other parallels and differences from Homer’s work. In the Odyssey, the Greek Odysseus is trying to return home from the Trojan war to reunite with his wife and to take up his old and much-missed way of life. He succeeds, as his followers do not, by showing great resources and endurance. He is the ultimate individualist. Aeneas, however, is fleeing his home after the city’s destruction in that same war. He loses wife, family, and home, and starts out to find the place ordained by the gods in which to build a new life and to found a new empire. His first duty is to bring his people to that haven. Underscoring the connection between the two works, Virgil even has Aeneas rescue one of Odysseus’s men on his way. Virgil’s original audience knew Homer’s narratives well. They had their memories of and opinions about the Greek poet’s earlier work to supplement their understanding and enjoyment— or criticism—of the Aeneid. This practice of building on an established tradition still takes place in popular entertainment: Modern audiences, for example, will watch a movie sequel or a television show featuring a crossover guest performer from another series partly because they already know what to expect and enjoy seeing the familiar in a new setting.
Divine Interference The gods have a number of roles in the Aeneid. Jupiter represents the providential divine intention for the human characters, whereas his wife Juno represents the seemingly irrational hostile forces that stand between characters and their goals. Venus represents the divine nurturing of the Roman people and state. Sometimes gods are the direct catalyst for action, and they always have some influence on events, which never unfold purely by coincidence or chance. Whether Virgil’s audience actually believed in them or not, the gods function in the epic as a powerful artistic symbol. The entire body of Greek and Roman art and literature is infused with demonstrations and
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explanations of the role of the gods in the affairs of humankind. This shared cultural referent was reinforced by affection among Virgil’s audience for the ancient faith of their ancestors, with its overtones of rural simplicity and straightforward vigor.
Imagery Virgil’s imagery in the Aeneid derives power from the repetition and sometimes startling variation of particular images through one or more books. Virgil exploits the repetition of imagery to constantly recall past events from the narrative. In the present, the past is being repeated or the future foreshadowed. The use of serpent and fire imagery in Book 2 provides an excellent demonstration of this facet of Virgil’s technique.
Structure The structure of the Aeneid has interested a number of critics in the twentieth century. It has been suggested that the poem is divided between books of intense action (even numbered books) and diffuse action (odd numbered books). In this view Books 3 and 5 function partly to release the tension of Books 2 and 4. The Aeneid has been described as a trilogy, with the tragedy of Dido, told in Books 1–4 and that of Turnus, in Books 9–12, flanking the central Roman section in Books 5–8. Another way of looking at the structure suggests that the first six books are patterned after Homer’s Iliad, and the second six resemble his Odyssey.
Diction, Rhetoric, and Meter Virgil’s word choices and meter have been studied and copied for at least two thousand years. It is hard to understand this aspect of the Aeneid without having also studied Latin, but it is possible to make a few basic generalizations. Quantity is the time it takes to pronounce a syllable. In Latin, a long syllable takes twice as long to pronounce as a short one. The Aeneid is written in quantitative hexameters; that is, each line has six metrical feet. These feet are a combination of short and long syllables. A hexameter line is made up of dactyls—one long syllable followed by two short syllables (the name ‘‘Ludwig van Beethoven’’ is an English double dactyl, for example) and of spondees—two long syllables (‘‘blackboard’’ is an English spondee). This may sound restrictive, but within the relatively narrow rhetorical structure the Aeneid displays great variety. Lines can be jagged and abrupt. They can flow with lulling smooth sound.
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Virgil often used commonplace words in fresh ways. Sometimes he deliberately used outdated terms that would attract attention because of their quaintness. Virgil also chose and combined words that enlarge the reader’s range of perception. His essential tool is variation within a symmetrical pattern, even within individual lines. Adam Parry, in his essay ‘‘The Two Voices of Virgil,’’ demonstrates some of the effects that occur in less than two lines with an example from Book 7: ‘‘For you Angitia’s woods wept, For you Fucinus’s glassy waters, For you the transparent lake.’’ Here he has used repetition (of the phrase ‘‘for you,’’), personification (the weeping of the woods and the lake), and levels of variation (first, woods, then water; second, water), mentioned first by proper name (‘‘Fucinus’s glassy waters’’) and then by the common noun ‘‘lake’’).
HISTORICAL CONTEXT Historic Troy, Carthage, and Latium According to Homer’s Iliad, the Greeks waged war against the Trojans after the Trojan prince Paris kidnapped Helen, beautiful wife of Menelaus, king of Sparta. Although the Trojan War Homer wrote about is considered legendary, historians have long known that there was an historic Troy and a protracted conflict that formed the kernel of this grand story. The archaeological site of Hisarlik in modern Turkey is believed by many to be ancient Troy. A layer of destruction dated to approximately 1183 BCE , known to archaeologists as VIIa, corresponds to the sacking of Troy by the Greeks. This date also generally agrees with the twelfth century dating of the war by ancient scholars. Aeneas was Priam’s nephew and fought in the Trojan War until the city was sacked and the Trojans were forced to flee for their lives. En route to Italy, Aeneas landed in Carthage, a city Roman sources say was founded by Phoenician Queen Elissa (also known as Dido) shortly before the Trojan War began. Modern scholars have dated the actual settlement to the ninth century BCE , three hundred years later. In the Aeneid, Aeneas was ultimately guided by divine intervention and prophecy to the shores of Italy where he met with tribes of Latins in the land of Latium. Archaeological evidence shows that the city of Rome was founded in the eighth century BCE upon the site of a Latin occupation that dates back to the tenth century BCE . Virgil, in
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COMPARE & CONTRAST
First century BCE : Displaced people like the Trojans travel to new lands to settle. If they encounter natives, they either intermarry or conquer them. Aeneas seeks to intermarry with the Latins rather than fight with them but war breaks out anyway. Today: Displaced people seek political asylum from countries that can afford to absorb people who are without resources. For example, after the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, social order breaks down and two million people become refugees, seeking asylum in countries such as Syria, Jordan, Egypt, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
First century BCE : Literate people are enormously interested in poetry. The Roman tradition of patronage and the lack of copyright law means that many poets are subsidized by wealthy and politically powerful men. Under the patronage system, some exceptional poets, such as Virgil and Horace, can have both financial independence
writing the Aeneid, was drawing a connection between the ruling family of Troy and the Julian tribe of Rome.
Roman Government Rome was founded in 753 BCE . For nearly 250 years it was a monarchy. The last king was a tyrant whose son Tarquin raped the wife of a Roman noble. (One of the most famous accounts of this event is found in Shakespeare’s long narrative poem ‘‘The Rape of Lucrece.’’) Outraged by this crime, the Romans, led by L. Junius Brutus (an ancestor of the Brutus who assassinated Julius Caesar), drove the Tarquin family out and set up a republic. For the next 450 years, Rome was ruled by the Senate and consuls. The Senate, chosen from the patrician (highest) class of citizens decided on government policies and the use of public money. The equites (middle class) and plebeians (working class) had their own assembly,
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and comparative artistic freedom to create their works. Today: Poetry is no longer a common medium for conveying history, ideas, or elements of a shared cultural experience. Most poets depend on university appointments or grants from various cultural institutions or agencies. Others hold down full-time jobs to support their writing. First century BCE : Wealthy Rome has a paid military force that is famous for being well trained and outfitted. Some political leaders are expected to take part in the fighting to prove that they are worthy to lead in both war and in peacetime. Today: The armies of most industrialized nations are professional. Politicians are no longer expected to have served in the military although having done so is a recommendation to some voters. The military’s highest leaders and officers are not expected to take part in actual combat.
which could accept or reject the proposals of the Senate. After 287 BCE , Senate proposals had the force of law. The executive posts in the government from the consuls down were elected by the vote of all male citizens. The consuls were elected in pairs for one year only to protect against the rise of another tyrant. Later they were joined by the tribune of the people, who looked after the interests of the equite and plebeian classes. Even after Rome entered a period of imperial rule (ruled by emperors), some forms of republicanism were maintained.
Rome and War Many wars during the Roman Republic (509–44 BCE ) were fought simply for survival. Many, however, were wars of expansion. Military achievements were important to all levels of Roman society. Upper-class men who hoped for political careers needed to demonstrate personal courage
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and organizational ability in the ultimate test of war. Men of the lower classes could improve their place in society by gaining a reputation for courage, loyalty, and intelligent obedience in warfare. Of all the wars Rome fought, few were as important as the three Punic wars against Carthage (264–146 BCE ), the city founded by Dido. These wars saw Rome’s greatest triumphs as well as greatest defeats. Even when Italy itself was invaded by the Carthaginian general in 218 BCE , the Romans refused to capitulate. After over a century of warfare, Roman forces eventually destroyed Carthage. Virgil alludes repeatedly in his narrative to these ongoing wars. Roman commentators believed that Dido’s death scene in Book 4 was full of references to the Punic Wars.
Renewal under Augustus Julius Caesar’s assassination threw Rome and its empire back into civil war, which continued until the defeat of Caesar Augustus (64 BCE –14 CE ) by Antony and Cleopatra at Actium in 31 BCE . Augustus had attempted to revitalize the traditional Roman way of life and recruited poets to help. Virgil was commissioned to write in part to remind the Romans of the circumstances that created them and their society and the part the gods played in it. He defined their sense of having been chosen and led by divine wisdom. It has been suggested that Virgil knew Jews living in Rome and that his view of history was affected by their own sense of mission as chosen people with a specific preordained destiny.
The Roman Way of Life Roman Society under Pressure At the end of the Punic Wars in 146 BCE , Rome was the major power in the Mediterranean. The Romans themselves believed that as long as Carthage had remained a threat, Rome was strong because of the need to stay united in the face of this powerful enemy. Social problems were quickly dealt with so that the city could focus its attentions on opposing the Carthaginian threat. When this single-minded focus was removed, Rome began to fall apart. Originally, most Roman citizens had at least a small farm that could generally support a family. The wars devastated these family holdings. Many men were away for long periods of fighting. Many never returned. It was difficult for the women and children left behind to do all the heavy farm work. Further, many Romans had to flee the countryside and band together in the safety of the cities when Hannibal (248–183 BCE ) invaded Italy. Further, international trade sprang up in the peace that followed the Punic Wars, and many small family farms could not compete with a flourishing trade in agricultural. Returning Italian soldiers, as well as the wealthy Roman senators, were able to buy up failed farmland cheaply and amass huge estates. Instead of planting grain, they chose to raise sheep, grapes, or olives, all of which needed fewer farmhands. The collapse of traditional Roman agrarian (or agricultural) society and the enlargement of the empire made it more and more difficult for the government to function effectively. Civil disturbances between various factions grew worse and worse. By the time Julius Caesar (100–44 BCE ) assumed personal control with the grudging acceptance of the Senate after a bloody civil war, Roman society needed drastic action.
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The Roman way of life, the mos maiorem (‘‘manners of the ancestors’’) had both a religious and a social aspect. Roman religion was based on two sets of gods. There were the Olympian gods, of whom Juno, Jupiter, Venus, Neptune, Vulcan, Diana, and Pluto play a role in the Aeneid. The Lares and the Penates (‘‘household gods’’) were the protective spirits of the family, the hearth (emblematic of the center of the household), the storeroom, and the countryside. Each family had its own personal household gods. Like the brownies or elves of fairy tales, but much more powerful, the household gods were believed to watch over each family. In the Aeneid, Aeneas’s father is described carefully carrying his family’s household gods away from the destroyed city of Troy. Traditional Roman families prayed to their Lares and the Penates everyday. Roman society was based on family and friends bound by mutual ties of respect and aid and on the patronage system. While patronage may seem strange or even distasteful to a modern sensibility, to the Romans, it was a perfectly honorable and practical way of life. A patron stood by his clients, ensured that they received justice under Roman law, offered advice, and helped their careers. Clients of a patron in turn would support and advise him and live up to the recommendations he had given them. This pattern of give and take was expected at all levels of society. Aeneas and Misenus illustrate the relationship of patron and client. Letters of recommendation from Roman patrons promoted their clients as personal assistants, political candidates, even as potential sonsin-law. These young men would be expected to live up to their patron’s recommendations. Prominent
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and powerful men expected to be asked to serve as mentors promising young men, as had been done for them in their youth. This practice connected families in a web of mutual responsibility and gratitude. A man might be asked to help the career of the nephew or son of a man who had done the same for him or his father years before. The connections down the generations among Anchises, Evander, Aeneas, and Pallas in the Aeneid offer examples of these kinds of multigenerational relationships. Emperor Caesar Augustus functioned as a patron of the poet Virgil. Virgil’s great epic is a preeminent example of a kind of work-for-hire product that served the purposes of his patron while enabling the poet to advance his own career. The system was clearly open to misuse, but it served Roman society and administration well for nearly a millennium.
CRITICAL OVERVIEW The earliest critics concentrated on the style in which Virgil wrote and the sources from which he drew. The Aeneid was written for a cultured and educated, extremely well-read audience and almost immediately became a school text. Many Roman critics wrote treatises explaining the book’s historical, religious, philosophical, and literary allusions to make it easier for teachers and students to understand it. Others wrote explanations of difficult words or unusual grammar. In the fourth century, a teacher named Donatus published excerpts from many of these works to produce a kind of general reader’s guide. A generation later, another teacher, Servius, relying in part on Donatus, produced a similar commentary for schools.
he read the Aeneid. In the end, western Christianity simply co-opted Virgil. In his Fourth Eclogue, Virgil wrote about the birth of a wonderful child who would end war and bring back the golden age. For this, Virgil was popularly (if not officially) accepted as a prophet of Christ. During the early Middle Ages, the Aeneid was used as a schoolbook for the study of Latin. Servius’s commentary, with or without extra material from Donatus, was reprinted many times. In the late fifth or early sixth century, a Christian wrote a short treatise in the form of a rather humorous vision of Virgil in which the poet explained the Aeneid as an allegory—an extended narrative metaphor—about the soul’s growth to maturity and virtue. From the late eleventh century on, Virgil’s reputation for enormous learning, a few allegorical passages in Servius, and the popularity of allegory as a literary form changed the way people read the Aeneid. It was often treated as a sort of coded message, full of hidden meaning. This approach was popular until the time of Shakespeare. It had a big impact on how other epic works were written. Writers such as Torquato Tasso and Edmund Spenser wrote epics according to this allegorical model, with the action and even characters all serving as metaphors or symbols for something else. Throughout all the changes in literary and critical fashion, the Aeneid remained popular simply as a story. The earliest French romance was not about Lancelot and Guinevere, but Aeneas and Lavinia.
Macrobius’s Saturnalia, written in the first half of the fifth century CE , treated Virgil’s works as a Roman bible. Macrobius depicted actual historical figures, including Servius, discussing the Aeneid. These figures were members of the last generation of educated Roman pagans, attempting to defend their gods, their way of life, the very nature of Rome, from the growing cult of Christianity.
Modern criticism of the Aeneid began in the seventeenth century. Late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century French and English critics began to interpret the Aeneid not as an allegory, but as a narrative that conveyed meaning in the same way as history. The narrative was seen as providing models of the highest qualities of conduct for both princes and their subjects. In the dedication to his translation, the poet John Dryden stressed these elements, which appealed to the readers of his time, who were looking for royal leadership into an era of national renewal.
Early Christian reaction to Virgil was mixed. On one hand, he was the poet of the Roman state and religion, which Christians sought to usurp. On the other hand, his work was an essential part of a complete education, and he was widely considered the finest poet writing in Latin. Christian poets such as Prudentius used Virgil as a model. Saint Augustine of Hippo (354–430) admitted crying over Dido’s tragic end when as a schoolboy
Proponents of literary romanticism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries reacted against the classicism of the 1600s and 1700s, when Greek and Latin texts from Virgil’s era were highly praised and imitated. The romantics found Aeneas a poor hero and were not impressed with Roman destiny as a theme. When they praised Virgil at all, they did so for his style or for the same emotional sensitivities they admired in their own poetry. This
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Map of the voyage of Aeneas
approach led readers to examine what critics had come to call Virgil’s private voice. For much of the nineteenth century, romantic critics and commentators focused on examining Virgil’s treatment of individual human beings caught up in the larger issues of Rome’s destiny. In the twentieth century, criticism of the Aeneid became increasingly more sophisticated in its understanding of the literary, social, and political realities of Virgil’s world. Modern critics still reflected as much of their own world as of Virgil’s. Two world wars and the end of colonialism affected reader responses to the events depicted in the work. A critical arena that developed was the study of readers’ changing attitudes about Virgil over the centuries. Kenneth Quinn, in his 1968 critical companion to the Aeneid, observed that Virgil ‘‘is rarely completely on the side of any character in his poem and completely against the character opposing him.’’ This is one of the most important observations any reader can bring to the Aeneid.
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Late twentieth and early twenty-first century criticism largely focused on the vagaries of translation. Virgil wrote his works in Latin. In some cases the Latin is translated into Italian and then into English, potentially creating more opportunities for misunderstanding or mistranslation. Renowned classics scholar Robert Fagles published his translation of the Aeneid in 2006 to critical acclaim. Brad Leithauser, writing for the New York Times Book Review compared Fagles’s flowing free verse to the tight iambic pentameter of Robert Fitzgerald’s 1983 translation, concluding that Fagles’s version set the new standard. Amid this crowded field, in 2008 Yale professor Sarah Ruden published her translation of the Aeneid. New Criterion reviewer Richard Garner lauded Ruden for taking on what other translators dared not do: She translated Virgil’s dense Latin lines one-for-one using iambic pentameter. Most translators, including Fagles, had translated Latin to English in a two-to-three line ratio. Ruden’s work is a respected addition to the library of English translations of Virgil’s epic.
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CRITICISM Helen Conrad-O’Briain Conrad-O’Briain holds a PhD from Trinity College Dublin where she is a research associate of the Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies and an adjunct lecturer in the School of English. In the following essay, Conrad-O’Briain offers a general assessment and an overview of the Aeneid. It is impossible to imagine western literature without Virgil’s Aeneid. After the Bible, perhaps no other book has had more direct effect on western literature and culture. For four hundred years the Aeneid had the place in Latin education that could be compared only to the King James Version of the Bible and the works of Shakespeare in English. Virgil’s language, presentation, the subjects he found important, the subjects over which he simply lingered, all of these sank deep into the heart of Latin literature. The Aeneid became a part of the Christian tradition. Even in the so-called Dark Ages in European history students were exposed to Virgil. Education in Europe and later in the Americas meant Virgil. Whenever writing about the Aeneid, a critic is writing about ideas and forms that have application for all areas of western literature. The story of Aeneas offered real possibilities, involving as it did big ideas in the distant past. Its main outline was fixed, but many of its larger details were fluid. Material could be added or subtracted. It could be used to reflect on recent events but was far enough in the past to be neutral. The Aeneid is characterized by inclusiveness. It is a public Roman epic, written for a particular audience. It is also Virgil’s epic. It represents a series of rapprochements between what the establishment wanted and what Virgil, the thinking Roman, wanted. In the process of fulfilling both sets of expectations, Virgil wrote an epic not just for Rome, but for generations to come. Virgil’s epic is on one level a conflation of the Iliad and the Odyssey, but a conflation that is radically directed away from largely self-centered, self-sufficient heroes to a hero and a chosen people. Virgil reinvented the epic for an exploration of human nature in a social and political situation. He and his original audience would have been conscious of a sense of coming age of Latin literature with such a controlled reuse of Homer, but this was not the poem’s real purpose or even his main reason for using Homer. Virgil manipulated
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WHAT DO I READ NEXT?
The Eclogues, Virgil’s first published collection of poetry, published about 38 BCE , are pastorals, poems set in an idealized countryside among herdsmen and small landowners. Reality intrudes in Eclogues 1 and 9, which concern the confiscation of Virgil’s farm.
Virgil wrote the Georgics in four sections. This handbook of agriculture, published about 29 BCE , was also intended to promote the revival of traditional Roman pastoral and agrarian life, with an emphasis on family life, hard work, practical patriotism, and simplicity of manners and pleasures.
David Wishart’s I, Virgil (1995) is a fictional autobiography of Virgil. It assumes that Virgil was ambivalent toward his protagonist Aeneas and the scope and plot of the Aeneid because he had reservations about the rule of Caesar Augustus.
Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007) is a novel about a teenage Native American boy who switches to a rich white school to increase his opportunities and must deal with the consequences of being an outcast in both communities.
Ursula Le Guin’s novel Lavinia (2009) tells the story of Aeneas and the Trojans landing in Italy from Lavinia’s point of view. Lavinia is almost an afterthought in Virgil’s epic where the men solve their problems on the field of battle, but she is a crucial connection between Rome, Troy, and Italy.
the earlier material to write a commentary on the heroic life into his own poem. The Aeneid was written to explore the source and meaning of the Roman way of life, the tool of divine providence. Against this providential social history is the history of the heart—and not Aeneas’s heart alone. All the private human plans and hopes of characters great and small are caught within the
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larger sweep of the will of the gods. These personal passages in the Aeneid have generated interest because paradoxically Virgil’s treatment of the individual conveys the universal in the particular. The vision of what the providential role of Rome in human history could be is just and dignified. It was the gods’ offer of a humane society for the world, in which evil would be overcome by the concerted physical and ethical courage of the Roman people. Unfortunately, even in the poem’s projected future that role remains only a possibility, doomed to be frustrated, not only by those who do not understand it, but by the character who is expected to bring it into being, Aeneas. The reader is constantly confronted with the paradox that in pursuit of this Roman ideal, Aeneas becomes less than he was. Kenneth Quinn wrote in his book Virgil’s Aeneid: A Critical Description, that Virgil is ‘‘rarely completely on the side of any character in his poem and completely against the character opposing him.’’ It is impossible to find a character in the epic who does not show some ambiguity. Nevertheless, criticism, particularly of the major characters, has too often attempted to read characters as either good or bad and not as Virgil meant them to be read, human and fallible. The characters make their own lives and deaths with their decisions. Like all great literature, the Aeneid is about characters’ reactions to events and to each other. Moral responsibility cannot be shirked. Tears are not only shed by men and women, and caused by them. Presiding over human action and choices are the gods. Divine providence is as ambiguous and dark as human nature in the Aeneid. Critics and readers focus on Juno’s rage. More disconcerting is the chilling picture of the gods destroying Troy on the night of the city’s fall. The vision of these vast beings pulling up the walls of Troy, while antlike humans fight and flee is terrifying. Troy is not innocent, but on that night it hardly seems to matter. Only Jupiter rises above this divine terror. His is the vision, his is the disposition of all things toward a plan, but it is only late in the poem that he masters the other divine powers in the poem’s universe. The new world order is being mapped out not merely on earth, but in heaven. Thematic discussions take up a large part of critical analysis, particularly those aimed at firsttime readers who meet the poem in translation. Virgil’s characters and themes are memorable because they tap into constants of the human
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situation and because of his technique. For readers who do not know Latin, a good entry into Virgil’s technique is his use of imagery. It has been remarked that Virgil has a small vocabulary of images. What Virgil does with that relatively restricted range of images is more important. Virgil in his chosen dactylic hexameter was perhaps the most technically skilled poet in the history of western literature. It has even been suggested that Virgil’s perfection exhausted the possibilities of the hexameter at the same time it created an expectation for it. This perfection cannot be experienced in a translation. What can be seen in a good translation, and even more clearly with a good translation and a little Latin, is the way Virgil chooses and arranges his words and ideas within a pattern of symmetry and variation. The meaning of the whole is always greater than the meaning of the individual words. From individual lines up to the poem as a whole, Virgil constantly balances ideas, images, characters, and actions against one another. Within that balancing he uses variety. This variety is not an exact one-on-one replacement. Instead Virgil’s variation extends meaning and action a little at a time. It occurs from the level of the line to the level of verse paragraphs to whole books and in the poem as a whole. For example, one short passage in Book 1 (lines 1.490–504), which introduces Dido for the first time, shows Virgil at his best. Aeneas is looking at a representation of Penthesilea, an Amazon queen who died helping her Trojan allies. This work of art begins to function as a simile as the narrative moves on to the approach of Dido. Dido appears exactly in the center of the fifteen-line passage. Her appearance is accompanied by another simile comparing her to Diana and her followers dancing through the wilderness. Penthesilea is used to bring Dido on the stage since she too is a queen who will die because of helping the Trojans. The image of the Amazon moving through the armies like fire begins the passage and Dido’s radiance as she moves through the crowd ends it. The comparison with Diana looks positive, but it is subtly dangerous. There is an ironic resonance in the line that records the happiness in Latona’s heart for the grace of her divine daughter, since Latona’s children had been known to destroy those who thought themselves happier than the gods. Source: Helen Conrad O’Briain, Critical Essay on Aeneid, in Epics for Students, 2nd ed., Gale, Cengage Learning, 2011.
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Jennifer Howard In the following essay, Howard evaluates the contribution Sarah Ruden makes in her blank-verse translation of the Aeneid. For more than 2,500 years, classical epic has been the province of men: written by, for, and about them, and passed down through the centuries by male translators. One could certainly describe Virgil’s Aeneid as a manly poem. From its armsand-the-man opening to its climactic blood bath on the battlefield, the Latin epic tells a tale of exile, combat, and slaughter, with a body count rivaling that of Homer’s Iliad. Women figure mostly as collateral damage. In what appears to be a first, however, a woman has finally tried her hand at bringing Virgil’s dactylic hexameters to a modern, English-speaking public. This month Yale University Press publishes a blank-verse translation by the poet and classicist Sarah Ruden. And she has plenty of company. The Aeneid has never been a forgotten work, but since the most recent millennial turn, it has enjoyed a burst of renewed popularity with translators. Four major English-language versions have appeared in the past three years alone. They include a blockbuster 2006 translation from Viking by the late Robert Fagles, who was an emeritus professor of comparative literature at Princeton University. In 2005, Stanley Lombardo, a professor of classics at the University of Kansas, came out with a version, published by the Hackett Publishing Company, that has legions of admirers. And Frederick Ahl, a professor of classics and comparative literature at Cornell University, weighed in with a version last November, published by Oxford University Press.
ALTHOUGH MOST SCHOLARS AGREE THAT WOMEN HAVE, UNTIL NOW, MOSTLY STEERED CLEAR OF GREEK AND LATIN EPIC, THEY HAVE MORE THAN ONE THEORY ABOUT WHY.’’
It raises an urgent question—What price empire?—even as it creates a foundational myth of how a great empire came to be. In an age that has had its fill of war and foreign adventures, Virgil’s epic, written 2,000 years ago, still speaks volumes. Although the biographical details remains sketchy, we know that Virgil (70 BC –19 BC ) lived through the civil wars that marked the death throes of the Roman Republic and the birth of the Roman Empire. He found a powerful patron, Maecenas, at the court of Augustus Caesar and probably read the Aeneid to the emperor and his sister, Octavia. We also know that the epic was unfinished at Virgil’s death. Almost immediately, however, it became required reading for Roman schoolboys, for whom it was a model tale of empire building and the making of a leader. But this war story is also a tale of piety, loyalty, sacrifice, grief, and perseverance. It describes how a family and a people survive catastrophe—the sack of Troy—and make a new home for themselves, founding what will one day become a great empire, Rome.
At least two more editions are in the works, one by the poet and translator David Ferry, widely admired for his Horace translations, and the other by Jane Wilson Joyce, a professor of literature in the classical-studies program at Centre College, in Kentucky, who is about four-fifths of the way through her own Aeneid.
The first six books of the tale describe Aeneas’ flight from Troy with his father, Anchises, and his young son, Iulus. Along the way, the hero encounters storms, shipwreck, and ill-fated romance. He briefly falls for Dido, queen of Carthage, who kills herself after Aeneas abandons her to fulfill his destiny.
All this activity comes at a time when scholars have broken free of the constraints imposed by a tradition that stretches back to the early English translations of the 17th and 18th centuries. Bringing a sense of personal passion to the task, modern translators are reminding readers that for all the fierceness and grandeur of the events it describes, the Aeneid is also intimate, at times even tender.
The second, less familiar half of the epic— Books 7–12—follows the hero as he lands in Italy and must fight what amounts to a bitter civil war to claim his empire. Aeneas wins, but not before countless warriors have slaughtered one another. The epic ends with an especially troubling moment: Aeneas denies mercy to Turnus, leader of the opposing force, and skewers him in a fit of rage on the battlefield. The moment ends the story on a discordant
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note, as the most faithful and pious of heroes succumbs to a dramatic loss of self-control. It is likely that Virgil did not intend to end the book with that scene; he probably had in mind a much longer work, which would have followed Aeneas’ evolution from warrior to statesman. Either way the harsh ending and the story’s account of the human cost of war have kept scholars debating: Was Virgil an empire booster, or a critic who managed to question the imperial enterprise even as he celebrated it? Our own recent, bloody history makes it easy to hear echoes in Virgil’s tragedy. That has made the Aeneid even more appealing to a post-Vietnam generation of translators. ‘‘Particularly when you get meaningless wars like World War I, Vietnam, and Iraq, the legitimacy of death gets questioned,’’ says Richard F. Thomas, a professor of Greek and Latin and director of graduate studies in the classics department at Harvard University. ‘‘This is a poem that activates that question pretty well: Is Rome worth it?’’ He points to a 1971 translation by Allen Mandelbaum as one that has been particularly popular with instructors ‘‘who wanted to get Virgil as a postVietnam poet.’’ That resonance has not faded. The cover photo on Lombardo’s 2005 version is a closeup of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall, with the names of the fallen inscribed on black stone. On the subject of Virgil’s attitude toward war, Sarah Ruden warns against casting an ancient tragedy as some kind of modern political statement. ‘‘People make a fundamental mistake arguing about the politics of the Aeneid,’’ says Ruden, a visiting fellow at Yale Divinity School. ‘‘It’s about things that have to be, about which people have no choice, and that means it’s about submission to the divine will.’’ Ruden acknowledges ‘‘a lot of grappling’’ with that aspect of the Aeneid. ‘‘This runs up hard against my Quaker faith because Quakers are not strongly about accepting the divine will,’’ she says. ‘‘People are bound to express their faith in God by going out and changing things for the better.’’ Born in 1962 in Bowling Green, Ohio, and raised in the countryside, Ruden grew up Methodist and became a Quaker late in her graduate training at Harvard University. She had already studied and translated Virgil as a classics major at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where she wrote her senior thesis on the poet’s Eclogues.
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‘‘It was all about stylistic hotdogging and emotional grandstanding,’’ she says. ‘‘I’d had enough Latin by that time that I could see what an amazing writer he was.’’ She did her doctoral work in classics at Harvard. There, she recalls, ‘‘somebody told me, ‘Don’t work on Ovid. All of these women work on Ovid.’’’ Rather than study a writer known for his love elegies as well as the Metamorphoses, she chose the harderedged satirist Petronius instead. Scholars, she believes, should be careful not to wall themselves off. ‘‘Several generations of women have been trained in classical languages and literature just the same as men. But you still see many, many women working on love poetry— a tiny portion of the works that survive—and talking and writing endlessly about ‘gender’ in prescribed terms. It’s like a seraglio.’’ Throughout her career, Ruden has not let gender determine which texts she works with or how she approaches them. She has published translations of Petronius’ Satyricon, Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, and the Homeric Hymns. Last year she arrived at Yale to work on her current project, which she describes as ‘‘an exploration of the letters of Paul against the background of Greco-Roman literature.’’ Ruden intends her translations for popular and classroom audiences rather than for fellow scholars. Like many of Virgil’s translators, she is a published poet in her own right. She holds a master’s degree from the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars. Even in her own work, Ruden has never been drawn to free-form verse. ‘‘I haven’t published any nonmetrical poetry,’’ she says. ‘‘I think my personal inclinations can be justified in terms of ancient poetry, which is very strictly metrical, very intricately metrical.’’ That predilection matches up well with Virgil’s hexameter scheme. The trick for Ruden, as for every translator, is how to render Virgil’s economical Latin compelling in English, which is a far baggier language. Like many other translators, including Robert Fitzgerald and David Ferry, Ruden opted to work in iambic pentameter. More unusual was her decision to translate roughly line for line, so that her Aeneid is about the same length as the original. Most English versions run longer. The risk of her approach, she says, ‘‘is too much compression.
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I could even be accused of translating in a way that’s inappropriate to English.’’ But she did not approach the epic for the poetic challenge of it, or to be a feminist trailblazer. She signed on for practical reasons. ‘‘I had to do it to stay in translation,’’ she explains. ‘‘I had to do a major work. I had to do one that’s taught very often.’’ She continues, ‘‘But I got caught up. This was something that came to mean a lot to me.’’ Here her personal history guided her. After completing her doctorate, Ruden found her first teaching job at the University of Cape Town. Living in South Africa, a country still gripped by turmoil at the end of apartheid, she says she came to understand how Virgil felt about the brutality of civil war. ‘‘How imperial conflict works itself out isn’t an academic matter for me,’’ she explains. ‘‘The Aeneid isn’t a stiff antiquarian pageant. It’s immediate and primal. ‘They’re taking our stuff! They want all of it! They’re killing us for it! Let’s kill them first!’’’ ‘‘I don’t believe I put the slightest strain on the Latin in trying to echo Virgil’s defensiveness and helpless grief,’’ she says, ‘‘but first I had to understand it, and Africa gave me that gift.’’ Although most scholars agree that women have, until now, mostly steered clear of Greek and Latin epic, they have more than one theory about why. Stephen Harrison, a professor of classical languages and literature at the University of Oxford, believes that the phenomenon dates back to the time when the works themselves took shape. ‘‘Epic was perceived in antiquity as a male prestige genre,’’ he wrote in an e-mail message to The Chronicle, ‘‘and the fact that anyone who knows any classical languages will have a view on a translation of Homer or Virgil makes it a tough thing to do, especially for women in prefeminist days when it was wrongly thought that women could not learn classical languages to the levels of men.’’ Another scholar, Barbara Weiden Boyd, thinks that the combination of language and genre has not been very hospitable to women. A professor of classics at Bowdoin College, she has published a textbook of selections from the Aeneid. ‘‘There’s something about Latin, but there’s also something about epic, because that’s also so implicated and embedded in Western literary hierarchy,’’ Boyd says. ‘‘The subject matter is about the
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world of men, but it’s also poetry that forms men and that educates men and that’s for a male readership, and somehow that all works together, it seems to me.’’ For Stanley Lombardo, the tradition of English translation hasn’t helped. ‘‘Pope’s Iliad and Odyssey established this standard for epic decorum, and it’s all grand and high diction. What woman would want to touch that?’’ Lombardo has made a name for himself not only as a translator but also as a performer of Homer and Virgil. He is emblematic of the new breed of Virgil translator, for whom the Aeneid is anything but stuffy and highfalutin. ‘‘This is living literature, and that’s how it should be rendered,’’ he says. ‘‘The immediacy of Greek and Latin literature is astonishing when you read it that way.’’ To do justice to the Aeneid, Lombardo says, ‘‘it’s got to pulse with life.’’ Richard Thomas, of Harvard, points to a phrase in Lombardo’s edition that illustrates that turn in translation. ‘‘Without very much justification on the level of Virgil’s Latin but a great deal of justification from what’s going on in the poem,’’ he says, ‘‘Lombardo writes ‘shock and awe,’ which immediately takes one to more-recent events and sets one asking the question, Are we Rome?’’ Jane Wilson Joyce, well into her own translation of the Aeneid, has, like Ruden, opted for a line-for-line approach. ‘‘I try, at least in general, to keep a vaguely dactylic rhythm going, but it’s amazing how often it wants to turn around into anapests,’’ she says. The economy of Latin compared to English is ‘‘so unfair,’’ she adds. ‘‘It’s just a joy.’’ Like Ruden, she sees beyond the story’s martial themes: ‘‘I find Virgil a tender presence. So even when horrible things are happening on the battlefield, there is a tenderness, and his feel for human relationships, his feel for landscape, and his pity for humans is something that I find intensely appealing.’’ Joyce laughs. ‘‘I don’t know—I’m in love with the guy.’’ Such a sense of personal connection, Sarah Ruden believes, gives female translators an edge over their male counterparts. ‘‘I’m going to get killed for voicing this, but I believe women have the right attitude,’’ she says. ‘‘Women get more involved. The authors are more real to us. We develop relationships with them.’’ Not long ago, she heard a talk at Yale given by Edith Grossman, who translates Gabriel Garcı´ a Ma´rquez’s works into English and has
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done an English-language version of Don Quixote. ‘‘I came away convinced that women, not men, are the natural translators for the great books,’’ Ruden says.
‘‘You shouldn’t take that to an author like Virgil,’’ Ruden argues. ‘‘You’re not being true to his context if you’re thinking in those terms. You have to go back to tragedy.’’
into the undergraduate curriculum, but, like Aeneas, they have to fight to earn their place. In Rak’s experience, an edition becomes entrenched for a while as the classroom favorite, ‘‘and it’s difficult to even think of another translation that could compete with it,’’ he says. ‘‘But along comes a new translation, and people want to have a look at it.’’ Every new translation offers the tantalizing possibility that it will strike closer to the thrill and beauty of the original than any has before. ‘‘The sorrow with any translation,’’ Lombardo says, ‘‘is that you’re never really quite there. You may be someplace almost as good.’’ Behind the hope is a never-ending struggle to crack the code of language. ‘‘I know the Latin of a particular passage once I’ve worked on it,’’ says Ferry. ‘‘Then I start my whole life over again.’’
‘‘Everybody in here is a person, an individual, and they get annihilated in these big events. You have these injured or abandoned women; you have these men who are cannon fodder.’’
‘‘Great works of literature do come from God,’’ Ruden says. ‘‘They are so miraculous, you can’t figure out how a human being could have pulled off something like this.’’
That sense of poignant fatalism touches translators male and female. David Ferry, an emeritus professor of English at Wellesley College, is in the first stages of translation, at work on Book 3 of the Aeneid. But even in the grand early passages, in which Aeneas and his family flee Troy, Ferry sees ‘‘so much else going on besides the epic’’—for example, the way that Aeneas’ boy, Iulus, ‘‘is trying to keep up, matching his father’s footsteps’’ as the city burns behind them . . . .
A translator must strive to see the work in its own terms, she believes, while knowing that such a goal will always be just out of reach. ‘‘But it’s something that you keep pushing and pushing and pushing, until you pass out from exhaustion. You have to keep up hope for an impossible thing. Again, it comes back to religion.’’
Richard Thomas, who taught Ruden at Harvard, puts it this way: ‘‘Epic poetry is the title we give it, but look onto any page and you’re looking at human voices, male and female, you’re looking at the human condition, you’re looking at worlds gone wrong, you’re looking at power and victory and defeat.’’
Source: Jennifer Howard, ‘‘Measuring the Aeneid on a Human Scale,’’ in Chronicle of Higher Education, Vol. 54, No. 36, May 16, 2008, pp. B8 B12.
But she cautions that women who translate ‘‘must follow the Edith Grossman line’’ and keep a certain scholarly distance and balance. ‘‘The danger of emotional engagement is to impose the self on this alien author,’’ she says. Women now have far greater liberties and a much greater sense of their historical oppression than the women of 2,000 years ago did, but that doesn’t mean that a 21st-century translator should, say, portray Dido as a victim of male chauvinism.
Translators take up a text like the Aeneid for an army of reasons. For Sarah Ruden, it began as a practical decision. For Stanley Lombardo, Virgil represented the logical next step in retracing the literary journey from Homer to Dante. (The Inferno is Lombardo’s current project.) For publishers, however, the decision to take on the Aeneid is more and more perilous. How many additional versions does the world need? ‘‘It’s fair to say that it gets more difficult to do this the more translations are published,’’ says Brian Rak, Lombardo’s editor at Hackett. Most Aeneid translations are intended to work their way
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No wonder the ancient poets always began their work with an invocation of the muse.
William S. Anderson In the following excerpt, Anderson discusses the significance of the opening line of the Aeneid: ‘‘I sing of arms and of the man.’’ It is not enough . . . to describe Vergil’s opening [‘‘I sing of arms and of the man’’] as a skillful allusion to inevitable rivalry with Homer. To be sure, he used two nouns of different orders, one referring to a person, one to a thing, and the nouns suggest main elements of the two Homeric narratives. Two nouns together, however, interact; they cannot be absorbed separately as mere equivalents to separate Greek epics. When George Bernard Shaw entitled his comedy Arms and the Man, he knew exactly what he was doing and exactly what Vergil meant with his pair of nouns: they affect
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each other. Shaw humorously explores some of the paradoxical ways in which warfare affects the personality of the warrior. One appreciates the comedy all the more if he has read the Aeneid and grasped the near-tragic vision which Vergil presents of Aeneas the man of arms. Homer knew that warfare can turn a man into a beast, but in the Iliad war remains a fact with which men must deal; within the limited context of battle, men can become heroes. It is part of Achilles’ tragedy that he can no longer accept the war as a necessary fact for himself. Vergil goes beyond Homer, since he does not present war as a necessary or desirable fact, and furthermore he shows not only that war brutalizes men, but also that men alter the meaning of war. Note, however, that he does not define Aeneas from the beginning as a tragic warrior, as Homer does Achilles. Instead of the negative term ‘‘anger’’ (later elaborated for its ruinous effects), Vergil uses the neutral word ‘‘arms,’’ which he explains in the next lines as crucially important for the establishment of Rome. Together, ‘‘arms and the man’’ could be viewed as positive words, interacting creatively to make possible the good that undoubtedly existed in Rome. So from the beginning Vergil has started a theme of rich ambiguity, a theme which runs through the poem and remains provocatively rich even after the last lines. This Vergilian theme of arms and man is so crucial that the reader should be prepared for it a little more elaborately. Vergil narrates two distinct occasions of war: the fall of Troy and the conquest of Latium. In the first, Aeneas meets defeat; he battles heroically—and his triumphs are not neglected—but the gods do not permit him to die, with conventional heroism, fighting for Trojan home and country. Although briefly bestialized by the exigencies of desperate resistance to the Greeks, Aeneas remains uncompromised; and it is evident that the gods have selected him because he has more importance as man than mere warrior. The second war is more complex. It starts under checkered circumstances, not without some responsibility on the Trojan side. It continues despite many cruel losses on both sides. Aeneas loses control of his passions and slaughters indiscriminately until at last he vents his anger on the guiltless Lausus and the guilty, but devoted, father Mezentius. Neither of these victories is clean and glorious, neither entirely tarnished by circumstances, but our uncertainty as to the attitude to adopt toward them applies to Aeneas as well. What is this war doing to him and to his ultimate goal? We see now that Vergil never
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intended to limit our sight to arms and Aeneas in themselves. We are always concerned, as we were but rarely in the Iliad, with the ultimate purpose to which this warfare is instrumental. Aeneas while being a man, also stands for Rome itself. If his victories are compromised, what happens to the Rome he founds? That is the tragic question which Vergil makes us face in Book Twelve, as we watch the encounter between Aeneas and Turnus. Without any obvious guilt on his part (such as Achilles’ anger), Aeneas becomes so involved in the Italian war as to render his final victory equivocal. A few words about Vergil’s verb ‘‘I sing.’’ Just as Vergil felt free to exploit Homeric convention and to present a theme of complexity that accorded with the new complexities of civilization seven centuries after Homer, so he altered somewhat his relation to material and reader. I have already emphasized the tradition of impersonality and insisted that Vergil could not have begun with a set of autobiographical lines. Now it is time to note the other facet of the poem: with all its impersonal narrative devices, it is also highly personal. A recent writer has used the term ‘‘subjective,’’ and perhaps that is more serviceable here, to avoid the awkwardness of the pair ‘‘impersonal’’ and ‘‘personal.’’ Vergil’s subjectivity is developed from a post-Homeric attitude in Greek and Roman writers, who openly placed themselves in their poetry, expressing attitudes toward narrated events and openly influencing readers. It is too much to detect in ‘‘I sing’’ an assertion of this artistic method. The reader, however, will do well to notice how often and ambiguously Vergil suggests attitudes, especially sympathy for Aeneas’ victims. . . . In the myths about Troy, there is little doubt that the city deserved its destruction. A heritage of deceit and ruthless exploitation culminated in the selfish lust of Paris, who stole Helen, the wife of the man who was his host in Sparta, and heedlessly took her back to Troy, where the Trojan leaders permitted him to enjoy his criminal passion. Homer adds to this heritage of evil by staging a violation of truce negotiations: Pandarus shoots Menelaus, the injured husband, at the moment when a carefully arranged duel has promised to settle the war with a minimum of bloodshed. Thus, although the individual Trojan might feel deeply the defeat of his country, it was conventional to depict the end of Troy as an event favored and promoted by gods as well as men. To escape from Troy, defeated but alive, would mean
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to leave behind the sinful taint of the past and to seek some new, creative future. And since Aeneas was permitted to escape, it should also follow that he himself was hardly tainted by the misdeeds of Paris and other members of Priam’s family. In Italy, destiny had chosen a new environment for the Trojans under Aeneas; there, the good aspects of the Trojan heritage could flourish, stimulated by the change of milieu and the proximity to the new Italian culture. At one level, then, the flight from Troy to Rome signifies the abandonment of a corrupt past and dedication to a creative future in a new land—all this happening far back in the mythical past just after the Trojan War, that is, around 1200 BC But Vergil saw more immediate, contemporary relevance in the Trojan theme, and he shared his insight with other writers of the period. Also writing in the 20’s, Horace published a poem in which he made much of the Trojan War, the move to Italy, and the hostility of Juno. . . . Horace’s theme concerns the absolute and necessary break between guilty Troy, which must remain ruined and uninhabited, and the new land founded by the Trojan survivors. To this extent, his short Ode 3.3 parallels Vergil’s epic. Horace also links this remote mythical past with the present by comparing the reward of apotheosis won by Romulus, Aeneas’ descendant who founded Rome, with the divinity to be granted Augustus for his heroic achievements. For Horace the myth of Troy-Rome was a symbolic story which could be applied fruitfully to contemporary history. Vergil made a similar application on a larger epic canvass. Source: William S. Anderson, ‘‘Virgil Begins His Epic,’’ in The Art of the ‘‘Aeneid,’’ Prentice Hall, 1969, pp. 1 23.
SOURCES Fagles, Robert, trans., The Aeneid, by Virgil, Penguin Classics, 2008. Garner, Richard, ‘‘Virgil Up to Speed,’’ in New Criterion, Vol. 26, No. 9, May 2008, p. 85.
Matyszak, Philip, Chronicle of the Roman Republic, Thames & Hudson, 2003, p. 19. Quinn, Kenneth, Virgil’s ‘‘Aeneid’’: A Critical Descrip tion, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968, p. 8. Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars, translated by Robert Graves, Penguin Classics, 2007.
FURTHER READING Bates, Catherine, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the Epic, Cambridge University Press, 2010. This resource covers four thousand years of epics, from the Epic of Gilgamesh to Omeros. Fagles, Robert, trans., Aeneid, by Virgil, Penguin Classics, 2008. Shortly before his death, seasoned translator and classics scholar, Robert Fagles published his translation of Virgil’s epic, which won high critical acclaim. Marks, Anthony, and Graham Tingay, The Romans, San Val, 2005. This book is for younger readers, but its layout makes it an excellent source for presentations. Handouts and charts can be simply made by enlarging pages. Reynolds, L. D., ‘‘Vergil,’’ in Texts and Transmissions: A Survey of Latin Classics, Clarendon Press, 1986, pp. 433 36. This article is a good introduction to the manu scripts that preserved the text of the Aeneid. Ruden, Sarah, The Aeneid, Yale University Press, 2009. Sarah Ruden’s beautifully written, line by line translation preserves the meaning of epigram matic statements where it has been lost in other versions. Some critics have said this is the clean est of modern translations. Williams, R. D., and T. S. Pattie, Virgil: His Poetry through the Ages, British Library, 1982. This introduction is carefully geared to the first time reader of the Aeneid. It includes a synopsis of the epic. The chapter ‘‘Virgil Today’’ is probably the best place to begin reading criticism on the Aeneid.
SUGGESTED SEARCH TERMS Aeneas
Lancel, Serge, Carthage: A History, translated by Anto nia Nevill, Blackwell, 1997, pp. 21 31.
Caesar Augustus
Latacz, Joachim, Troy and Homer: Towards a Solution of an Old Mystery, translated by Kevin Windle and Rosh Ireland, Oxford University Press, 2005.
Lavinia
Leithauser, Brad, ‘‘Wars and a Man,’’ in New York Times Book Review, December 17, 2006, p. 1.
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Dido AND Carthage
Roman mythology Virgil Virgil AND Aeneid
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Beowulf The Old English poem Beowulf follows its main character from heroic youth to heroic old age. Beowulf saves a neighboring people from the monster Grendel; eventually becomes the king of his own people; and dies defending them from a dragon. It is a great adventure story and a deeply philosophical one. Scholars differ over the poem’s original purpose and audience, but Beowulf probably appealed to a wide audience and garnered a range of responses.
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Beowulf survives in one manuscript, which is known as British Library Cotton Vitellius A. 15. At least one scholar believes the manuscript is the author’s original, but most scholars believe it is the last in a succession of copies. Beowulf may have been written at any time between about 675 CE and the date of the manuscript, about 1000 CE . No one knows where the manuscript was before it surfaced in the hands of Laurence Nowell in the sixteenth century. An edition of Beowulf was published by G. S. Thorkelin in 1815, but for over one hundred years, study focused on Beowulf not as poetry, but on what it could tell about the early Germanic tribes and language (philology). J. R. R. Tolkien’s ‘‘The Monsters and the Critics’’ redirected study to the poem as literature. The 1939 excavation of the Sutton Hoo ship burial in Suffolk, England, and Tolkien’s own Lord of the Rings, influenced by his lifelong study of Beowulf, helped to interest general readers in the
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poem. Since then translations and adaptations of the poem have increased the poem’s audience and recognition. Notably, Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney published a bestselling, easy-to-read modern English translation in 2001 that was reissued in 2007 with one hundred illustrations. This epic poem has influenced modern adventure fantasy and inspired at least two bestsellers, comic books, and even a Beowulf/Star Trek Voyager cross-over.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY As of the early 2000, the person who wrote Beowulf remained unidentified. Scholars had suggested at least two possible candidates, but neither of these was generally accepted. Many dates and places have been suggested for the composition of Beowulf. Most of the theories suffer from wishful thinking: Scholars connect it to a favorite time and place. It is no use, however, to show where and when it might have been written. It must be shown that it could not have been written anywhere else at any other time in order for a theory to be conclusive. Early critics often stressed the antiquity of the poet’s material and attempted to break the poem down into a number of older lays (see Style section below). Others have pointed to Northumbria during the lifetime of the scholar Bede (c. 672–c. 735) as the place and time in which the poem was written because Northumbria was culturally advanced and Bede was a great Anglo-Saxon scholar. The kingdom of Mercia during the reign of Offa the Great (756–798) has also been suggested, partially because the poet included thirty-one lines praising Offa’s ancestor, another Offa. In subsequent criticism a later composition date became popular. Scholar Kevin Kiernan believes that the existing manuscript may be the author’s own copy, which would mean the poem was written very close to 1000 CE . An early date for Beowulf (675–700) has frequently connected it with East Anglia. It has been suggested that the East Anglian royal family considered themselves descended from Wiglaf, who comes to Beowulf’s aid during the dragon fight. The main argument for this early date, however, is based on archaeology. The poem’s descriptions of magnificent burials reflect practices of the late sixth and seventh centuries, but this does not mean the poem was written then. A person witnessing such a burial might describe it accurately fifty years later to a child who might
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then repeat the description another fifty years later to a person who might then write it down a century after the burial happened. Some scholars assume that the poem, celebrating the ancestors of the Vikings, could not have been written after their raids on England began. Others suggest that a mixed Viking Anglo-Saxon era or even the reign of the Danish Canute (King of England when the manuscript was written) would have been the most obvious time. It has also been suggested that the poem might have been written to gain the allegiance of Vikings settled in England to the family of Alfred, since they claimed Scyld as an ancestor. However, it is just as feasible that Alfred’s family added Scyld to their family tree because he and his family were so famous through an already existing Beowulf.
PLOT SUMMARY Narrative in Beowulf The action of Beowulf is not straightforward. The narrator foreshadows actions that occur later. Characters talk about things that have already happened. Both narrator and characters recall incidents and characters outside the poem’s main narrative. These digressions (see Style section below) are connected thematically to the main action. Critics once saw the digressions as flaws. The poet, however, consciously used them to characterize human experience, stressing recurring patterns, and to represent the characters’ attempts to understand their situation.
The Kings of the Danes and the Coming of Grendel Scyld was found by the Danes as a small boy in a boat washed ashore. The Danes at this time were without a leader and oppressed by their neighboring countries. Scyld grew to be a great warrior king and made the Danes a powerful nation. Dying, he ordered the Danes to send him back in a ship to the sea from which he came. They placed him in a ship surrounded by treasures and pushed it out to sea— and ‘‘no one knows who received that freight.’’ Scyld’s son, Beowulf Scylding, becomes king in his turn. His son Healfdene takes the throne, and thenHealfdene’ssonHrothgarsucceedshim.Hrothgar builds a great hall, Heorot, in which to entertain and rewardhispeople.There are greatfestivities at its opening, but the music and laughter enraged Grendel, a human monster living underwater nearby.
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MEDIA ADAPTATIONS
Beowulf was adapted in 1981 as the featurelength animated film Grendel, Grendel, Grendel by independent Australian director and producer Alexander Stitt. The film is narrated by Peter Ustinov as the voice of Grendel.
Kenneth Pickering and Christopher Segal adapted Beowulf as a rock musical. The book and music were published by Samuel French in 1982 as Beowulf: A Rock Musical.
A movie version of Beowulf was made in 1999 by Dimension Studio, starring Christopher Lambert and Rhona Mitra. In 2003, Beowulf and the Anglo-Saxons was made by Arts Magic Studio. The film traces the origins of the tribes in the epic and examines the story according to the society of its time. In 2004, Educational Video Network produced Background to Beowulf, a DVD that explains historical and literary traditions relevant to the epic.
Benjamin Bagby is famous for his onstage dramatization of Beowulf. His performance was recorded on DVD in 2006 by Koch Vision.
In 2007, Cerebellum released a DVD study guide about Beowulf for its Rochetbooks series.
A computer-generated animation of Beowulf was released in 2007 by Paramount Studios with voices and character images by Ray Winstone, Crispin Glover, Angelina Jolie, Robin Wright Penn, and Anthony Hopkins.
A 48-minute DVD production of Beowulf, created by Eagle Rock Productions in 2008, is intended to be an entertaining way to learn about a great book.
Outlander, starring James Caviezel and Sophia Myles, is a 2008 movie from the Weinstein Company with a plot that follows the Beowulf story, but the hero is an extraterrestrial.
The 2009 film Life in the Age of Beowulf, available on DVD, explores archaeological discoveries at a village settled during the historical period in which Beowulf is set.
A modern retelling with contemporary dialogue, the 2005 movie Beowulf and Grendel was filmed by Starz/Anchor Bay Studio in Iceland and has a cast of Icelandic actors.
That night Grendel breaks into Heorot, slaughters and eats thirty of Hrothgar’s men (the king’s warriors would normally sleep in the hall). This happens again the next night. After that, ‘‘it was easy to find him who sought rest somewhere else.’’ Grendel haunts the hall by night for twelve years. The Danes despair of ridding themselves of him. They can neither defeat him nor come to terms with him.
Beowulf Comes to the Kingdom of Hrothgar Danish sailors bring news of Grendel to King Hygelac of the Geats whose nephew (also named Beowulf Scylding) has a growing reputation for strength and monster-killing. Beowulf, supported
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by the wisest men of his people, resolves to go to Hrothgar’s aid and sets off by ship with fourteen companions. They land in Denmark and are met and questioned by a coast guard who, impressed with Beowulf, sends them to Heorot. Hrothgar receives them and accepts Beowulf’s offer of help. Hrothgar knew Beowulf as a child and interprets Beowulf’s arrival at his court as an act of gratitude. He had sheltered Beowulf’s father, Ecgtheow, when he was an exile and made peace for him with his powerful enemies. Unferth, an official of the court, attempts to discredit Beowulf with the story of a swimming match Beowulf had as a boy with another boy, Breca. Beowulf exonerates himself with his version of the swimming match. Wealtheow, Hrothgar’s
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queen, welcomes Beowulf. The young man tells her that he would lay down his life to defeat Grendel. She thanks God for his resolve.
‘‘man-price,’’ the payment made to a man’s lord or his family by someone responsible for his death as an indemnity.) A lay, or short narrative poem, of a famous battle is sun as entertainment.
Beowulf’s Fight with Grendel
Wealtheow acknowledges Beowulf’s great deed, but counsels her husband not to alienate his nephew Hrothulf by adopting Beowulf. She hopes aloud that Hrothulf will remember all she and the king did for him when he was young and will treat his young cousins, their sons, well. Wealtheow then gives Beowulf a magnificent golden necklace (worn at that time by both men and women). Wealtheow asks Beowulf to be a good friend to her sons. She ends by saying that in Heorot all the men are loyal to one another and do her will. The original Anglo-Saxon audience knew from existing legends and stories that Hrothulf would later kill his two cousins.
Hrothgar gives Beowulf and his companions the duty of guarding Heorot that night. The young man decides to face Grendel without weapons since Grendel does not use them. He tells those around him that the outcome of the fight is in the hands of God. The Danes leave the hall, Beowulf and his companions bed down for the night. When darkness falls, Grendel comes stalking across the empty moors. Intent on slaughter and food, he has no idea what is waiting for him in the hall. He bursts open the Heorot’s heavy ironbound doors with the touch of his hand and rushes in, grabs one of the sleeping Geats, eats him, greedily gulping down the blood, and then grabs Beowulf. Beowulf has had a moment to get oriented, however, and wrestles with Grendel. Surprised by Beowulf’s strength Grendel tries to get away, but cannot. They struggle, Beowulf refusing to break his grip. Beowulf’s companions try to wound Grendel, only to find he is impervious to their weapons. In the end, Grendel manages pull away from Beowulf, leaving his arm in the hero’s grasp. He flees, bleeding, to his lair.
The Morning after the Battle With morning the Danes come from the surrounding countryside to see the huge arm, its nails like steel, and the bloody trail of the dying monster. Some of them follow the trail to the water’s edge and come back singing Beowulf’s praises. One of the king’s men compares Beowulf to the great dragon-slayer, Sigemund. (In the legends on which Nibelungenlied is based, it is Sigemund’s son Siegfried who is the dragon slayer.) Hrothgar thanks God that he has lived to see Grendel stopped. He publicly announces that he will now consider Beowulf his son. Beowulf tells the Hrothgar that he wishes the king might have seen the fight. He says that he had hoped to kill Grendel outright, but it was not God’s will.
Celebrations in Honor of Beowulf’s Victory There is a celebration in honor of Beowulf and his companions. Hrothgar gives him magnificent gifts, including a golden banner, sword, and armor. The other Geats are given rich gifts too. Hrothgar gives treasure for the man whom Grendel has eaten. (This probably represents his wergyld, literally
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Grendel’s Mother Comes for Vengeance and Beowulf Tracks Her to Her Lair The Geats are given new quarters for the night and Danish warriors sleep in the hall for the first time in many years. While the Danes are sleeping, Grendel’s mother comes to avenge her son. She carries off Aeschere, Hrothgar’s friend and counselor, a man who had always stood at his side in battle. Beowulf finds Hrothgar broken with grief over the loss of his friend. Hrothgar tells Beowulf what the Danes know about the monsters and the wilds where they live. Beowulf offers to track Grendel’s mother to her underwater lair, remarking that it is better to perform noble deeds before death and better to avenge a friend than mourn him too much. Hrothgar, Beowulf, and their men ride to the sea where they find Aeshere’s head at the edge of the overhanging cliffs. Unferth, now deeply impressed by Beowulf’s generous heroism, loans Beowulf his sword. Beowulf asks Hrothgar to take care of his companions and to send Hygelac the treasures he had been given for killing Grendel if he (Beowulf) dies.
Beowulf’s Fight with Grendel’s Mother Beowulf enters the water and is seized by Grendel’s mother who drags him to her den, which is dry despite its underwater entrance. Unferth’s sword is useless against this monstrous hag. Beowulf wrestles with her. The woman trips him and tries to stab him with her dagger, but the blade is turned by his chainmail (a mesh tunic of fine interlocked metal rings). He struggles away from her, grabs a great sword hanging on the wall, and strikes off her head. He sees the body of Grendel and cuts off his head too, the sword blade melting
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in his blood. Carrying Grendel’s head and the sword’s hilt, Beowulf swims back to the surface.
Beowulf Returns from the Fight in Triumph Meanwhile from the cliffs above, the waiting men see blood welling up to the surface of the water. Hrothgar and the Danes assume the worst and make their way sorrowfully back to the hall. Beowulf’s companions linger, grieving and forlornly hoping for his return. Beowulf comes to the surface. He and his men return to the hall. He presents Grendel’s head and the hilt of the ancient sword to Hrothgar. Beowulf recounts his underwater fight to the court, acknowledging the grace of God. Hrothgar praises Beowulf and counsels him to use his strength wisely. He warns him of the temptations of prosperity which lead to arrogance and avarice. Beowulf returns Unferth’s sword. He thanks Hrothgar for his great kindness and promises him that if Hrothgar ever needs him, he shall come to his aid with a thousand warriors. Beowulf and his companions return to their ship, and Beowulf presents the kindly coast guard with a sword.
Beowulf’s Return to His Uncle’s Court Beowulf and his companions return home and go immediately to his uncle’s hall. Hygelac’s young queen, Hygd, is presiding with her husband. Hygelac welcomes his nephew back with great warmth. Beowulf narrates his adventures. In particular he talks about Hrothgar’s daughter, Freawaru, who is engaged to Ingeld, a prince whose people are hereditary enemies of the Danes. Beowulf fears the marriage will not end the feud and that Ingeld will have to decide between his people and his young wife. This passage exactly predicts what happens in the Ingeld legend. Thus the epic’s original listeners were likely moved by Beowulf’s wisdom and prescience in predicting the strife that is to come. Beowulf presents Wealtheow’s and Hrothgar’s gifts to his uncle and aunt. In return Hygelac gives his nephew a princely estate and his grandfather’s sword.
stumbles upon the treasure and steals a golden cup from it to regain his lord’s favor. The dragon in revenge terrorizes the countryside, burning Beowulf’s hall in the old king’s absence. Beowulf decides to fight the dragon. He orders an iron shield made and assembles an escort of twelve warriors plus the thief, brought along as a guide. They arrive on the cliffs above the barrow. Beowulf, feeling his death is near, looks back over his life and recounts the tragic history of his family and people. He speaks affectionately of his grandfather and the old man’s grief over the accidental death of his eldest son. He speaks bluntly of the warfare between the Geats and Swedes. He recalls his adventures in Denmark. He speaks of his loyalty to his uncle Hygelac. Finally he remembers his uncle’s disastrous raid to the Rhine and his own part in it. He recalls defeating Daegrefn, champion of the Franks, in single combat before both armies by crushing him in a bear hug. Beowulf then announces that he intends to fight the dragon alone. He goes down the path to the treasure barrow and attacks the dragon, but cannot manage to kill it. One of his men, a young warrior Wiglaf, comes to his aid. Together they kill the dragon, but Beowulf is fatally wounded. He dies saying he has no fear in God’s judgment of him and thanking God for allowing him to trade his old life for a great treasure for his people. He tells Wiglaf to take care of the Geats. Finally, he asks that they build a barrow for him on the cliffs where it will be seen and he remembered. The Geats build the barrow, place the treasure in it, and mourn their lost king as the kindest and most worthy of rulers.
CHARACTERS Aeschere Aeschere is Hrothgar’s counselor and friend, his ‘‘wing man’’ in battle. Grendel’s mother murders him in revenge for the death of her son. Hrothgar is brokenwithgriefwhenhelearnsofAeschere’sdeath.
Beowulf The Treasure and the Dragon Years pass. Beowulf’s uncle and his uncle’s son, Heardred, die in battle. Beowulf becomes king of the Geats and rules for fifty years. Then a dragon begins to threaten the land. The dragon has been sleeping on a treasure, deposited in a barrow above the sea centuries before by the last despairing survivor of a noble family. A desperate man
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Beowulf is the son of Hrethel’s daughter and Ecgtheow. From the age of seven, he is raised by his maternal grandfather. He is first and foremost the hero who kills the monsters no one else can face, but he is more than a fighter. Beowulf is a strong man who thinks and feels. His deep affection for his grandfather Hrethel and uncle Hygelac lasts to the end of his long life. He is
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capable of discernment, sensitivity, and compassion. He is concerned about what Freawaru may face in her political marriage. He understands and sympathizes with Wealtheow in her concern for her sons. He, more than any other character, has a sense of God’s hand in human affairs. He alone talks about an afterlife. His impulses are not merely courageous, they are generous. As a young man he comforts Hrothgar at Aeschere’s death, saying that glorious deeds are the best thing for a man to take into death. Dying, he thanks God that he has been allowed to trade his old life for a treasure for his people and commits their welfare to Wiglaf. Beowulf is not merely an incredibly strong man skilled in hand-to-hand combat; he is equally skilled with words. His defense against Unferth is a brilliant exercise in oration. His conversation with his uncle on his return home is a formal relation, the official report of an ambassador. When he looks backward on his life and times before his final fight, he produces the sort of historical memoir that was long the hallmark of the elder statesman. His choices may not have always been what people around him wanted, whether in his decision not to take the throne over his young cousin or in his decision to fight the dragon. His choices, however, are never without reasons with which the narrator and the audience can sympathize. Except for monsters, Beowulf kills only two human beings: Daegrefn, the champion of the Franks, during his uncle’s disastrous raid in the lands at the mouth of the Rhine, and Onela, who was responsible for his cousin Heardred’s death. Except for an expedition against the Swedes, Beowulf does not engage in any war during his reign.
Beowulf Scylding Beowulf Scylding is the son of Scyld, father of Healfdene, and grandfather of Hrothgar.
Breca Breca is the boy who has a swimming match with Beowulf. Beowulf admits it is a foolish thing to do. They are separated by a storm at sea. Breca reaches shore in Finland. Beowulf comes ashore after killing nine sea monsters who try to eat him.
Daegrefn Daegrefn is the champion of the Franks. Beowulf defeats him in single combat before the armies of the Geats and the Franks, crushing him in a bear hug.
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Eadgils Eadgils is the son of Othere and grandson of the Swedish king Ongetheow. He and his brother Eanmund rebel against their uncle, King Onela. They are sheltered by Heardred and the Geats. Beowulf, to avenge his cousin, supports Eadgils in taking the throne.
Eanmund Son of Othere and grandson of the Swedish king Ongetheow, Eanmund and his brother Eadgils rebel against their uncle, King Onela. They are sheltered by Heardred and the Geats.
Ecglaf Ecglaf is Unferth’s father.
Ecgtheow Beowulf’s father, Ecgtheow married the unnamed daughter of Hrethel, king of the Geats. It is likely that Ecgtheow was related to the Swedish royal family, which would explain why the Swedish king, Onela, does not dispute Beowulf’s control of the Geat kingdom after Beowulf’s cousin Heardred dies in battle with the Swedes. Ecgtheow is involved in a feud so violent that only Hrothgar would shelter him. Hrothgar is able to settle the feud.
Freawaru Hrothgar’s daughter, Freawaru gets engaged to Ingeld in the hope that doing so ends the recurring war between the Danes and Ingeld’s people, the Heathobards. Beowulf’s prediction of what is likely to happen is uncannily like what the legends say did happen. The passage characterizes Beowulf as perceptive and sympathetic.
Grendel Grendel is an immensely strong cannibal. Whatever Grendel and his mother may have been in the traditions behind the present poem, in Beowulf they are descendants of Cain, the eldest son of Adam and Eve, and the first murderer. Placing Grendel and his mother in a biblical context made them even easier for the original audience to accept. They live in the wilds, cut off from human society. Grendel’s attack on the hall is motivated by his hatred of joy and light. The Danes cannot hope to come to terms with Grendel or his mother since they are completely outside and beyond human society and understanding.
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Haethcyn Second son of Hrethel, Haethcyn kills his older brother in an archery accident. Haethcyn himself is killed in the border warfare between the Geats and the Swedes. Hygelac, his younger brother, leads the relief party that saves the remnants of the Geatish army at the battle of Ravenswood.
break down, when he is faced with another monster and the death of his closest friend just when he thinks his hall and people are finally safe. Hrothgar recovers his composure and gives Beowulf a philosophy of life that, while austere and pessimistic, is fitted to the world in which they live. As hinted in the poem, he is killed by his son-in-law, Ingeld, and Heorot is burned.
Healfdene Healfdene is Beowulf Scylding’s son and the father of Hrothgar.
Heardred Heardred is the son of Hygelac and Hygd. Beowulf refuses to take the throne before him and acts as his guardian. Heardred is killed in the fighting that follows his intervention in a power struggle between two branches of the Swedish royal family.
Heorogar
Hygd Wife of Hygelac, Hygd represents a perfect queen. She offers the throne to Beowulf after her husband’s death because her son is too young. Interestingly, Hygd’s name means ‘‘thought,’’ and her husband’s name means ‘‘thoughtless.’’
Hygelac Hygelac is Hrethel’s youngest son and the hero of the battle of Ravenswood. He dies on a raid that is initially successful, but ends with the annihilation of the Geatish forces.
Heorogar is Healfdene’s second son.
Ohtere Herebeald Herebeald is Hrethel’s eldest son who is killed by his younger brother Haethcyn in an archery accident.
Ohtere is the son of Ongentheow. His sons Eadgils and Eanmund unsuccessfully rebel against his brother Onela.
Onela Heremod
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Onela is the king of the Swedes and son of Ongentheow. His nephews Eadgils and Eanmund rebel against him. They then seek refuge with Heardred and the Geats. Onela exacts vengeance on the Geats, killing Heardred, but he does not interfere when Beowulf takes the throne. Beowulf helps Eadgils take the Swedish throne and kills Onela in vengeance for his cousin’s death.
Beowulf’s companion Hondscio is eaten by Grendel.
Ongentheow
Hrethel
Ongentheow is the king of the Swedes. He is killed at the battle of Ravenswood.
Heremod is a king of the Danes who reigns before Scyld. Despite his great promise, he grows cruel and avaricious, murdering his own supporters. Both Hrothgar and the retainer who first sings Beowulf’s praises use him as an example of an evil leader.
Hrethel is Beowulf’s maternal grandfather, Hrethel raises Beowulf from the age of seven. He dies of grief after his second son accidentally kills his eldest son. Fighting between the Geats and Swedes begins after Hrethel’s death. Beowulf remembers his grandfather with great affection.
Hrothgar Hrothgar is the great-grandson of Scyld and a successful warrior king. Hrothgar builds the greatest hall in the world and finds himself unable to defend it or his people from Grendel. Only once does his dignity and patient endurance
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Scyld Often called Scyld Scefing, Scyld is the first king of his line. In other ancient accounts, Scyld is said to have arrived alone in a boat as a small child. One tradition holds that he is the son of the biblical Noah and was born aboard the ark. Scyld appears in the genealogy of the West Saxon kings.
Unferth Unferth is characterized as Hrothgar’s ‘‘thyle,’’ but modern scholars are not exactly sure what
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this word means. In glossaries from the Old English period, the word is defined by the Latin word rhetor or orator. Unferth may be the king’s ‘‘press officer,’’ a source of official information about the king and his policies, or he may be a scribe or court jester. He is initially envious of Beowulf’s reputation and reception at court, but later Unferth offers his friendship to Beowulf.
Wealtheow Wealtheow Is a princess of the house of the Helmings and the wife of Hrothgar. She has great dignity, political sense, and status among her husband’s people. She addresses Hrothgar like a counselor.
Wiglaf Wiglaf is the young warrior who comes to the aid of Beowulf when he fights the dragon. Wiglaf is a relative of Beowulf, probably on his father’s side since his connections are Swedish. His father, Weohstan, fought on the Swedish side during their invasion of the Geats following Heardred’s meddling in the internal feuds of the Swedish royal house.
THEMES Fortitude and Wisdom For the narrator and characters, wisdom and fortitude represent an ideal to which every man aspires and which every society needs. Physical bravery was most appreciated when accompanied by understanding and discernment. This discernment was both practical and supported by a larger spiritual understanding of God and the human condition. This is the point of Hrothgar’s ‘‘sermon’’ in lines 1700 to 1782. The Danish coast guard, for example, (lines 229-300) demonstrates these qualities in his respectful treatment of Beowulf and his men. Beowulf is a fearless master of hand-to-hand combat. He is discerning in his understanding and treatment of men and women and in his sense of God. Even if his decision to fight the dragon is questionable, the narrator underlines the reasonableness of its basis. Beowulf’s uncle Hygelac, by contrast, while having great courage, lacks wisdom and falls victim to his own folly and the greater military resources of the Franks.
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Glory and Treasure The characters in Beowulf and its original audience wanted glory, the immortality of good fame, and human memory reaching across time and space. Glory in Beowulf is usually connected with heroism in battle or with generosity. Treasure is the outward manifestation of glory. Men are eager to receive gifts of fine weapons, armor, and jewelry, much as modern athletes measure their own success by comparing their salaries relative to those of other athletes. In the epic, treasure advertises a warrior’s worth and a people’s strength. Devout Christians, however, would have tried to seek the glory that God gives to those who do his will, the imperishable treasure laid up in heaven of the Gospels. They would seek to do their duty, and more than their duty, purely for the love of God and neighbor rather than for earthly fame. Earthly treasure was to be used to do good deeds, not as a display. The narrator’s and the characters’ view of glory is a point of contention among critics. Some see lofgeornost, ‘‘most desirous of praise,’’ the poem’s last word, which is applied to Beowulf, as well as Beowulf’s own words to Hrothgar ‘‘Let him who can, gain good repute before death— that it is the finest thing afterwards for the lifeless man’’ (lines 1384-89) as reflecting badly on Beowulf. It may not be so simple. In the last lines of the poem (3180-82), the qualities for which Beowulf’s people praise him are not a warrior’s, but those of a kindly friend. He is, they say, ‘‘of all the kings of the world, the gentlest of men, the kindest and gentlest to his people, the most eager for glory.’’ Because of the qualities the Geats link with Beowulf’s eagerness for glory and fame, some readers believe that lofgeornost is specifically divine and not human.
Fate and Providence The narrator says Grendel would have killed more men if he could, ‘‘except God in his wisdom and the man’s [Beowulf’s] courageous spirit had withstood that fate and him. The lord ruled all the human race as he still does.’’ Both the narrator and individual characters talk about both God’s providence and a concept the Anglo-Saxons called wyrd, which may be translated as fate. Providence is the will of God moving in the affairs of men. The concept assumes there is a plan and meaning behind what happens. It does not mean that men are coerced by God.
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TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY Research online the Sutton Hoo Burial site that was excavated in 1939 and the archaeological dig at Gammel Lejre. Divide the class into two teams with one creating a presentation that compares the burial and the treasures found at Sutton Hoo to the burials and treasures in Beowulf, while the other team compares the evidence from Gammel Lejre to the description of Heorot in the epic. Use visual aids so your classmates can see the excavation sites and the treasures found at them. Research the development of kingship in the seventh and eighth centuries and compare the findings to the presentation of kingship in Beowulf. Further, compare these western civilization kingships to those of either Africa or Asia. Write a compare/contrast paper based on what you learn.
Read J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, particularly the chapters dealing with the Riders of Rohan. How is Beowulf reflected in Tolkien’s work? Write a personal opinion paper in which you give your assessment of Tolkien’s indebtedness to Beowulf.
Their wills are their own, but the ability to carry out their intentions is given by God. Many critics assume that wyrd is a blind force which predetermines the outcome of events. There are one or two places in the poem where this may be its meaning. In others, it signifies ‘‘death.’’ In most cases, wyrd appears to mean the normal or expected pattern of cause and effect.
Prepare an oral report on the scientific tests that are used to investigate manuscripts, including infrared photography and chemical analysis. In particular, investigate the use of fiber optic light and an electronic camera to reveal hundreds of covered letters and parts of letters along the damaged edges of a manuscript. Explain how this technique was used in the Electronic Beowulf Project with its long-term goal of assembling a continuously expanding electronic archive of materials founded on, but not limited to, the only surviving manuscript of Beowulf. Give a PowerPoint presentation in which you describe this project to your classmates.
Metal working was an important AngloSaxon craft. Although workers could not achieve the high temperatures used in steel making in the later Middle Ages, they still had techniques for making small quantities of usable steel. Learn about metal craft and make a display poster on which you arrange photocopied images that illustrate the process and show museum pieces from this period.
Loyalty is one of the greatest virtues in Beowulf. It is a bond that holds Anglo-Saxon society together, but it brings with it the darker duties of vengeance and feud.
the law into one’s own hands,’’ but in AngloSaxon society order was maintained by just that, the concept that all free men had a duty to see justice done. It was a duty to punish the murderer of family, friends, lord, or servant. One deposed West Saxon king was killed by a swineherd in retribution for the king’s murder of his lord. It was possible to accept one’s guilt and pay compensation, the wergild or ‘‘man price.’’ The guilty person’s family or lord had a duty to see that it was paid. Christians were encouraged to offer and accept these fines, but no one was forced to. In some circumstances, it was considered dishonorable to accept it.
In modern times, injustice and victimization are often presented as lesser evils than ‘‘taking
Feuds were often the result of tit-for-tat vengeance. The feud is a constant unspoken
Loyalty, Vengeance, and Feud
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on a treasure buried out of despair by a man. The dragon is disturbed by a thief who is himself driven by necessity. Hrothgar locates evil within man himself. In lines 1700-82 he sums up all that can go wrong when a warrior forgets that God is the source of everything that he has and is. Beginning with the example of Heremod, a Danish king turned tyrant, Hrothgar asks the young Beowulf to remember the source of his strength and to be wary of the hunger for power that destroys the generosity that binds members of a society together. Finally he begs him to recall that good fortune and life itself are transitory; sickness, the sea, the sword, or old age will eventually take his strength and life. Beowulf takes Hrothgar’s words to heart. He refuses to accept the kingship of his people until there is no other choice. He dies thanking God that he was able to win a treasure that will be of use to his people.
STYLE Beowulf slays Grendel (Ó Mary Evans Picture Library / Alamy)
theme in Beowulf, and reflects the fact that AngloSaxons understood conflict generally in terms of the feud. In Beowulf Grendel is said to feud with God and with the Danes. To stress Grendel’s alienation from human society, the poet writes that the Danes could not expect a ‘‘wergyld’’ from him (lines 154-58). When Grendel is killed, his mother comes to avenge his death. Hrethel, Beowulf’s grandfather, grieves bitterly because he cannot avenge his eldest son’s accidental death. The presentation of the wars between the Geats and Swedes stresses elements that recall the feud, particularly the stress laid on the killing of kings.
Point of View Beowulf has an omniscient narrator. He comments on the characters’ actions and on what they think. He is aware of things, for example, the curse on the dragon’s horde (lines 3066-75), unknown to the other characters. Beowulf shares this feature with the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid, but remains subtly different. The narrator connects his knowledge with that of the audience in the opening lines of the poem: ‘‘We have heard of the glory of the princes of the Spear Danes’’ as a means of legitimating the story. The narrator’s voice is also intimately connected with the characters’ since both use narratives in the same way, to point out a moral or to project future events.
Characterization Evil and the Monsters The monsters in Beowulf may represent human suffering caused by natural disasters; however, this is not an entirely adequate explanation. Grendel and his mother are essentially human even if they are monstrous. Although it does not excuse them, each monster is activated by human actions. Grendel’s envy is aroused by the sounds of human joy. The dragon only follows its nature in entering the open barrow and nesting
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The poet used several methods to create character. The narrator describes characters, and characters express themselves in direct speech, a popular part of all Germanic poetry. Moreover, characters define each other as when the coast guard (lines 237-57) or Wulfgar (lines 336a-70) give their impressions of Beowulf and his men. More striking is the poet’s careful development of characters through their own speeches. The voices of the individual characters are just that, the
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voices of individuals. Beowulf’s speeches could not be confused with Hrothgar’s.
Alliterative Verse Old English poetry is different from that of most English verse written since the Norman Conquest. It is based on a pattern of stressed syllables linked by alliteration across a line of verse divided by a distinct pause in the middle. In Old English verse, the basic unit is the half line. Each half line has two stressed syllables and up to six unstressed syllables. In a full line, the two half lines are divided by a pause (called a caesura). They are joined by alliteration, the repetition of the initial consonants or vowels of stressed syllables, as in ‘‘Anna angry, Arthur bold.’’ Two or three (never all four) stressed syllables alliterate. They may be the first and/or the second and the third. The third stressed syllable must alliterate. The fourth stressed syllable does not.
Episodes and Digressions One distinctive feature of Beowulf is the use of shorter narratives embedded in the main story of the poem. They are not part of the main narrative, but they can be related to its past or present. These narratives can be divided into two types, episodes and digressions. An episode is a narrative that is complete in itself, but merged one way or another into the main narrative. An example is the Finnsburg Tale (lines 1063-1159a). A digression is much shorter, allusive rather than fully developed, and interrupts the main narrative. Episodes and digressions often illustrate good or bad conduct or suggest to the audience a particular way of looking at the main action.
From Lay into Epic Except for Beowulf, the secular narrative poetry found in Old English (as in ‘‘The Battle of Maldon,’’ ‘‘The Battle of Brunnanburh,’’ and the ‘‘Finnsburg Fragment’’ are all lays, or fairly short narratives telling the story of one event. Only the ‘‘Waldhere Fragment’’ (sixty-three remaining lines) may have been part of a poem as long as Beowulf. The lay seems to have been the usual native narrative poem. Longer, more complex epic structure appears to have come into existence with the introduction of Christian Latin culture whose educational system included the Aeneid. For this reason, nineteenth century scholars assumed Beowulf was made up of earlier lays. Scholars later concluded that Beowulf is not a patchwork of older material stitched together,
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but an original composition using completely recast older material from a variety of sources.
Formulaic Style Many scholars have attempted to demonstrate that Beowulf was composed orally. Whether the poet wrote or spoke, he used a traditional stock of words and patterns of composition used by Anglo-Saxon poets and recognized and appreciated by their audiences. The formula can be broken down into 3 headings: epithets and short modifying formulas; sentence formulas; and formulaic elaboration of themes. One kind of epithet, the kenning, is a contracted metaphor, for example isern-scur (iron shower) for a flight of arrows or hildegicelum (battle icicle) for sword. Another kind of epithet is a literal description similarly reduced to its essentials, for example hildebord (battle board, a shield). The difference between a kenning and a noun compound can be seen by comparing hilde-mece (battle sword) with hilde-leoma (battle light). There are many different compounds for warriors, weapons, and relationships in a heroic culture. By varying the first word of the compound the poet could make different alliterative patterns. Thus hilde can be varied with beado,guth, and wael. The words formed do not necessarily mean exactly the same thing. Hilde means battle, but wael means specifically slaughter. Sentence formulas provide summaries and transitions. Many are short, half-lines, as in ‘‘I recall all that.’’ There are also sentence patterns, for instance, those beginning ‘‘not at all’’ or ‘‘not only’’ that then go on to ‘‘but,’’ ‘‘after,’’ ‘‘until,’’ ‘‘then.’’ These are often used for ironic understatement, another characteristic of Anglo-Saxon verse. For example, ‘‘Not at all did the personal retainers, the children of princes stand about him in valour, but they ran to the woods’’ (lines 2596-9a). Sentence formulas were developed to allow quick shifts of action and to carry the parallels and contrasts that are characteristic of Old English style. Certain themes were addressed through the use of specific words, images, and symbolic objects. These words and ideas had an understood meaning among Anglo-Saxons. Using such words invoked their understood meaning, so that the themes they referred to need not be further elaborated by the poet. One example is the group of words and images used to develop battle descriptions: the ‘‘beasts of battle,’’ the wolf, the raven and the eagle, who, it was understood, traditionally fed on the bodies of those slain.
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HISTORICAL CONTEXT The Origins of the Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms The Germanic peoples arrived in Britain over a period of perhaps a century and a half. They did not always arrive in tribal or family groups. They do not seem to have brought their kings with them. Only the Mercian royal family claimed to be descended from a continental king. Certainly, groups based on kinship or on loyalty to a military leader—whether one of their own or a RomanBritain—began to coalesce into proto-kingdoms. The wars between the Geats and the Swedes in Beowulf may represent remembered incidents on the continent. As possible, it may represent the continual struggle among the kingdoms of Anglo-Saxon England. These areas absorbed one another and Romano-British areas until at the time of the Viking invasions (c. 800) there were three major kingdoms: Mercia, Northumbria, and Wessex, and two smaller ones, Kent and East Anglia. When Alfred fought the Vikings to a standstill about 890, Wessex alone was left. Through all these centuries, government, society, and culture were changing and developing
Loyalty and Society Throughout this period, however, some things remained constant. One is the personal loyalty that held society together. The mutual loyalty within the kindred and within the war band were at the heart of Anglo-Saxon social organization. Institutions were centered on individuals. A noble, even a royal household was held together by loyalty to a lord who was generous and worthy of respect. Within this relationship the beotword, a formal statement of intention, was important.
Learning, Literature, and Craftsmanship Life in Anglo-Saxon England had few of the comforts that modern readers take for granted, but it was not without achievement and personal satisfaction. Anglo-Saxon society appreciated craftsmanship and was open to new ideas and technologies. Within a century of the arrival of Roman and Irish missionaries among them, the Anglo-Saxons had mastered the manufacture of parchment, paint and ink, glass and masonry. By the eighth century, they had several kinds of watermills with relatively elaborate wooden machinery, monumental sculpture, and the potter’s wheel. By the eighth century,
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Anglo-Saxons were producing literature in Latin and carrying Christianity to related tribes on mainland Europe. The love of craftsmanship, learning, and literature survived the greatest hardships. When the educational base was nearly wiped out by the Viking raids in the ninth century, Alfred of Wessex, in the middle of his struggles to defend his kingdom, set about re-establishing schools and encouraging scholarship. He encouraged translators, even translating texts himself, so that those who did not know Latin could still have access to ‘‘the books most necessary for men to know.’’ The Germanic immigrants from the continent who became the Anglo-Saxons brought a writing system—runes—with them from the continent. Runes were used for short inscriptions, occasionally magical, usually merely a statement of who made or who owned an object. Their literature and history were preserved orally using an elaborate poetic technique and vocabulary. Even after the introduction of Latin learning, this poetry held its own and began to be written using the Latin alphabet. Nevertheless, literature was still heard rather than read, even when the text was a written one. The difficulties of book production meant that multiple copies of any text except the most basic religious books were a rarity even in monasteries. Whether literate and illiterate, men and women would rely on hearing books read aloud. Even when reading privately, people read aloud, which made them conscious of the rhythm of poetry and prose. Beside their love of literature, the AngloSaxons had a passion for music. Small harps, called lyres, have been found even in the graves of warriors, and in Beowulf at least one warrior is also a poet-singer. Songs and chants were popular among the Anglo-Saxons and some of the earliest manuscripts of chant still in existence are from Anglo-Saxon England. Large organs existed in the tenth century.
The Hall Halls like Hrothgar’s mead-hall, or drinking hall, Heorot, if not so magnificent, were the normal homes of wealthier landowners. A great deal like the old fashioned wooden barns still seen in parts of the United States, they had great central open fires and beamed roofs. The walls were hung with woven and embroidered drapery. By the tenth century some halls had an upper floor. Some had smaller attached rooms or halls to give the women of the family some privacy.
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COMPARE & CONTRAST Anglo-Saxon period: The pre-electrical world was a world of darkness. People get up and bed down with the sun. Light comes from fires and small lamps burning whale or olive oil or rushes dipped in animal fat. On a clear night in Anglo-Saxon England the sky is dazzlingly clear and bright with stars. Today: The great urban centers light up the night. Satellite photos of Earth show large glowing areas from all the artificial light. Flying across the United States one sees the light of towns, cities, and interstates far below. However, in urban settings, people see few stars because of light pollution. Anglo-Saxon period: The population of Britain is probably under three million people. Land is claimed for farming by cutting down forests. Most native trees readily regrow from stumps. Wolves roamed the countryside. The edges of forests provide game, wood, and food for pigs. Wetlands are important for fish, waterfowl, and basketry materials, such as alder, willow, and rushes.
homes out of local materials, or trade for goods made locally. Local or traveling smiths make knives and other metal tools to order. Salt and millstones and luxury goods, such as wine, spices, and silk are bought at fairs.
Today: The population of Great Britain is over sixty-one million. Most people live in cities. Conservationists try to preserve woodlands, wetlands, and areas of traditional agriculture. Having long since lost most of its forests, Great Britain is rocky with little top soil. Thus, herding sheep is more common than farming. Anglo-Saxon period: Most people live in selfsufficient communities. People grow what they eat, make what they need, build their
Women in Anglo-Saxon Society The hall was in many ways a men’s club, but the owner’s wife and her eldest daughter would extend hospitality to guests and retainers, offering them a drink from a special cup. The modern word ‘‘wassail,’’ an early English toast that later came to be applied to a hot alcoholic brewed drink, derives
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Today: People buy nearly everything they use. Food is often bought already prepared. Many items are manufactured hundreds, if not thousands, of miles from where they are purchased and used. However, concerns about chemicals used in food production and desire for a healthy diet cause some people to keep vegetable and herb gardens at home.
Anglo-Saxon period: Most people die young. Some people live into their sixties and seventies, but the average life expectancy for those who lived past infancy is probably between thirty-five and thirty-eight. Medicine is primitive. Herbal remedies have limited effectiveness. People have no understanding of how diseases were contracted. There were few ways of deadening pain. Pneumonia and abscesses are usually fatal and blood-poisoning is common. Death in childbirth is common. Appendicitis is fatal. Today: People in North America and Western Europe can expect to live into their seventies and eighties. Most of the illnesses and conditions that killed Anglo-Saxon people are no longer a threat given modern sanitation, clean water, and access to basic medical treatment.
from Waes thu hael, ‘‘Be you healthy,’’ which was said as a beverage was handed to a guest. Women were active in dairying and textile production. Wool and linen were spun by hand and woven on upright frames. English woolen cloth and fine embroidery were already prized on the continent by the end of the eighth century.
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the first extant critical appreciation of the poem is the manuscript itself. Someone thought enough of the work to have it copied on good vellum by two fairly good scribes, an expensive decision for the year 1000. Another indication of its earliest popularity may be in its apparent influence on another Old English poem, Andreas, which survives in a manuscript kept at Exeter Cathedral in Devon since the mid-eleventh century. After that, there is no sign of the poem for well over five hundred years.
Manuscript page from Beowulf
Women, particularly from ruling families, could have considerable power, influence, and education.
Weapons Every Anglo-Saxon man and woman carried a plain practical knife for work and eating. Men who could be called up for military service would be equipped with a spear and shield. Warriors and nobles would also own a sword. Swords were very expensive, worth as much as a small farm, and armor even more so. They were important possessions often handed down from father to son. To bury them with a man was a great mark of honor and a display of wealth and status.
CRITICAL OVERVIEW If the Beowulf manuscript is not the author’s autograph, as claimed by Kevin Kiernan, then
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Laurence Nowell acquired the book in the 1560s and wrote his name and date on the top of the first page. It is unlikely he could read much of the poem. The manuscript eventually appeared in the library of a family named Cotton, but it does not appear in either of the library’s two catalogues (1628–1629 and 1696). In 1704, Humfrey Wanley, however, recorded it in his published catalogue of manuscripts containing Old English. The effective rediscovery of the poem, however, was the work of an Icelander, G. S. Thorkelin and a Dane, N. S. F. Grundtvig. Thorkelin had a transcription of the poem made and made a second himself. He published his edition in 1815. Grundtvig worked on and published the poem between 1815 and 1861. Perhaps the greatest single scholar of the poem, Grundtvig proposed many of the later accepted restorations of the text (emendations) and proved Beowulf’s uncle Hygelac to be a historical figure. For Grundtvig, the poem’s greatness lay in its sense of moral purpose. Grundtvig approached the poem as a unified work of literature in its own terms, anticipating the major topics of later Beowulf criticism. After Grundtvig, some scholars concentrated on clearing up problems of the poem’s language and allusions. Others mined the poem as a historical and social document in the hopes of proving their often politically inspired theories about ancient Germanic life. Still others attempted to identify older poems (lays) within it or to discover a nature myth or allegory in its action. By the opening years of the twentieth century, Beowulf was a synonym for undergraduate literary boredom. In 1915, novelist D. H. Lawrence used it in The Rainbow as a symbol of aridity and meaninglessness in education. Robert Graves, just back from World War I trench warfare in 1919, disagreed. He found the poem more relevant to his military experience than courtly works from the eighteenth century.
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It was another returned soldier, J. R. R. Tolkien, who, in writing ‘‘The Monsters and the Critics,’’ made it impossible to treat the poem simply as a quarry for the study of language or anthropology. W. P. Kerr some thirty years earlier had complained that the monsters cheapened the poem. Tolkien insisted that the evil which the monsters represented was a central part of a profound commentary on the human condition. Many critics agree that Tolkien redirected readers of Beowulf from what the poem is not to what it is. His powers as a writer, not only in his lecture but also in his use of Beowulf in Lord of the Rings, greatly contributed to Beowulf being accepted not only as literature, but as great literature. Criticism in the thirties was dominated by discussions lyric poetry. Tolkien’s elegiac reading of Beowulf, although not entirely convincing in its details, was popular among critics and redirected critical attention from the problems of narrative momentum and to the poem’s humanity. Although Frederick Klaeber had established the poem’s essential Christianity over twenty years before, critical tendencies were also now sympathetic to Tolkien’s identification of a Christian reading beneath the surface action. The horrors of war, too, had made monstrous and unreasoning evil at the heart of the human situation a compelling subject. Klaeber saw Beowulf as a real, even Christlike, hero. Tolkien, like many writers and film makers of the mid-twentieth century, was uncomfortable with so-called traditional heroes. Eric Stanley, John Leyerle, and others developed a vision of the man Beowulf flawed by his desire for praise or treasure or even being born before the arrival of Christianity. Leyerle and Halverson and even more thoroughly Berger and Leicester tend to relocate the flaw from the character to his society. In its most developed form, this view held that the heroism the characters see as necessary for personal worth and social solidarity is destructive of both. These studies are often selective in their presentation, out of touch with historical reality, and full of special pleading. Kemp Malone and others rebutted at least the more extreme of these arguments. Many later readers struggled with the assumption that since Beowulf is not Christian the poet must have assumed that he was damned. This view, however, does not seem to fit what actually goes on in the poem. Some critics have flirted with the idea
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of a slightly heretical or at least theologically confused poet. For much the same reason, Margaret Goldsmith proposed an allegorical reading of the poem. Then, beginning with a collection of articles edited by Colin Chase in 1981, Beowulf criticism focused on the manuscript itself and the question of dating. In the latter half of the twentieth century, hundreds of publications appeared on Beowulf, of them perhaps the most influential were Adrien Bonjour’s The Digressions in ‘‘Beowulf’’ (1950); E. B. Irving’s two books A Reading of ‘‘Beowulf’’ (1968) and Rereading ‘‘Beowulf’’ (1989); and John Nile’s ‘‘Beowulf’’: The Poem and Its Tradition (1984). Klaeber’s definitive edition of Beowulf, first published in 1936, was reissued in 2008 with revised introduction and commentary, updated scholarship, and study aids. A 2010 overview of Beowulf criticism by Jodi-Anne George, part of a Macmillan series of guides, presented important criticism in chronological order and traced the trends in theory. These tools enable readers to easily find and study reliable criticism of the great epic.
CRITICISM Helen Conrad-O’Briain Conrad-O’Briain holds a Ph.D. from Trinity College Dublin where she is a research associate of the Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies and an adjunct lecturer in the School of English. In the following essay, Conrad-O’Briain discusses the epic elements in Beowulf and the Anglo-Saxon epic techniques of its author. She also compares the character of Beowulf with other epic heroes. Michael Alexander, a translator of Beowulf, begins his entry on the epic in A Dictionary of Modern Critical Terms with Milton’s ‘‘great argument’’ and ‘‘answerable style,’’ that is, as a definition of epic Alexander states that the work must have an important theme and a style to match. He continues, ‘‘classically trained critics, expecting art to see life steadily and see it whole, look for an idealized realism and debar folklore and romance elements.’’ Paraphrasing and then quoting the critic Northrup Frye, Alexander accepts that ‘‘these stories recapitulate the life of the individual and the race. The note of epic is its objectivity: ‘It is hardly possible to overestimate the importance for western literature of the Iliad’s demonstration that the fall of an enemy, no less than of a friend or leader, is tragic
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WHAT DO I READ NEXT?
IN BEOWULF, THE NARRATOR AND CHARACTERS USE HUMAN EXPERIENCE TO UNDERSTAND THE HUMAN CONDITION AND TO FIND THE NOBLEST WAY TO LIVE THEIR LIVES.’’
The anonymous Irish epic Ta´in Bo´ Cu´ailnge (The Cattle Raid of Cooley), available in a translation by Thomas Kinsella (1969), is unusual in that it is composed in prose with inset short verses. The focus of the story alternates between two characters, Queen Maeve of Connacht, who begins the war, and the Ulster hero Cuchulainn. During the period in which the Ta´in and Beowulf were written, England and Ireland enjoyed close cultural ties. In writing his famous fantasy Lord of the Rings (1954-1955), J. R. R. Tolkien used characters and action from Beowulf. The influence of Beowulf is obvious in the Riders of Rohan, who figure in Book 2, The Two Towers, and Book 3, The Return of the King. John Gardner’s 1972 bestseller Grendel is an imaginative retelling of Beowulf from Grendel’s point of view.
Tom Holt’s fantasy comedy ‘‘Who’s Afraid of Beowulf?’’ (1989) mixes satire, heroic virtues, and computers. The hero’s character is loosely based on that of Beowulf.
Swords and Sorcerers: Stories from the World of Fantasy and Adventure, edited by Clint Willis and published by Thunder’s Mouth Press in 2003, is a collection of nineteen notable fantasy stories and excerpts from longer works, including Beowulf.
Theodore L. Steinberg’s 2003 Reading the Middle Ages: An Introduction to Medieval Literature provides a cultural context for the literature of this period.
and not comic.’’’ According to this definition, Beowulf somehow combines the elements that define the epic with other elements that seem to come from the world of ‘‘Jack the Giant Killer’’ and ‘‘Three Billy Goats Gruff.’’ Beowulf is, indeed, on one level a very simple story told with great elaboration. A man of great strength, courage, and generosity fights three
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monsters, two as a young man, the third in his old age. Other more complicated human events precede these, others intervene, others follow, but those more realistic events are all essentially background. To some earlier critics, such as W. P. Kerr in Epic and Romance, the choice of a folktale main narrative was a serious fault. Monsters lacked the dignity to carry the ‘‘great argument’’ with ‘‘answerable style.’’ But Beowulf is a true epic in its breadth of interests and sympathies, even though it is centered on the career of one man killing three monsters. The action and the characters of this apparently simple story have the strength to embody the experience and ideals of the original audience. The monsters participate in evil and disorder as no human, even Heremod, could, but the evil that originates purely within the human heart is not overlooked. Transforming both the fairy tale monsters and the sordid power politics of the background is the objective recognition of human struggle for understanding and order. This is the hallmark of human experience seen through the lens of epic technique. In Beowulf, the narrator and characters use human experience to understand the human condition and to find the noblest way to live their lives. In part, Beowulf’s epic inclusiveness comes from the narrator’s often short observations, which place the poem in a larger, transcendent context. The narrator periodically reminds the reader of the over-arching providence of God as in lines 1056-58: ‘‘The Lord God ruled over all men, as he now yet does.’’ In part, the epic breadth comes from the characters, particularly Beowulf and Hrothgar. It is Beowulf’s generosity of spirit and imaginative sympathy for individuals that introduces characters like the old man mourning his executed son or the young girl Freawaru facing a political marriage. It is that same generosity of spirit and sympathy that allows him
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to speak objectively of the ‘‘sin and crime on both sides’’ in the war between the Geats and Swedes (lines 2472-73). Hrothgar, the old king of the Danes, a man who has known triumph and disaster, looks back across his long life and reaches into the workings of the human heart and out into the realities of time and circumstances to understand human sorrow and evil. The inclusiveness of Beowulf reaches backwards and forwards in time. The short narratives embedded in the main narrative (digressions) reflect on the main action, as Adrien Bonjour demonstrates in The Digressions in ‘‘Beowulf.’’ They also create a sense of continuity and universality in the situations the characters face. Character by character, incident by incident, they create the society and the universe in which the great tests of the monsters are set. They define the limits of the heroic heart and heroic society, the ideals which characters such as Hrothgar and Beowulf fulfill and in some ways transcend. In these narratives, as in the poem, as Alexander writes in his translation’s introduction, the operations of cause and consequence, however mysterious to the characters, whether deriving from natural forces or human will, are inescapable. Beowulf is a carefully designed poem. A heroic king comes from the sea and is given back to the sea in death. Generations later another heroic king is buried on the cliffs overlooking the sea. Between them vengeance and feud, despair and generosity weave their way through the human life. Every idea, every theme is examined from one angle after another with all the techniques available to the poet from an Anglo-Saxon poetic tradition rich in irony and understatement. Treasure is the lifeblood of heroic society, fame made tangible, but the poet links it with death and despair. Love of kin motivates Beowulf throughout his life, but in the society around him families destroy themselves. Song and generosity wake a monster. Just when safety seems assured, the best and truest friend and counselor dies. The poet’s technical skill assured that the poem would mark a high point in Anglo-Saxon poetry. Although these techniques are specifically Anglo-Saxon, they broadly parallel other western epics. The poem uses an elaborate vocabulary dictated, at least in part, by the alliteration and stress patterns of Old English verse. This vocabulary, although largely that of everyday speech or prose, includes words which are rarely used other
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than in poetry. It is quite possible the poet has even coined words for Beowulf. The poet presents the material in carefully structured sentences and equally structured verse paragraphs. This structure, with its emphasis on defining things by what they are not, and by understatement, produces pointed juxtapositions of characters, themes, and action. It clarifies cause and effect. It produces clear and swift narrative movement. It can be a potent source of irony. Alexander, in the introduction to his translation, draws attention to the use of basic values in Beowulf. Sunlight is good, cold is bad. The words do not refer to symbols but to reality. Alexander’s observations are a good introduction to the poet’s use of description. The poem gains immediacy from simplicity and universality, a quality it shares with the Homeric epic. The poet always seems to find the best and fewest words to make objects authentic. Landscapes resonate with atmosphere: grey, cold, and threatening as in the description of the wild lands which Grendel haunts (lines 1357-76 and 1408-23), or full of light and life, as in the landscape of the creation song (lines 90-98). Sometimes space is defined by the quality of movement through it, as in the landscape through which the Danish retainers ride back after tracking Grendel’s last bloodstained retreat, or as in Beowulf’s two sea voyages (lines 210-24 and 1903-12). The poem’s characters, particularly Beowulf himself, are molded by the needs and aspirations of the poet and audience’s society. This is true to some extent of all literature, but particularly of the epic. Beowulf, however, is different from other northern heroes and from the heroes of Greek and Roman epics. He is radically different, not just from Heremod, but from Ing and Scyld and Sigemund. He is unlike Achilles, unlike Odysseus, except in his love of family. He is a hero driven not by personal glory but by affection and duty. He seems largely untouched by the darker emotions that dog Aeneas and betray him into fury at the end of the Aeneid. Only the doomed Hector of Homer’s Iliad seems to be a hero of the same clay. Personal glory is not without meaning to Beowulf. He tells Hrothgar that the best thing men can do is to lay up fame before death (lines 1386-89). He happily accepts treasure and just as happily passes it on to others. Nevertheless, a sense of duty, sympathy, and generosity are his primary motivation. Despite his great strength, he is a man with limitations; in each of his fights,
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Brendan Gleeson as Wiglaf, John Malkovich as Unferth, and Robin Wright Penn as Wealthow in the 2007 fantasy film version of Beowulf, directed by Robert Zemeckis (Ó Photos 12 / Alamy)
he is seriously challenged and clearly sees himself as relying on the help of God. Beginning with J. R. R. Tolkien’s essay, ‘‘The Monsters and the Critics,’’ many critics have stressed a sense of futility in Beowulf. This reading arose partially from factors within the poem and partially from factors external to it. These critics had lived through two world wars. Many of them had served as soldiers and known violent, often pointless, death, often the death of friends. They did not cease to admire heroism, but they balanced it against what they knew of war’s futility. Beowulf is not a pacifist’s poem, but these critics have made readers more aware of the problems and fragility of its warrior society and standards. Beowulf and the rest of the characters are never allowed the luxury of assuming that any victory earns more than a respite. The poem conveys a deep sense of the fragility of human institutions and of human hopes. Good men and women can do their best; their fame is assured, but not necessarily their works. The whole action of the poem happens within historical patterns in which families and kingdoms rise and fall. This sense of the transitory nature of human life is part of the critical re-evaluation of the implications of the poem’s Christianity. J. D. A. Ogilvy and Donald Baker have suggested that Beowulf’s death is like a saint’s death, and the parallels, particularly with that of Bede’s death, are closer than even they suggest. Other critics have explored
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similar implications in Beowulf’s burial. The real tragedy of the poem may lie not in Beowulf’s own death, which transcends the tragic through his faith in God, but in his people’s despair, which leads to the re-burial of the treasure. He gives his life to save them from the dragon, but he cannot save them from themselves. The Geats, even Wiglaf, refuse more than his dying wish, they refuse to accept Beowulf’s view of them, a people worthy of the real treasure of an old king’s life. Source: Helen Conrad O’Briain, Critical Essay on Beowulf, in Epics for Students, 2nd ed., Gale, Cengage Learning, 2011.
Rosemary Huisman In the following essay, Huisman discusses gender roles in Anglo-Saxon society and how they shape characters in Beowulf. Over the last few years I have been thinking, reading and writing about narrative. At the 2005 conference of the Australian Early Medieval Association in Canberra, I described the model of narrative which I had developed: one derived from the different natural worlds and their associated temporalities as described in modern physics. I saw a dominance of different temporalities at different periods of English narrative, and, in particular, I saw the dominance in narrative in Old English of sociotemporality, the time of the social world of humans. Traditional narrative theories had assumed time to be a singular concept, but that time, which those theories had equated with a
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chronological sequence in the understanding of narrative, turns out to be only one of six possible temporalities, the one associated with the physiological or biological world, in which I can’t drink the water until I pick up the glass. Sociotemporality, however, is associated with a world of symbolic relations and social attributes and identities; its sequence is that by which a social group understands its history, its social being. The meaning of this narrative sequence is equative: a sequence of social similarity or, frequently, dissimilarity; it is comparable, in the clause, to the meaning choices of relational processes, of being or not being. In the Old English poem Beowulf, the hall Heorot is raised; the narrative immediately tells us of familial strife which destroys it (lines 82b–85). Hrothgar tells Beowulf he will be a comfort to his people, and immediately adds, Ne weard Heremod swa [Not thus was Heremod . . . ], as he describes the malevolent rule of a king who brought injury to his people (lines 1707b–1724a). It is this leaping about in chronological sequence which motivated Klaeber’s famous heading on narrative in Beowulf: ‘lack of steady advance’, not to mention the persistent use of the term ‘digressions’ in earlier Beowulf scholarship. In my abstract for this paper I included a short plot summary of Beowulf: it’s a typical panoramic overview. However, as Barbara Hemstein Smith has shown in her study of plot summaries of Cinderella, no plot summary is innocent; there is always a particular purpose, or assumed purpose, realised in what is given or what is left out. My summary is in fact traditional because its temporality is chronological, one event after another, with specific linguistic indications of time (in bold). These events are physical acts (underlined), as is appropriate for the world of chronological sequence: The hero Beowulf, from a people called the Geats, when a young man visits the Danish court of King Hrothgar and kills in turn two monsters who have savaged the Danish people first a monster called Grendel, then Grendel’s mother. Fifty years later, as an old man and now king of the Geats, Beowulf kills a dragon which is threat ening his own people, but in the process is himself killed.
But if one were trying instead to make a summary based on sociotemporal relations, the social world of equative sequence, what would one include? To repeat: sociotemporality is associated with a world of symbolic relations and social
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IN THE POEM BEOWULF THERE IS NO DOUBT THAT, BETWEEN THE TWO COMPLEMENTARY DOMAINS OF SOCIAL ACTION, SOCIAL POWER IS VERY UNEVENLY DISTRIBUTED.’’
attributes and identities; its sequence is that by which a social group understands its history, its social being. A summary will mention superordinate terms for symbolic relations, social attributes and social identities. On textual and archaeological grounds, it seemed to me that a good place to start was with the two lexical sets in Old English which cluster around the social identities of gender. As Christine Fell pointed out over 20 years ago, the word mon(n)/man(n) is ungendered in Old English, and signifies ‘human’, even into the eleventh century. The Oxford English Dictionary [OED] gives the first sense of ‘man’ as ‘a human being, irrespective of sex or age . . . in O[ld] E[nglish] the prevailing sense’, and adds under 1.1 a) ‘in many OE instances and in a few of later date used explicitly as a designation equally applicable to either sex (obs.). In OE the words distinctive of sex were wet, wif, waepman and wifman’. So, in the second pair, to indicate one gender or the other, a compound with man as the second element was used, with a first element metonymically signifying the gender: wif for the female, waep-, a contraction of waepned, for the male. My principal concern in this paper is to suggest the distinctive social domains associated with these first elements, and to relate these domains to the symbolic relations and social attributes of male and female characters as told in the poem Beowulf. A Boolean search of the online Dictionary of Old English Old English corpus on the stems wifand waepned- gave 33 matches, that is, short contexts in which both stems occurred, used contrastively, sometimes with a second element, sometimes as the whole word. . . . ... Wif- and waepned- were also used contrastively with other second elements, for example: wifcynne / waepnedcynne wifhanda / waepnedhanda
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It is appropriate to describe these two first elements as two ‘lexical sitems’ rather than words (or morphemes), as further searches of the corpus demonstrate their various spellings and contractions, for example: wifmen —> wimmen waepnedmen —> waepmen —> wepmen All of these variants are used at times alone, that is, not in the context of the contrasting term. The semantic field, in modern translation, from which the masculine lexical item derives is uncontentious: waepned, ‘weaponed’, past participle of the weak verb waepnian, ‘to arm’, derived from the strong noun waepen, ‘weapon, sword’. These grammatical variants can be related to many similar forms in other early Germanic languages (the OED comments that ‘outside Teutonic, no comparable cognates have been found’). While waepnedman is literally an armed human, the social assumption that it is those of the male gender who bear arms has telescoped the meaning relations: waepned- now directly signifies ‘male’. The semantic field of the feminine first element is less confidently ascribed. The OED describes ‘wife’, OE wif, as ‘of obscure origin’. Christine Fell echoes these words but adds ‘it could be etymologically connected with the words for ‘weaving’ and this would certainly make good sense in so far as the duties of cloth-making seem to be the ones most consistently linked with the feminine role’. Inductively, I am confident (until someone can demonstrate otherwise) that w/f is related to the OE strong verb wefan [to weave] that a w/f is originally a ‘weaving human’. Other words from the semantic field associated with cloth-making are similarly gendered in Modern English. As Fell notes, the word ‘spinster’ is not recorded until Middle English, but obviously existed in OE (from verb spinnan, with feminine occupational suffix -stere). My contemporary Collins English Dictionary glosses the word ‘distaff’ (from OE dis- ‘bunch of flax’ and stoef, for ‘the rod on which wool, flax etc is wound preparatory to spinning’) as ‘the female side or branch of a family’, and adds ‘compare ‘‘spear side’’’—which in turn is glossed as ‘the male side or branch of a family’. In the latter, ‘spear’, we see the persistence of the semantic field of weaponry gendered as male, here clearly contrasted with a term from the set of cloth-making, ‘distaff’, gendered as female. In summary, in the Old English (and, arguably, in the more general Germanic) usage we have
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the contrast of a weaving human (female) with a weaponed human (male). We can describe these as metonymic relations, that is, in the terms of Peircean semiotics, weaving is an indexical sign of female gender, weaponed is an indexical sign of male gender. What social domains of human activity do these gendered signs refer to? I had previously wondered about indices of gender when looking at grave goods from various excavations. (It will be obvious I am not an archaeologist.) I’m not referring here to the grand collections, such as that of Sutton Hoo in the British Museum, but rather to the small collections of local material you see in places like Canterbury. Most items I could identify—the swords, spears, brooches, beads, combs—but two items defeated me. The first, the round crystal balls, the size of a marble, still puzzle everyone, though Audrey Meaney suggests the role of amulet, an object with a magical purpose for female use. The second item, very common, looked like a ceramic or stone doughnut. I now know it’s an item used in spinning, in Modern English called a spindle whorl. Alternatively, if heavy, it could be used in weaving, to weight the warp or vertical threads on a weighted loom: the reconstruction of a large loom in the Viking Museum at York uses such weights. Descriptions of grave goods typically assert some goods as indices of gender, yet there is sometimes a curious lacuna in relation to clothmaking objects. Thus, from The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Anglo-Saxon England, under the entry GRAVE GOODS: Weapons, including spears, shields and swords, were associated with male burials, while jewellery such as strings of beads, brooches, and wrist clasps and other dress fittings such as work boxes, bunches of keys and items designed to dangle from a waist belt (girdle hangers and cha telaines) accompanied female ones.
You notice there is no mention of spinning and weaving items, although other accounts refer to these as ‘common’ in graves described as female. When archaeologists contrast the grave goods found in women’s and men’s graves, they more usually talk of the weapons of men and the jewellery of women, perhaps because there is more variation in the latter, which may then be read as signifying status as well as gender. For whatever reason, the practices of cloth-making tend to be less visible in many scholarly discussions. (The Blackwell Encyclopaedia entry for TEXTILES initially states that the topic includes the processes as well as the product, but then discusses only the
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product, the cloth produced.) Yet excavations, such as those at Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire, in the 1920s and 1930s (‘the first early AngloSaxon settlement to be recognised and excavated in a systematic way’) yielded many items used in spinning and weaving. As Henrietta Leyser writes, . . . spinning and weaving have been the pre emi nent tasks for women of every class, from slave to aristocrat, in all the early civilisations of which we know Egypt, Palestine, Greece, Rome. Anglo Saxon England is no exception. In all probability every home had its loom; spindle whorls, shears and weaving batons are found regularly in wom en’s graves.
Why is the activity of weaving, as opposed to that using weapons, comparatively invisible to some scholars, when the gendered lexical items wif- and woepned- seem so evenly contrasted in textual use? (Feminist scholars may find this a rhetorical question.) The archaeological evidence, if not conclusive, is at least supportive of the linguistic evidence. Both suggest that, in early Anglo-Saxon society, there were understood to be two complementary social domains of action corresponding to the indexical signs for the two genders, that of weaving (or cloth-making generally) for women, and that of possessing weapons for men. Initially, I will just assert that the Anglo-Saxons readily extended each domain from the physical to the social. The physical is to weave cloth. The social is to weave the social fabric. The physical is to wield weapons. The social is to protect the social fabric. The social functions of the woepnedman and the wifman are complementary and both essential for the continuance of the social world. One consequence of this account is that it shows the irrelevance of modern dualisms like private/public in talking about Anglo-Saxon culture. The more relevant dualism is that of internal perspective and external perspective, looking inwards to or outwards from the social group; in each domain of action, of making and protecting the social fabric, both perspectives come into play. For a woepnedman, the external perspective is that of fighting external threats to the social group; the internal perspective is that of co-operating with his fighting companions. For a wifman, the internal perspective is that of weaving good relations among those in the social group; the external perspective, I will argue, is that of weaving, through her body, good relations with another social group by being given in marriage and bearing a child of both groups. You can see that positive and
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negative values differ in each domain. In the male domain, the external negative value is cowardice, a lack of courage, the internal negative value is disloyalty or treachery. For women, the internal negative value is the disruption of social relations, the external negative value is the refusal of exchange. For either gender, externally or internally, success in actions of positive value makes and strengthens the social world; failure in those actions, or even worse, success in actions of negative value, weakens, tears, the social fabric. We can see fairly readily, from the external perspective, that the indexical sign of masculinity, weapons, is directly related to the masculine social domain of action, that of protection, whether defensively against attack or aggressively to augment the group’s territory or treasure. However, the understanding of ‘weaving’ as through the woman’s body is also not just a figure of speech. Consider talk of the Virgin Mary. Just as Christian churches were built over the sites of pagan temples, Christian discourse could incorporate the pagan indices of femininity. Jane Chance gives an extreme (if non-Germanic) example by Saint Proclus, Patriarch of Constantinople (ob 416 CE). He describes: the awful loom of the Incarnation, wherein in ineffable manner that garment of union was wrought of which the Holy Ghost is weaver; the overshadowing Power from on high, wea veress; the old fleece of Adam, the wool, the most pure flesh of the Virgin, the woof; the immense grace of her who bore the Artificer, the weaving shuttle the Word, in fine, coming gently in from on high at the hearing of the ear.
The Marian Library in Ohio records that, in the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew (thought to be derived from the Proto-Evangelium of James), Mary is called to the temple with other maidens and given wool to weave a new curtain for the temple. While spinning this purple wool at home, she was visited by the Annunciation. Thus, spin ning is one of the typical activities in representa tions of Mary’s Annunciation, pregnancy and Joseph’s doubt.
Mary Clayton, who has done the most detailed work on the cult of Mary in Anglo-Saxon England, remarks that ‘of the individual scenes found in early Christian art, the most common early type of Annunciation is one with a seated Virgin, generally spinning . . . ’. She notes that, in the Anglo-Saxon Benedictional of St AEthelwold, the Annunciation illumination has Mary holding a weaving-related object, which may show the influence of the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew. So the association of
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conception and spinning and weaving is part of the Christian discourse throughout the Anglo-Saxon period. It is an association readily assimilated to the pre-Christian Germanic concept of the wifman and her domain of social action. The successful wifman wove together woepnedman and woepnedman. The Virgin Mary wove together God and mankind. If we now approach the Old English poem Beowulf with these two gendered domains of action in mind, that of weaving the social fabric and that of protecting the social fabric, what interpretative observations might be made? The following remarks are introductory, an attempt to point towards the general nature of such observations. The first observation is that the two domains are told of in the poem, from both their internal and external perspectives, and each domain is realised in its most elevated, most idealised, that is most socially valued, context of social relations, one that can be called ‘courtly’ or aristocratic. A king builds Heorot to house his people, organises coast-guards and hallguards, offers honourable hospitality. Hrothgar’s actions instantiate the internal perspective of the woepnedman, protecting the internal co-operation and security of his society. Beowulf, in the earlier events in Hrothgar’s court, instantiates the external perspective of the woepnedman, commonly described as ‘heroic’, protecting a society, even one not his own, from external attack. A queen, Wealtheow, at the feast following Grendel’s defeat, ceremonially offers the cup to warriors in the appropriate order, the internal function of the wifman, making and strengthening explicit recognition of the social order. Again, in the story told by the scop (poet) at that feast, Hildeburh, sister of the Danish chief Hnaef and wife of Finn, king of the Frisians, by whom she has a son, exemplifies the external function of the wifmon, one through whose body two different social groups attempt to weave a relationship. So the success or failure of those in these exalted social roles will reverberate throughout the whole social system. The second observation is that both positive and negative embodiments of the two domains of social action are told, explicitly or allusively. I said earlier that positive and negative values differ in each domain, that, in the male domain, the external negative value is a lack of courage, the internal negative value is disloyalty or treachery and that, for women, the internal negative value is the disruption of social relations, the external negative value is the refusal of exchange into another group.
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For an example of masculine treachery, the internal negative value of the male domain: we know that Hrothulf, nephew of Hrothgar, but older than the sons of Wealhtheow and Hrothgar, will not protect the boys after their father’s death, although at the feast previously mentioned Wealhtheow asserts to Hrothgar that he will do so. (Wealtheow is acting positively in her internal role as weaver of the social fabric, but is unsuccessful.) We know less about Offa of Mercia’s queen, variously understood to be called Thryth, briefly alluded to as one who caused discord, the internal negative value of the female domain, before she was married. Those who show cowardice, the external negative value of masculinity, are so devalued that they are not even named: I’m referring to the men who desert Beowulf during his last fight with the dragon, when only the named warrior, Wiglaf, remains with him. And the external negative value of the female domain, the refusal of exchange? My failure to find an example of this leads on to my fourth, and very important, observation about the poem. I say ‘fourth’ because I want briefly to mention a third. This third observation is that neither Grendel nor his mother can be located in the domains of the woepnedman and wifman. This is unsurprising, when you remember that the base meaning of man is ‘human’. Neither of the monsters is human, even with a putative descent from Cain. Grendel explicitly cannot be fought with weapons; in no sense is he a woepnedman. He and his mother do not live in a social group: there is no function for a wifman, weaving a social fabric. They are both excluded from the two social domains of human action. To my fourth and last observation: I said that I could not find an example of the negative value of the female domain, the refusal of exchange. I suggest this is because refusal is a power-based speech act. And in the poem Beowulf there is no doubt that, between the two complementary domains of social action, social power is very unevenly distributed. The very notion of an heroic story as one centred on actions in battle is one centred on the external social role of the woepnedmen. My earlier brief, stock, chronological summary of the events of the poem homed in on verbs, processes, realising the masculine domain: Beowulf ‘kills’ three times, while his opponents ‘savage and threaten.’ Contemporary Hollywood studios are said to consider the young male demographic, 16–25, as their most lucrative audience, and the many so-called ‘action’
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movies are made primarily for their tastes. Similarly, most of the narrative of Beowulf tells a story of successes and failures, acts of positive value and negative value, within the masculine social domain of the woepnedman. Stories of the female domain of action are indeed told, as necessary and complementary—there is no continuing social fabric without them—but their telling is imbued with the power imbalance of the domains. So the fight at Finnsburh between Danes and Frisians is told primarily through the emotions of Hildeburh, who must burn her brother and son together on the funeral pyre, and, after the later death of her husband Finn, be ‘led back to her people’, the Danes (the Old English grammar does not allow her agency). The external weaving of the wifman, bearing the child who is both Dane and Frisian, is ripped to shreds by the acts characteristic of the more powerful domain of the woepnedmen. (Those thinking, Wulf and Eadwacer! may not be far wrong.) And, in Beowulf, immediately after this story of the failure of Hildeburh’s female action, in the continuing story of the feast, Queen Wealhtheow bears the cup to her husband Hrothgar and speaks to Hrothgar of her confidence that Hrothulf, his nephew sitting beside him, will protect their sons if their father dies: an example of female action through speech, an attempt to produce the social fabric by asserting it. As already mentioned, this attempt also will fail, in Hrothulfs refusal to provide such protection. There is a great deal more, in examples and explication, that could be said on these matters. I have not examined ‘peaceweaver’, much discussed. I have not mentioned the extension of ‘weaving’ to the making of texture in words rather than thread, to text rather than textile. But what I have tried to do in this paper is to begin with the consideration of two complementary gendered domains of social action, from which different social roles in narrative can emerge. These roles can be regarded as successful or unsuccessful, as positively valued or as negatively valued. It is after identifying these complementary domains that one can consider the power relation between them, through the interaction, encouragement, suppression or even appropriation of the possible roles associated with each domain. This procedure contrasts with scholarly talk which begins with ‘woman as passive and victim’ or ‘woman as hero’: that is, talk which begins with power relations, or with the assumption of only one domain of value, so that alternative possibilities become invisible. I hope then, in some small way, to have given more visibility to the
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world of symbolic relations, social attributes and social identities which can be read into the Beowulf narrative. Source: Rosemary Huisman, ‘‘Narrative Sociotemporality and Complementary Gender Roles in Anglo Saxon Soci ety: The Relevance of Wifmann and Woepnedmann to a Plot Summary of the Old English Poem Beowulf,’’ in Jour nal of the Australian Early Medieval Association, January 1, 2008, pp. 125 36.
George Clark In the following excerpt, Clark discusses the world of Beowulf as it is presented by the poem’s narrator. In his ‘‘Afterword,’’ Clark discusses briefly the Sutton Hoo ship burial discovery and predicts how subsequent criticism may approach the poem. DISCOVERING THE POEM’S WORLD
The poem imposes many delays on its central story and includes many explorations not directly related to its main business, but despite an indirect movement and moments of leisure, Beowulf creates a powerful impression of a great action moving irresistibly forward, advancing not steadily but abruptly in sudden lurches and turns toward a fearful event. Brief summaries of the ‘‘basic story’’ of Beowulf conceal its rich variety of forms and matter; the poem captures a vast historical scope, includes a variety of genres or modes of composition, and reveals a constant interplay of tones. The prologue separates the poem’s audience from the story—long ago in another country—then presents the audience with a gratifying account of heroic success, of heroism leading to national success, of the hero as founder of a great dynasty. At the height of Scyld’s brilliant career, a kingdom won, an overlordship established, and an heir engendered, the narrator proposes as a universal truth the rule that in every nation the successful aspirant to honor must do praiseworthy deeds. On these words, the narrator announces Scyld’s death at the fated time; the prologue closes with his people’s grief for the great king’s passing. Scyld earned the narrator’s accolade— . . . that was a good king!(11)—early in the prologue which ends with the universal truth of mortality and an unanswerable question. Scyld returns to the mystery from which he came after his richly laden funeral ship is launched on the unknowable deep. Still, the succession of fortunate generations of Scyld’s line contrasts the mystery and the blunt fact of death with an unfolding story of dynastic prosperity extending for generations until the crowning of the
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Scyldings’ success with the building of Heorot. Mortality presses in on the line of Scyld Scefing and the first celebration at Heorot awakens a monster who seems to embody or to represent the force of chaos and old night. That scene, dramatically reversing the stately tone of the poem’s prologue, begins with the monster’s anger at the sound of joy in Heorot, then traces that joy to the poet’s song celebrating the creation of the world, then leaves the Danish ruling elite living in those joys until the monster, Grendel, begins his raids. Grendel’s first raid turns all the successes of the triumphant line of the Scyldings into horror, pain, and humiliation. After Grendel’s second raid, the night after his first, the narrator notices that: Then it was easy to find the man who got himself a more distant resting place, a bed in a private dwelling, when the hall thegn’s hatred was man ifested to him, plainly declared by a sure sign; whoever escaped that enemy kept himself far ther away and safer.(138 43)
Six full lines remorselessly detail the humiliation of noble warriors among the Danes who, in the face of certain death there, give up sleeping in the royal hall, a kind of men’s lodge, and seek out a more domestic safety. The Danes become double victims, of Grendel’s wrath and of the poem’s irony; the monster diminishes their manly status; the poem makes that diminishment public and thus real. The audience is drawn toward Grendel, it accepts a certain complicity in calamity to savor the poem’s detached irony at the cost of Danish manliness. Warrior societies in many cultures segregate men and women; apparently the all-male fellowship of such lodges contributes to the aggressive spirit a warring society requires. Grendel’s interruption of the regular practice unmans the Danish warrior class, calls their heroic status into question, and damages the means of sustaining their traditional calling and their honor. As the poem moves from the Danes to the Geats, a series of contrasts in the character and tone of the narrative become apparent. The Danish scene represents a whole society in paralysis, the Geatish a man in action. The Danes meet frequently, consider deeply, risk their immortal souls searching for supernatural help, and lament their losses in an agony of helplessness. Immediately following the report of Grendel’s first and second raids, the narrator adds that this calamity persisted for twelve years; that the lord of the Scyldings suffered great sorrows; that songs
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IN THE COMING DECADES, BEOWULF SCHOLARSHIP WILL ALMOST SURELY BE DEEPLY INFLUENCED BY THE FINDINGS OF ARCHAEOLOGICAL RESEARCH AND ESPECIALLY BY THE EXCAVATION AT SUTTON HOO.’’
sadly revealed to the world that Grendel waged cruel war against Hrothgar for many years. The narrator (or those songs) reports that Grendel intended never to make a truce with the Danes. The narrator sums up: Grendel performed ‘‘many crimes . . . cruel humiliations,’’ many powerful men among the Danes often considered what should be done, and Hrothgar’s sorrows burned continually in his heart. In the Danish setting some forty lines report the unending succession of humiliations and sorrow heaped upon the hapless people and above all their king, but restated among the Geats, the long story of passive suffering and helplessness amounts only to a clause. The Danish complaint ends with Hrothgar’s sorrow and inaction: the wise man was unable to ward off that mis ery; that distress, that cruel and violent, hateful and long drawn out onslaught, that cruel dis tress, which had fallen upon the people, was too severe.
The scene abruptly moves to the Geats, where the strongest man living on earth, Hygelac’s retainer, hears of ‘‘Grendles dæda’’ (195), Grendel’s deeds. The strong man at once commands that a ship be readied and announces his intention to visit the famous king of the Danes who has need of men. Between the hero’s command, him announcement, and his selection of his companions for the exploit, the Geatish councilors consult the omens and approve his plans even as he leads his picked company to the sea and the ready ship. The pagan and superstitious practice of consulting omens evokes no negative comment in the poem, though Anglo-Saxon sermons strongly condemned such time-honored observances. From Beowulf’s first introduction into the poem to the moment Grendel realizes his impending doom, all signs agree that the hero’s victory is certain. The
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alacrity of the hero’s decision, preparations, and setting out bespeaks a self-confidence that seems itself a token of victory. The voyage is swift and easy, which requires strong winds from the right quarter and confirms the favorable omens. The supernatural sign vouchsafed the Geatish councilors and the disposition of nature agree in pointing toward Beowulf’s success. The wisdom of the Danes concurs: the coast guard who challenges Beowulf and the Geats at the Danish shore seems to respond to an aura of good luck and good intentions manifested in Beowulf’s appearance when he breaks off his formal challenge to observe that one of the seafarers seems a man of unique qualities and exceptional status and to wish: ‘‘may his look, his matchless appearance, never belie him.’’ Given the Danes’ dearest wish of the past twelve years, the coast guard must see a resolve to destroy Grendel and the tokens of success in the foreigner at the Danish coast. ... AFTERWORD
In the coming decades, Beowulf scholarship will almost surely be deeply influenced by the findings of archaeological research and especially by the excavation at Sutton Hoo. Students of the poem have hardly digested the importance of the original Sutton Hoo excavation of 1939, definitively published in a massive study by Rupert Bruce-Mitford and others (1975–83). Already the new excavations at Sutton Hoo have offered some surprises. While archaeologists extend our knowledge of the material culture of the AngloSaxon world, lexicographers are doing the same for the word-hoard of the Anglo-Saxons. . . . The study of the poem itself will surely develop in some directions already partially mapped out. The poem’s psychological and social realism has already become a topic of critical inquiry that will continue to prosper in an age that can accept or even value mixtures of realism and fantasy. A renewed effort to reconstruct the poem’s social and cultural milieu seems likely: reader-response criticism and the new historicism alike will demand a vigorous inquiry into the poem’s origins and attempt to discover what the poem meant to its earliest audiences and what the place of poetry was in the Anglo-Saxon world. The poem’s idea of the basic social institutions needs a deeper reading against what we know of those institutions in the Anglo-Saxon age. The questions of the poem’s date and place of origin will burn strongly for some decades to come. We are likely to find too many rather than too few answers, and the profusion of
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seemingly contradictory solutions may strengthen the case for the poem’s oral transmission and for its susceptibility to at least some reworking even after being committed to parchment. The poststructuralist new criticisms and formalist approaches to narrative texts will try (and have tried already) their strength with Beowulf. The possibility of a deconstructive reading of Beowulf may fill some philologists with horror, but such a reading may be illuminating. The concentration of the newer critical schools on narrative will almost surely benefit the study of the greatest poem in English before the Canterbury Tales. Source: George Clark, ‘‘The Heroic Age, Ideal, and Chal lenge’’ and ‘‘Afterword,’’ in Beowulf, Twayne, 1990, pp. 51 54, 143 44.
SOURCES Alexander, Michael, ‘‘Epic,’’ in A Dictionary of Modern Critical Terms, edited by Roger Fowler, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987, pp. 73 75. Bonjour, Adrien, The Digressions in ‘‘Beowulf,’’ Medium Aevum Monographs 5, Basil Blackwell, 1977. Fulk, R. D., Robert E. Bjork, and John D. Niles, eds., Klaeb er’s ‘‘Beowulf,’’ 4th ed., University of Toronto Press, 2008. George, Jodi Anne, ‘‘Beowulf’’: Reader’s Guide to Essen tial Criticism, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Raffel, Burton, trans., Beowulf, Signet Classics, 2008. Tolkien, J. R. R. ‘‘The Monsters and the Critics,’’ in The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays, by J. R. R. Tolkien, HarperCollins, 1997; originally published in Pub lications of the British Academy, Vol. 22, 1936, pp. 245 95.
FURTHER READING Alexander, Michael, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in ‘‘Beowulf’’: A Verse Translation, Penguin Books, 1973. Alexander discusses the history of the manu script, the epic tradition, and the characters and plot of the poem. Anderson, Sarah, ed., Beowulf (Longman Cultural Edi tion), translated by Alan Sullivan and Timothy Murphy, Longman, 2004. Anderson’s edition includes comparative transla tionsofthefirsttwenty fivelinesofthepoem,along with secondary works providing context and selec tionsofotherOldEnglishpoetryandprose. Backhouse, Janet, D. H. Turner, and Leslie Webster, The Golden Age of Anglo Saxon Art: 966 1066, British Museum, 1985.
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Backhouse provides excellent illustrations of Anglo Saxon art, fine and applied, covering the period in which the Beowulf manuscript was written. Brown, Michelle P., Manuscripts from the Anglo Saxon Age, University of Toronto, 2007. Brown explains the art of bookmaking in the Anglo Saxon period and includes one hundred and fifty color illustrations of Anglo Saxon books in the British Library. Clark, George, Beowulf, Twayne, 1990. This book is an excellent beginners’ introduc tion to the poem. Chapters cover Beowulf criticism, the other legends embedded in the poem, the ethics of heroism, the monsters, and kingship. Donoghue, Daniel, ed., Beowulf: A Verse Translation, Norton Critical Edition, translated by Seamus Heaney, Norton, 2002. The Norton Critical Edition provides an excel lent translation, with introduction, notes, and scholarly analysis, all designed to facilitate the reader’s appreciation of the epic. Evans, Angela, The Sutton Hoo Ship Burial, British Museum, 1994. This publication presents a richly illustrated introduction to the Anglo Saxon ship burial, which was first excavated in 1939. The objects uncovered and the burial itself are relevant to Beowulf and various studies of the epic. Joy, Eileen A., The Postmodern ‘‘Beowulf’’: A Critical Casebook, West Virginia University Press, 2007.
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This book contains twenty three essays on postmodern theory and contemporary theoret ical approaches to the epic. Kerr, W. P., Epic and Romance: Essays on Medieval Literature, CreateSpace, 2009. J. R. R. Tolkien’s ‘‘The Monsters and the Crit ics’’ in many ways specifically responds to Kerr’s approach, which first appeared in print in 1896. Kiernan, Kevin S., ‘‘Beowulf’’ and the Beowulf Manu script, University of Michigan, 1998. Kiernan argues that the Beowulf manuscript in the British Library is the author’s own working copy. Orchard, Andy, A Critical Companion to ‘‘Beowulf’’, D. S. Brewer, 2005. Orchard’s work is a good source for all readers wanting clarity on issues of interpretation and background regarding the epic.
SUGGESTED SEARCH TERMS Beowulf Beowulf AND Grendel Beowulf AND Heorot Anglo Saxon literature epic literature Old English literature
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The Cantos The Cantos is Ezra Pound’s most significant contribution to world literature. The poem was published in various parts over a span of five decades and during the twentieth century tended to be read in parts. During the same years, Pound was better known for his short poems, his theoretical writings and manifestoes, and his turbulent personal history. Nonetheless, The Cantos documents the rise, prominence, and fall of literary styles and poetry from various western and Asian cultures and spoke to a generation of artists across a range of media. Pound was perhaps the central figure in the development of modernism, in literature, sculpture, and music, and many of his enduring concerns and artistic innovations are present in The Cantos, both as prefigurations and reminiscences of the heady days of the 1920s and 1930s.
EZRA POUND 1917–1968
The sections of The Cantos were published in different countries, languages, and presses. An incomplete description of the serial publication is given here and follows information provided by the American publisher New Directions. The first three cantos appeared in Poetry magazine in 1917 and then were significantly changed for their first appearance in a book entitled A Draft of XVI Cantos, which appeared in 1925. A Draft of XXX Cantos appeared in 1930; Eleven New Cantos in 1934, and The Fifth Decad XLII–LI (the Leopoldine cantos) in 1937. Cantos LII–LXXI (the China cantos and the Adams cantos) appeared in
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the University of Pennsylvania, where he met Hilda Doolittle and William Carlos Williams. Pound and these two poets became friends and colleagues in the burgeoning modernist movement. He studied further at Hamilton College and then did graduate work at the University of Pennsylvania.
Ezra Pound (The Library of Congress)
1940. (In 1944 and 1945, Pound wrote LXXII and LXXIII in Italian; these poems, known as the Italian Cantos, were added to the revised complete edition [1987].) The Pisan Cantos LXXIV–LXXXIV appeared in 1948. Section: Rock-Drill de los Cantares LXXXV–XCV was published in 1956, and Thrones de los Cantares XCVI-CIX in 1959. The remaining parts and fragments were published as Drafts and Fragments of Cantos CX–CXVII in 1969. In the United States New Directions published numerous editions; The Cantos of Ezra Pound (Cantos 1–117) appeared in 1970. Several complete editions appeared after that, for example, Richard Sieburth’s edition Ezra Pound: Poems and Translations (Library of America, 2003), which presents the complete oeuvre. Similarly, various helpful guides have appeared, for example, William Cookson’s A Guide to the Cantos of Ezra Pound (Persea, 2002).
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY One of the most significant literary figures of the twentieth century, Ezra Loomis Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho, in 1885. His family soon moved to the suburbs of Philadelphia, where Pound grew up. He received a bachelor’s degree from
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Pound taught for less than one year at Wabash College in Crawfordville, Indiana, and then he moved to Europe in 1908. Settling in Venice, Pound printed privately his first book of poems, A Lume Spento (1908), before moving on to London. In London, Pound became part of the avantgarde literary scene. In the twelve years he spent in London, he helped shift current literary taste from the Georgian style of such writers as Charles Swinburne and Henry James (both of whom he admired greatly) toward the modernist style he promoted. In the process, he befriended W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Richard Aldington, and many others. According to T. S. Eliot, Pound offered indispensable editing support during Eliot’s composition of The Wasteland. In 1914, Pound married the artist Dorothy Shakespear, whom he met through W. B. Yeats who had a romantic relationship with her mother, the novelist Olivia Shakespear. After World War I, Pound began writing his cantos, but at the same time, he felt the pre-war literary freshness and experimentation of London had somehow come to an end. In 1920, he published his long satirical poem Hugh Selwyn Mauberley as a farewell to the city, and during this time, he began to shift his interest from literature to politics and economics. Pound and his wife moved to Paris where they lived four years, but the poet found the city not to his liking—probably because his role as the dominant impresario was already filled by Gertrude Stein. In 1924, the couple moved to Italy. There, while they remained married, the poet began his long-term relationship with the violinist Olga Rudge. Pound and his wife, sometimes living apart, stayed in Italy for twenty-two years, during which time the poet came to greatly admire Mussolini and Italian fascism. In these years, Pound was studying economics and history but had also thrown himself fully into the composition of his cantos. During World War II, Pound, who had become convinced that the U.S. capitalistic system was pernicious, made pro-fascist and anti-Semitic radio broadcasts on Italian state radio, which caused his indictment for treason in the United
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States. After Mussolini fell, Pound was captured and held in the U.S. Army Disciplinary Training Center in Pisa, Italy, where he suffered in solitary confinement. Pound was returned to the United States in poor condition, and because the authorities felt that he was mentally unfit to stand trial, he was incarcerated in St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D. C., for thirteen years. During this time, Pound continued to write and to collect disciples— admirers, poets, critics, sycophants. In addition, his wife lived nearby, visited him, and handled his estate. When Pound was released in 1958, the couple returned to Italy; however, Pound lived with Rudge in Venice, whereas Dorothy lived in Rapallo. After an initial burst of activity, Pound grew depressed and fell into silence. He made few public appearances in the 1960s, and he died in Venice in 1972.
PLOT SUMMARY The Cantos really has no plot. The poem consists of approximately 120 shorter poems called cantos, after the sections into which Dante divided each book of his Divine Comedy), some of which tell unified stories and some of which are collections of musings, observations, memories, and exhortations. To summarize the content of The Cantos, therefore, it is probably best to describe the poem in sections.
A Draft of XVI Cantos The first installment of cantos appeared just as Pound was leaving Paris. Published in a small, limited, expensive edition with gothic-style illuminated capitals, the book was self-consciously aimed at an exclusive public. These first sixteen poems introduce the themes that Pound intended to pursue throughout his long ‘‘poem containing history.’’ The first canto, certainly one of the finest, is both a retelling of the story of Book 11 of Homer’s Odyssey and a modeling of the palimpsestic mode of constructing poetry that Pound uses throughout The Cantos. A palimpsest is an ancient piece of paper or parchment that has been written on a number of times at different points in history. On a palimpsest, the traces of the earlier writing are incompletely erased and still visible. Pound was fascinated by the idea of layers of composition that could be partially perceived during a subsequent reading. In this first canto, Pound uses a number of texts. Homer’s book
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MEDIA ADAPTATIONS In 1958, after he was released from St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C., and before he returned to Italy, Pound agreed to be recorded for an audio record. The Caedmon record label produced two records, Ezra Pound Reading His Poetry, both of which have extensive selections from The Cantos. MP3 sound files of Ezra Pound reading his poetry, including private recordings made between 1962 and 1972, are available for download from PennSound. The documentary film Ezra Pound/American Odyssey (1985) was directed by Lawrence Pitkethly and narrated by Paul Hecht; it includes archival recordings of Pound’s voice.
Pound’s translation Cathay, the complete book of poems, along with his own Ripostes (1912), is available on CD or download from Audio Directory. Alan Davis Drake recorded the poetry.
is the source text, but at the end of the canto, Pound reveals that his text of Homer is a Latin translation from 1538. Pound’s own translation (of a translation) sounds less like Latin or Greek or contemporary English than it sounds like his earlier translation of the Anglo-Saxon poem ‘‘The Seafarer.’’ Thus, the canto presents an Anglo-Saxon sounding version of a Latin version of a Greek poem that Pound found in a book on the banks of the Seine in Paris. Much of the rest of this installment continues this layered presentation. From Homer, Pound moves immediately to Provenc¸al troubadour stories as retold by the Victorian poet Robert Browning, to China, and back to Homer. The third canto focuses on Pound’s own life in Venice where he has recently arrived and is sitting ‘‘on the Dogana’s steps.’’ Canto IV reels around the Mediterranean as it goes from the smoking stones of destroyed Troy to the ruins of a Roman arena in Verona, Italy. These cantos, through number
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seven, introduce Pound’s themes: history, the persistence of the image, the senselessness of violence and destruction, and the beauty of human accomplishments. Cantos VIII through XI relate Pound’s version of the story of the Italian condottiere (mercenary soldier) Sigismondo Malatesta (1417–1468), the lord of Rimini, who was condemned by the pope to burn in hell. Pound was particularly struck by how Malatesta used his power not to amass more power or money but to create a court of artistic and intellectual accomplishment. (The Tempio Malatestiano, a church in Rimini that is more dedicated to Malatesta and his wife, Isotta, than to God or a saint, remained one of Pound’s favorite artistic accomplishments.) Canto XIII introduces the Chinese and Confucian theme that dominates much of The Cantos, and in its quiet beauty could not contrast more with the cantos that follow it, the so-called Hell Cantos. In these poems, Pound’s model is Dante (it has already been Homer, Browning, and Confucius), but Pound’s hell is characterized by money-worship and the befoulment of art and artists. This first installment ends, in Canto XVI, with hell in the twentieth century.
A Draft of the Cantos 17 27 A second installment of cantos (using Arabic numerals), A Draft of the Cantos 17–27, appeared in 1928, published by John Rodker, another small press. Instead of beginning with Homer, in these poems Pound begins with a vision from Ovid and a glimpse, following the horrific Hell cantos that end the previous installment, of his ‘‘paradiso terrestre,’’ his earthly paradise. In these cantos, Pound begins in earnest to examine the history of banking and finance, concentrating on the Florentine state, the industrialization of the United States, and the links between banking and war.
A Draft of XXX Cantos A limited edition of A Draft of XXX Cantos appeared from the Hours Press in Paris in 1930. In 1933, the American trade publisher Farrar & Rinehart published this section of The Cantos for the first time in the United States (and concurrently T. S. Eliot’s company, Faber & Faber, published it in a trade edition in Britain). This edition reprinted the poems of the first two installments and added three cantos, ending with the short Canto XXX. In this final canto, Pound returns to the Greek world where he had begun but moves in and out of the
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Italian Renaissance (mentioning Cesare Borgia (1475–1507) and the Malatesta). The book ends with the death of Pope Alessandro Borgia (Pope Alexander VI, 1431–1503), who represents both the intrigue and the culture of the Renaissance.
Eleven New Cantos Soon after Pound’s A Draft of XXX Cantos appeared in the United States and Britain, Pound published Eleven New Cantos with the same publishers. This 1934 volume reflects Pound’s increasing concern with economics and his growing fascination with and admiration for Mussolini. Canto XXXI is based on the correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. In fact, much of this volume consists of Pound’s version of early U.S. history and the Bank of the United States controversy, always with an eye to the Italian Renaissance and as a prefiguration of the twentieth century. One of the most important cantos of the whole epic, however, is Canto 36, Pound’s translation of the troubadour Guido Cavalcanti’s poem ‘‘Donna mi prega.’’ Here, Pound’s enduring love of the Provenc¸al language and the troubadour period (from about 1100 to 1350) finds its greatest expression.
The Fifth Decad XLII LI Still consumed by economic history, Pound published his next installment of cantos, The Fifth Decad XLII–LI in 1937. The book moves from the Monte dei Paschi di Siena, a Renaissance bank that Pound greatly admired, to an involved attack on borrowing and credit, which he calls ‘‘usura,’’ to more representations of Greek myths. By this point in the epic, Pound was being asked about how the work as a whole was structured, and he is said to have comments that it was much like a fugue (a musical composition incorporating counterpoint or various different voices), involving theme, response, and contra-sujet (which is French for opposing subject). In tracing the underlying structural principles in the epic, many critics have concluded that the work is structured much like a fugue.
Cantos LII LXXI Appearing in 1940, just as the war in Europe was beginning, Cantos LII–LXXI received little notice and is considered by some to be the weakest installment. The first ten recount millennia of Chinese history. When Pound reaches 1776, he returns to the United States for the final ten poems.
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The Pisan Cantos The Pisan Cantos was written largely while Pound was held in the U. S. Army Detention Training Center (DTC) in Pisa, Italy, and the work is generally considered to be the most successful of the individual collections. Amid much controversy, the book won the first Bollingen Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress, while Pound was being held in an asylum for the criminally insane. (The book starts at Canto LXXIV, omitting LXXII and LXXIII, the fascist-themed Italian language cantos that Pound’s publisher included many years later in the complete edition of the poem.) Pound’s study of philosophy appears in this book, as well as he envisioning taking his poem into paradise, as Dante describes in his Divine Comedy. However, these flights are accompanied by the most personal of details: reminiscences of Pound’s days in London, impressions of fascist Italy, and mentions of Pound’s fellow prisoners in the DTC. The book manages, better than any of the previous installments, to express Pound’s ideas of the ‘‘Periplum,’’ the wholeness of a man’s life as contextualized in history, art, and politics.
Section: Rock-Drill LXXXV XCV and Thrones XCVI CIV
Pound begins his Cantos with an address to English poet Robert Browning (1812 1889).
Pound wrote little in his early years in St. Elizabeths Hospital, but near the end of his time there, he returned to the cantos. In Section: Rock-Drill LXXXV–XCV, published in 1956, and Thrones XCVI–CIV, published in 1959, Pound envision a reader of these difficult poems. His ideal reader is well-educated, familiar with a number of obscure texts and ideas, and competent in five or six languages. These two installments ask the reader not as much to understand as to participate in Pound’s way of thinking and his imagination. Readers are invited to enjoy the beauty of images and Pound’s command of the poetic line and to draw on their own vast reading in order to begin to appreciate the poet’s rich allusions.
are gone; instead, the cantos have a contemplative, sad, meditative tone that characterizes much of The Pisan Cantos. In the eleven years between the publication of Thrones XCVI–CIV and this volume, Pound struggled with depression. He began to regret much of what he had done and said, writing ‘‘Let those I love try to forgive / what I have made.’’ Some view these as the most beautiful of the cantos: his light touch with Greek myth and deft handling of a striking image of man-made beauty illuminated by the natural light are impressive.
Drafts and Fragments of Cantos CX CXVII Drafts and Fragments of Cantos CX–CXVII, which appeared in 1969 as a response to a bootleg (illegal) publication of the same poems, collects a few finished and a few unfinished cantos. In these poems, the tone has shifted drastically from the previous two installments. The tone of erudite confidence and the sense of haranguing
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CHARACTERS John Adams John Adams (1735–1826) was the second president of the United States. His correspondence with Jefferson forms the basis for many of the middle cantos.
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Mussolini’s intelligence in their brief encounter. He retells this story in Canto XXXXI. Mussolini returns in Canto LXXIV, the first of the Pisan series, where Pound describes how Italian partisans captured Mussolini and executed him. Mussolini’s body and that of his mistress Clara Petacci were hung upside down on public display in Milan.
The Boss, Muss See Benito Mussolini
Confucius See Kung Fu-tse
Isotta degli Atti Isotta degli Atti (c. 1430–1470) was Sigismondo Malatesta’s mistress and, later, his third wife. His love for her is demonstrated all over the Tempio Malatestiano by the intertwined initials S and I.
Siggy See Sigismondo Malatesta
Kung Fu-tse Confucius (551–479 BCE ) is the moral anchor of The Cantos. Pound compares the moral precepts of the West, especially those of Aristotle, against Confucian ideals and finds those of the West lacking. For Pound’s poem, perhaps the most important dictum of Confucius is his insistence on exact terminology; Pound feared and hated the inexact use of language, and The Pisan Cantos are suffused with Pound’s regretful sense that he violated this precept in his wartime broadcasts.
Ixotta See Isotta degli Atti
Thomas Jefferson The third president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) was a proponent of agrarian democracy and opposed centralized banking systems.
Sigismondo Malatesta Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta (1417–1468) was the lord of the Italian city of Rimini and a famous ‘‘condottiere,’’ or Renaissance courtier. By the time he was thirteen, Malatesta was fighting in the field, leading his troops against papal armies and winning. These experiences were the prelude to Malatesta’s struggles against Popes Pius II and Paul II. Malatesta held his own, and at the same time built a court in Rimini, which for Pound was an example of enlightened governance, bringing the artists Agostino di Duccio and Piero della Francesca to Rimini to help in the decoration of the Church of San Francesco, also known as the Tempio Malatestiano.
Benito Mussolini Fascist Party leader and Italian dictator Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) was Pound’s contemporary and one of his idols. Pound met with Mussolini once, in 1933, and believed he could sense
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THEMES The Past as a Palimpsest A palimpsest is a piece of paper or parchment that has been written on a number of times and on which the earlier texts have been only partially effaced. But the term also designates a building that incorporates an earlier building, typically one from a previous historical period. One illustration of the palimpsest occurs in the first canto, in which Pound translates into Anglo-Saxon sounding English a Latin translation of a Greek text that he found at a Paris bookstall. The text he translates is preserved through these various editions and at the same time gradually transformed by them. The palimpsest serves Pound as both a structural principle for The Cantos and one of its most important themes. As a student and later as a traveler and resident in European cities, Pound appreciated how cultures are superimposed historically, literally in the sense of one culture erecting its buildings on the ruins of a previous one, and metaphorically in one culture expanding upon an idea formed in a previous one. Hellenistic art took Greek classicism and gave it emotionality. Roman architecture, sculpture, and literature appropriated and developed Greek architecture, sculpture, and literature. Similarly, religious ideas recurred, with new versions echoing past ones, illustrated by Greek gods recreated by Romans with Roman names. Classicism in total was recapitulated in the Renaissance, the word itself meaning rebirth. Pound sought this multifaceted action through time, to capture how cultures evolve by and through layers and how cultural artifacts are both preserved and transformed by later articulations. In this pursuit, Pound agreed his contemporary and fellow American the novelist William Faulkner (1897–1963), who strove to show in his own work how the past is always present, how
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TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY In many of the middle cantos, Pound focuses on the correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. He is also interested in the establishment of the first and second Banks of the United States, and on how these two early presidents clashed with Alexander Hamilton on economic policy. Write a research paper in which you explain the purpose of the Bank of the United States and how it was viewed by Jefferson and Adams. Then explain Pound’s view of the national bank. Beginning in Canto XIII, Pound examines the philosophy of Confucius. What are some important Confucian ideas? How has Confucianism influenced Chinese society over the centuries? What is the current Chinese government’s attitude toward Confucian thought? With two or three classmates, create a panel discussion with each member explaining one aspect of Confucius’s effect on China. Have one member evaluate the philosopher’s ideas and select some that might be useful in the United States in the early 2000s. Ezra Pound greatly admired the Italian dictator, Benito Mussolini, and Mussolini makes
appearances in The Cantos. What was Mussolini’s government like? How did he rise to power? What relationship was there between Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany in the 1930s and 1940s? Compile historical photographs taken during World War II and project these as you discuss the similarities between Mussolini and Hitler and the military action they commanded.
An important cultural moment for Pound, one that informed the conception of The Cantos, is the Provenc¸al or troubadour culture. Where did these people live? What language did they speak? How was their society organized? What does the word troubadour mean? In a PowerPoint presentation, introduce your classmates to Provenc¸al or troubadour culture.
Put together an oral report and slide presentation on the Tempio Malatestiano, explaining the church architecture, the exterior and interior decorations, and the church’s special significance for Pound. Use information and images from online sources and art history books you locate in the library.
ancestors are always shaping descendents, how past plots are re-enacted. It is this vast cultural legacy that Pound appreciated, grasped, and wanted his epic to convey.
Return,’’ he writes of classical gods awaking in modern times and returning to active life. They are not dead, he asserts; they are just dormant yet their influence lives on.
Throughout The Cantos, Pound tries to illustrate the presence of the past in people’s current beliefs and practices. Moreover, he tries to show how modern war and finance can be better understood through the study of banking itself, which can be traced to its origins in medieval Florence and Siena. Adding to the overall complexity, his obsession with the idea of the image, or what he called the ‘‘luminous detail,’’ found a correlative in his study of the Chinese ideogram, in which he saw ideas conveyed in a form that is at once both pictorial and verbal. In an early poem, ‘‘The
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Much of The Cantos is concerned with esthetics, with the search for beauty and the examination of its essence. Pound was not a nature poet and did not find beauty in nature, as did the early romantics. For Pound, the interplay between human creation and natural forces—especially light—creates beauty. He was fascinated with Mediterranean light and how it illuminates and transforms pastel painted stucco and architectural ruins of ancient cultures, and he imagined past cultures in their heyday by watching the transformative effect of
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evident throughout the epic, particularly how he evolves his chosen subjects with such exceptional style.
Time and History
The influence of the Chinese teacher and philosopher Confucius is evident throughout the poem, especially in the segment beginning with Canto 42, where Pound gives a Confucian digest of the history of China. (Archive Photos / Popperfoto / Xenofile Images, Inc. Reproduced by permission.)
light as it brightens and then declines on a given day in the present. Human striving is not vain, for Pound. He admired strong historical figures who sought to create beauty, justice, and a new social system. Curiously, Pound selected as models certain historical persons who were known for their both power and cruelty, for example, the sixteenthcentury Italian military leader Sigismondo Malatesta and his sometimes rival, the autocratic and often ruthless Pope Alexander VI, but more notably, given the immediacy of World War II, Pound admired the fascist leader Benito Mussolini and was convinced that fascism was a better system than free-market capitalism. In the balance, the poet also admired Confucius, Dante, Guido Cavalcanti, John Adams, men who wanted to create cultures in which art and governance worked together, not in opposition. But arguably the strongest parts of Pound’s epic are his descriptions of beautiful subjects. His original use of language to convey the image is
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Time is a constant theme in The Cantos, and history is the subject by which a convoluted and repetitious sense of time is conveyed. Pound described his epic as ‘‘a poem containing history’’ and as ‘‘the tale of the tribe.’’ Pound juxtaposes diverse time periods, often in adjacent lines. Many of the cantos jump wildly around in time. Rather than using chronology to construct his poem, Pound structures his poem with central ideas and images, and he moves through history and geography, connecting ancient China to the nascent American republic, for instance. Pound wants to expand or complicate people’s sense of time, inviting them away from the assumption that time, like plot, is linear, into an awareness of how the past is not lost but present, and how all action and creation in the present, no matter how novel and fresh, in truth occurs within and is colored by a vast, still-traceable historical context.
STYLE As an epic, The Cantos involves a journey, but unlike the Odyssey or the Aeneid the journey is not through space but through history. Pound initially thought of his poem in terms of Dante’s medieval epic the Divine Comedy, in which the poet journeys from earth to the depths of hell then ascends through purgatory to paradise. But Pound’s poem does not undertake this progression in any linear sense. The first canto presents, in Pound’s translation of a translation, Odysseus’s preparations to going into the underworld, and in the early cantos, Pound also describes how Sigismondo Malatesta braved terrestrial and spiritual hells. The first section of cantos ends with the socalled Hell cantos, which present images as horrific as any literary work since Dante. But after the first sixteen cantos, the Dantelike structure fades. Pound provides the reader the occasional glimpse of what he called his ‘‘paradiso terrestre,’’ the earthly paradise, especially in his descriptions of light glinting off of artworks such as the mosaic over the doorway in a church in Torcello, Italy, but for the most part the cantos are concerned with what might be ‘‘purgatorio,’’ or the world of history. Entire cantos are devoted to
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enumerating Chinese rulers or summarizing the correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. Only in the last few cantos does Pound begin to concern himself fully with what is in his paradise, and over the fifty years he spent writing the poem he seems to have come to the conclusion that paradise is both fleeting and ever present: ‘‘Do not move / let the wind speak / that is paradise,’’ he says in a fragment for one of the last cantos. Perhaps the best description of the structure of the poem is Pound’s. At times, he told friends that he had built the poem to mirror the structure of a fugue, a music form that consists of the announcement of a theme in one voice, the echoing of that theme from other voices, and the contrapuntal development of that theme. On another level, the individual cantos are structured not as coherent narratives but as details linked together imagistically. Canto III, for instance, begins in Venice, where Pound ‘‘sat on the Dogana’s steps / For the gondolas cost too much, that year.’’ He muses on the appearance of Venice in 1908, describing such specifics as the Buccentoro rowing club and the citizens ‘‘howling ’Stretti,’’’ a line from a popular song, but quickly moves to the baths at Baden, Switzerland, and from there to Burgos, Spain. These details are linked by images and concepts: the air and colors of Venice make Pound think of Tuscany, which makes him think of the ancient gods and nymphs. From that series of fleshy, earthly images, he jumps to a Roman text about the baths where nude young women bathe. For Pound, the images communicated not just a picture in the mind but the nexus of intellectual and emotional response in a given moment. In order to convey his conception of culture and history and how they define any present moment, Pound had to find a style that both used former models and departed from them. In other words, as he engaged with the ideas of his work, he borrowed, echoed, and deviated from the cultural patterns he wanted both to preserve and transform. The style he used is challenging because it disrupts readers’ unconscious expectations. Highly educated readers can recognize familiar details but are also surprised by a presentation that is unfamiliar and at time so disparate and multifaceted as to be daunting.
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HISTORICAL CONTEXT Pound wrote The Cantos over a long period of time—the first canto was published in 1917 and the final installment to be published during Pound’s lifetime appeared in 1968. Pound’s poem is steeped in history: his own description of the poem as he formulated it was ‘‘a poem containing history.’’ History, therefore, both formed the raw material for the poem and impinged upon its construction and creation. When Pound first thought of writing his ‘‘tale of the tribe,’’ he was living in London and had gained a reputation as a literary impresario and provocateur. From the time that he arrived in London in 1909, he had set himself the task of wresting art and literature from the nineteenth century into the twentieth. To achieve this end, he served as a foreign editor for American publications; he ‘‘discovered’’ such writers as T. S. Eliot; he edited anthologies; he promoted operas; he gave money and materials to sculptors; and he harangued and wrote and dashed about the city, an unforgettable figure in his pointy beard and cape. But by 1920, Pound had tired of London. World War I had taken its toll on the writers and artists he sponsored, and London’s openness to artistic experimentation was waning. Pound wrote his well-known Hugh Selwyn Mauberley poem cycle in 1920 and moved to Paris. He only stayed there four years, though, feeling that Italy was a better place for working on The Cantos, the poem that now consumed his energies. In the 1920s, as Pound finished the first thirty cantos, he grew increasingly interested in European and American history and economics, subjects that supplemented his already extensive knowledge of Chinese and Provenc¸al history and art and classical civilizations. The Cantos began to be Pound’s ‘‘tale of the tribe,’’ the ‘‘tribe’’ being intelligent, artistic, culturally minded people. In his historical research, Pound came across a number of men who brought together what he saw as political justice, economic wisdom, and an artistic temperament and The Cantos quickly became a tale of how those men—Jefferson and Adams, Confucius, Malatesta—had to fight against the venality and stupidity of their contemporaries. Pound came to believe that the answer for his own times was the Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini (1883–1945). Through the late 1920s and the 1930s, Pound began to write more on economics, arguing that Mussolini’s programs epitomized the kind of humane system that Pound hoped
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COMPARE & CONTRAST
1920s: The so-called Roaring Twenties are characterized by economic expansion in the United States. Reckless and exorbitant spending among the wealthy anticipates the Great Depression, which begins with the New York Stock Market crash in late 1929. 1960s: The economic growth of the post– World War II 1950s continues to generate construction and suburban sprawl into previously rural areas. While the middle class prospers, many young people drop out, in protest of the ongoing Vietnam War and the U.S. military draft. The late 1960s witness considerable social conflict, for example, with the civil rights movement, and congressional acts are passed to assure equal rights in employment, housing, and education. Today: After the economic downturn of the early 2000s, people face record levels of debt, insolvency, and unemployment. Economic news is sufficiently negative to cause consumers to change their purchasing habits and credit companies reverse their previous marketing ploys to encourage debt and thus profit from high interest rates. Foreclosures are common.
1920s: Post–World War I years witness artistic experimentation. Many expatriate American artists and writers live in Paris, fleeing what they see as bourgeois provincialism in the United States.
to see succeed in the world. In Cantos XLII through LXXI, Pound wrote extensively on Chinese and American history, but Mussolini’s name and ideas come up repeatedly. Even more disturbing is a growing anti-Semitism in the poems. Consumed by a hatred of banks and always attracted to medieval times, Pound concluded that powerful Jews were behind the world banking system. Exacerbating Pound’s fascist and anti-Semitic sympathies
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1960s: During escalation of U.S. military involvement in Southeast Asia and engagement in the Vietnam War, some American writers protest big business and the big business of war, urging young people to drop out of the conventional path of education and work and join the hippie generation. Use of various illegal drugs is widespread among teenagers. Today: As the United States withdraws troops from Iraq, it commits thousands more to Afghanistan. Military forces are also used for humanitarian purposes, as for example in assisting Haitians after a series of devastating earthquakes in early 2010. 1920s: Higher education is for upper class individuals; most young people go directly into the labor force on or before completion of high school. 1960s: Baby Boomers enter college in record numbers, causing shortages in teachers. Individuals with PhDs find ample job opportunities waiting for them upon graduation. Today: As industry contracts through the economic downturn of the first decade of the twenty-first century, jobs are lost by the tens of thousands. Many unemployed individuals seek retraining in hopes of finding positions in new areas; however, the workforce is growing faster than industry, and unemployment remains at 10 percent nation-wide and higher in certain cities and states.
were his mental problems: By the late 1930s, Pound was showing clear signs of paranoia. Pound returned to the United States briefly in 1939 and gave a few speeches, but he only managed to convince his audiences that he was either a crank or insane. When war broke out in Europe, Pound was forced to remain in Italy, and for the duration of the war he lived there. To earn money, he made broadcasts on Italian
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Cantos 71-72, written in Italian, defend the fascist ideals of dictator Benito Mussolini. ( Bettmann / Corbis)
state radio, that were filled with anti-Semitism and venom directed at President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882–1945). In 1943, Pound was indicted for treason in the United States, and as the war was ending, he was captured by Italian partisans and turned over to the U.S. Army. He was kept in a cage in Pisa for a while before being returned to the United States to stand trial. Upon his arrival in Washington, D.C., Pound was found mentally unfit for trial and sentenced to detention in a mental hospital. However, at this same time, a collection of the poems that he had written while held by the Army, The Pisan Cantos, appeared, and to many readers, they were the best poems Pound had ever written. As ever, they were difficult and relied on an enormous body of crosscultural knowledge, but for the first time, Pound showed weakness, doubt, regret about his actions and beliefs. In these poems, he came through as
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honest with himself as he had ever been. Before his release from the hospital in 1958, he published one other set of cantos. He returned to Italy to live out the rest of his life, quietly.
CRITICAL OVERVIEW Critical opinion on Pound’s Cantos seems more divided than the critical opinion on any other important modernist work, and the epic’s critical fortunes have risen and fallen with time perhaps as a result. Even during the half-century when the work appeared in installments, readers and critics were widely divided on the poem’s merits. As the critical literature on The Cantos is vast, only some of the more prominent critics of the work are covered here. As the poem was being composed, even Pound’s close friends and admirers were unsure about the
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structure of the poem—how it fit together and what it would look like as a whole. The Irish poet William Butler Yeats wrote in 1936 that all he saw at that point were strange and unrelated fragments but he assumed the relationship between elements would become apparent when the finished poem was considered. Yeats also said he thought the work had more style than form, that the content seemed broken or interrupted. T. S. Eliot echoed Yeats’s criticisms, writing in 1946 that The Cantos are very opaque and as though the poem is irritated with the limited knowledge of his readers. Eliot praised Pound’s influence in the highest terms, but was less enthusiastic about his most important poem. In 1950, the prominent English critic F. R. Leavis responded to Eliot’s opinions on Pound. Like Eliot and Yeats, Leavis felt that Pound did not use the historical sources well. But where Eliot felt that Pound’s importance as an influence was immeasurable, even if the meaning of his poem was opaque, Leavis felt that Pound’s style limited the impact his epic could have and thus restricted its importance. Pound’s greatest defender among literary critics was the Canadian Hugh Kenner, who wrote the first book-length study of Pound’s work, The Poetry of Ezra Pound, in 1951, and who contributed an enormously important work of Pound scholarship, The Pound Era, twenty-one years later. In The Poetry of Ezra Pound, Kenner forcefully answered Pound’s critics. After the appearance of the Pisan section of cantos in 1948, he wrote: ‘‘it is no longer easy . . . to dismiss The Cantos as either formless or irrelevant. Pound impinges upon the citizen of CE 1950 or whenever, not via his psychological tensions . . . but through a rational amalgam of morals and politics.’’ Kenner’s book was the first to argue that the epic was in fact an epic with form; Kenner made it possible for a large group of scholars to write on Pound without having to defend the poet on charges of formlessness or sloppiness. For Kenner, ‘‘Pound’s structural unit in The Cantos is not unlike the Joycean epiphany: a highly concentrated manifestation of a moral, cultural, or political quiddity [the essential quality of a thing, its ‘suchness’].’’ Although The Cantos received constant criticism for being formless—and Kenner’s work only provided a means of defense, it did not dispel all of the objections to Pound’s poem—few critics ever took issue with Pound’s poetic strengths. Perhaps Pound’s most important innovation was
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in his use of the line. Pound’s close friend William Carlos Williams admired The Cantos primarily for Pound’s command of the poetic line, which he said followed the movement of the poet’s thought. Eliot, Leavis, and others all praised this aspect of The Cantos and of Pound’s work in general. The Cantos, for all of its difficulty, inspired a number of other poets who saw in Pound’s poem a different model for the epic. John Berryman’s Dream Songs, Louis Zukofsky’s A, and Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems, all were influenced by Pound’s innovations. In the 1960s, more criticism was written on Pound than on almost any other American poet, and many of the young poets of the period, ranging from the Buddhist poet Gary Snyder to the southern nature poet Charles Wright, saw Pound as their most important predecessor. In subsequent decades, with the decline of New Criticism, which studied poems in isolation from their context, Pound’s poems generated increasing discussion. However, even as readers discovered Pound’s value, the epic tended not to be included in classroom study because of its contrary political and anti-Semitic bias. Pound’s disturbing political opinions, coupled with the work’s difficulty, caused the poem virtually to disappear from college poetry courses. Nonetheless, Pound’s biography and work also proved him to be a good friend to hundreds of artists of all kinds and acknowledged him as the central figure in literary modernism.
CRITICISM Greg Barnhisel Barnhisel is an associate professor of English and director of the first-year writing program at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In the following essay, he looks at The Cantos in their historical context. He argues that the poem became the focal point for a debate in the United States, the ramifications of which went far beyond the poem, Pound, and even literature. Ezra Pound’s Cantos, the masterpiece of one of modernism’s central figures, is perhaps the least read of any of the great works of modernism. The poem is difficult, certainly. It asks the reader to come to it with a vast array of knowledge of languages, historical events, and mythologies. It presents a string of images and fragments strung together by a logic that is hard to decipher. It expresses opinions that are unfamiliar and foreign
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THE ESSENTIAL QUESTION FOR ALL OF THESE WRITERS AND THINKERS WAS WHETHER ART CAN BE VIEWED ENTIRELY AESTHETICALLY (SOLELY IN TERMS OF ITS ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE ATTRIBUTES)
Dante’s great epic poem Divine Comedy (1308–1321) presents the hierarchical medieval worldview of the afterlife, ranking sins with the nine circles of hell, and in its descriptions of purgatory and paradise placing human artistry in its finite and temporal framework. Pound’s earlier and shorter poetry is collected in Personae, which first appeared in 1926 and was reprinted in 1990. These poems introduce readers to Pound’s style without the complexity of his Cantos. Literary Essays of Ezra Pound (published in a paperback by New Directions in 1968) contains an introduction to Pound’s literary theory by T. S. Eliot. Ezra Pound: Selected Prose 1909–1965, first appeared in paperback when New Directions published it in 1975. This collection presents most of the poet’s important writings on literary, political, and economic topics. In 2008, Fordham University Press published a critical edition of The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, by Ernest Fenollosa and others. The book contains Fenollosa’s work along with critical assessment of it with foreword and notes by Pound. Pound had a dramatic effect on the editing of T. S. Eliot’s poem ‘‘The Waste Land’’ (1922). In 2000, the Norton Critical Edition of Eliot’s poem appeared, which provides background, criticism, and helpful notes on this modernist poem. Stephen Kern’s The Culture of Time and Space (1880–1918) (Harvard University Press, 2003), describes the life of the mind in the decades leading up to World War I. Kern provides an engaging description of the cultural, social, and technological changes that influenced modernist art. He describes how late nineteenth-century culture was altered by such large concepts as Darwin’s theory and such seemingly petty social changes as the widespread use of pocket watches.
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OR WHETHER ART ALWAYS BEARS SOME TRACES OF, COMMENTS ON, AND HAS RESPONSIBILITY TO THE SOCIETY THAT PRODUCES IT.’’
at times and at other times are disturbing and even offensive. For these and other reasons, few college poetry courses include more than a few excerpts from The Cantos, and few readers outside the academia invest the required time to read and appreciate the poem. Nonetheless, many critics feel that the poem is the great epic of modernist poetry, and some feel that it, not James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), is the greatest work of modernism. Pound was a central figure in the development of modernism, both in terms of facilitating the careers of other artists and writers and of developing the techniques that would become the hallmarks of modernism. Pound’s lifelong dictum was ‘‘Make it New!’’ and the drive for innovation inspired most of his artistic endeavors. His early poems are some of the most familiar works of literary modernism and almost no course in American poetry omits such poems as ‘‘In a Station of the Metro,’’‘‘Sestina: Altaforte,’’ or ‘‘The River-Merchant’s Wife.’’ But the difficulty of The Cantos is really not the issue when we ask ourselves why the most important poem by one of the most important figures in modernism is rarely read. After all, T. S. Eliot’s ‘‘The Waste Land’’ remains popular and is hardly easier than The Cantos. In the early 2000s, students learn a little bit about Pound early; high school English classes often read ‘‘In a Station of the Metro’’ to illustrate metaphor, and freshman literature survey courses include a few of his poems in their modernist units. But if readers wish to venture any further into Pound’s work, they are immediately confronted by the big issues of Pound’s life and beliefs. This is neither a conspiracy on the part of Pound-haters, nor is it unjustified: In order to understand The Cantos,
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one must be conversant with the historical events, personages, and economic ideas that really are the central subjects of the poem. But acquaintance with what Pound did in his life and what he thought, combined with the difficulty inherent in reading The Cantos, makes students reluctant to undertake the project. The relationship of Pound’s ideas to his poetry is a topic that has been central to public understanding of the poet since at least the late 1920s. Cultures have always tried to balance out the competing claims of aesthetic value and a so-called good message in art. In the fifth century before the Common Era, Plato banished the poets from his imaginary Republic because art encouraged dissent and disreputable ideas. In the seventeenth century, John Milton tried to use art to rally English people against the abuses of royalty while at the same time the elites were creating aesthetically rarefied art for themselves. The essential question for all of these writers and thinkers was whether art can be viewed entirely aesthetically (solely in terms of its artistic and creative attributes) or whether art always bears some traces of, comments on, and has responsibility to the society that produces it. Pound’s Cantos, with its attacks on Roosevelt and Alexander Hamilton and advocacy of Italian fascism and anti-Semitism, is a problematic poem in this context. During the 1930s, while most readers had begun to ignore Pound, many critics felt that the poem would indeed be a great work if Pound could ever come up with a coherent structure for it. But how could literary critics ignore the admiration of Mussolini? How could they dismiss as unimportant the poem’s attacks on Jewish bankers? The answer lies in the profound changes that occurred among American cultural intellectuals between the 1930s and the 1950s. During the Great Depression in the 1930s, socialist and communist movements met some success in the United States. On the East Coast and especially in New York City, many young intellectuals, many of whom were from Jewish immigrant families that had labored in poverty, gravitated to communism. Communist groups published magazines and newspapers, including poems, fiction, and literary criticisms by these young intellectuals. But by the late 1930s, a small group of Jewish intellectuals from New York grew tired of the strict rules the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) had set regarding the art and literature that should be supported. Adhering to the Soviet line, the CPUSA advocated so-called
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socialist realism, that is, realistic art that exalted workers and their struggles. This group of breakaway critics (who became known as the New York Intellectuals) disagreed. They sought out art that was more daring, more abstract, and experimental. Forming their own journal, Partisan Review, the New York Intellectuals forged their own kind of cultural criticism: strongly left-wing, anti-Nazi but also anti-Soviet, seeking out new and avant-garde art as a way to undermine the bourgeois complacency of the United States. This group included Mary McCarthy, Delmore Schwartz, Philip Rahv, Irving Howe, Clement Greenberg, Lionel Trilling, and many others. These individuals felt that art had a responsibility not just to society, as the socialist realism doctrine held, but also to aesthetic values that have nothing to do with morals or ethics or societal aims. James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, James Baldwin, and the abstract expressionist painters were some of the artists favored by the New York Intellectuals. However, given that most of intellectuals were Jewish, the group as a whole was highly suspicious of Pound. As the New York Intellectuals were going through their educations and growing more independent, another important group of critics was forming, this one in the South. Members of the Fugitive Group, named after their literary journal, consisted of southern literary men who looked back to the Old South and saw in it culture, refinement, and an artistic sensibility. Although they initially linked their literary program strongly with the South, they quickly developed a more general methodology for studying literature of all kinds. By the 1940s, these writers (who included John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, and R. P. Blackmur) were becoming known as the New Critics. Their approach to literature centered on close reading: Poems should be read not with an eye to the biography of the poet, not with attention to the political beliefs of the poet or of his time, but with the greatest emphasis placed on the inner workings of the poem itself. The New Critics sought out tension, ambiguity, irony within the poem, and paid close attention to each word and all of its connotations. For them, the social value of literature—if any—was that it developed an aesthetic sensibility in readers, which would make them more sensitive and perceptive citizens. Both the New Critics and the New York Intellectuals, therefore, believed that literature should
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Pound discusses the monopolies on credit and interest rates perpetuated by banks at the time he was writing The Cantos. In this 1931 scene, the president of the Federal American Bank in Washington, D.C., addresses a crowd of depositors angry over the bank’s restrictive practices. ( Hulton Deutsch Collection / Corbis)
not be judged primarily by the ideas it expresses. The form and structure of a poem, its sound, its imagery, and its innovations should be viewed as its most important attributes, and critics should pay attention to those aspects of a poem rather than to what lessons a poem teaches or what kind of man the poet is. In 1949, just as members of these groups were becoming the most prominent cultural intellectuals in the United States, they were called upon to defend these claims about how to judge art. Ezra Pound was brought back to the United States soon after World War II and was quickly put on trial for treason. Knowing that he would be found guilty and most likely executed, his lawyer, Julian Cornell, sought to have Pound found mentally unfit to stand trial, and the judge agreed. Pound was incarcerated in St. Elizabeths Hospital
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in Washington, D.C. The American reading public was disgusted with Pound and, to make matters worse, people had essentially stopped buying his books. Pound seemed destined to fade into irrelevance. But in 1948, Pound’s collection The Pisan Cantos appeared. The book received largely positive reviews, and many readers who had dismissed Pound now began to feel again that he was a great poet. The following year, the book won the first Bollingen Prize, an award given by the Library of Congress to the year’s best book of poetry. Predictably, many people were outraged. How could a man be lauded by his country just three years after that country had sought to execute him for treason? The Pisan Cantos was not innocent of those acts and beliefs for which Pound had earned such opprobrium: In the poems he laments
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the death of Mussolini and talks about his wartime radio broadcasts. In the Saturday Review of Literature, the most important mainstream book review magazine in the country, the poet Robert Hillyer published two attacks that took as their targets Pound, T. S. Eliot, literary modernism, the Bollingen Foundation, and New Criticism. How could these people, Hillyer asked, reward art that held positions that were so inimical to the values for which the United States had just fought a terribly destructive war? The Bollingen committee, which included T. S. Eliot and a number of New Critics, responded to Hillyer’s objections in terms that would determine academic approaches to Pound’s poetry for decades. In a communique´, the committee cited the ‘‘objective perception of value,’’ arguing that aesthetic and artistic value could be judged entirely separately from moral or social standards. Surprisingly, the New York Intellectuals agreed with the Bollingen committee. In a forum convened for Partisan Review, most of the contributors supported the Bollingen award. One notable exception was the poet Karl Shapiro, a member of the Bollingen committee, who stated frankly that he voted against awarding the prize to Pound because, as he was quoted to say, ‘‘I am a Jew and I cannot honor anti-Semites.’’ This cultural moment was the coalescing of a strange and unpredictable alliance. The left-wing, cosmopolitan, nonacademic, largely Jewish New York Intellectual group came together with the right-wing, agrarian, academic, largely southern New Critics to argue that art must be judged first and foremost on aesthetic standards. As a result of this endorsement, Pound’s popularity, sales, and critical respect slowly but steadily grew over the next ten years and then grew dramatically during the 1960s. The Cantos had the endorsement of the leading critics of the day, and readers were given license to read the poems as strictly aesthetic artifacts. Source: Greg Barnhisel, Critical Essay on The Cantos, in Epics for Students, 2nd ed., Gale, Cengage Learning, 2011.
Chantal Bizzini In the following essay, Bizzini explores the different voices of intellectuals of the past to whom Pound refers in The Cantos and relates these to ideas of a utopian city. Shaped after the Odyssey and the Divine Comedy, Ezra Pound’s Cantos, the great American epic of the twentieth century, recounts a voyage. This is
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POUND CHANGES THE DEVELOPMENT OF HISTORY, CREATING NEW POSSIBILITIES FOR THE FUTURE AND EXPLAINING HISTORY WITH A FRESH VISION.’’
the journey back home, or uo´oto. This voyage, at the time when Pound writes the first thirty Cantos in 1930, encompasses time and space and displays ‘‘an exploration through history, which, after the Hell and Purgatory of the earlier Cantos, would presumably end in Paradise, in the lost city which Pound variously conceived and described’’ (Sullivan 29). In our quest for this lost city, we can first question the real cities in which Pound actually lived, and the historical cities that he wrote about, and finally the cities that he imagined, which abound in The Cantos. The real cities in Pound’s life are mostly European. He traveled first in Venice in 1898 and in 1908. Then, he chose to live in Europe: in London in 1908; in Paris, from 1920 to 1924; in Rapallo, in 1925, and finally in Rapallo and Venice until his death in 1972 (Sullivan 14–19). We know that Pound, as the poet narrator of The Cantos, plays with the persona of Ulysses, and we can thus infer that, at the very basis of this European wandering, lies an exile. This exile is, at the same time, an exile of place and time. Pound chooses to escape in the nostalgia of the past in Europe instead of remaining in twentieth-century America. Consequently, very few American cities seem to require Pound’s interest through The Cantos. When he begins to work on The Cantos in 1915, Pound is still living in London; but soon after the war he must acknowledge that ‘‘London was the Capital no longer’’ (Kenner 382), and ‘‘had become a place of locust-shells’’ (Kenner 419); that ‘‘in the old sense there were no more capitals’’ (Kenner 384), and that ‘‘much of Europe had been destroyed’’ (Kenner 419). So, in Canto LXXVI, the third of the Pisan Cantos—1948)—, Pound sees himself as having escaped alone from a pervasive ruin: As a lone ant from a broken ant hill from the wreckage of Europe, ego scriptor. (LXXVI/458)
We assume that after having seen that the city, which is an architectural work of art as well
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as an expression of civilization, has been destroyed, Pound will write The Cantos ‘‘against this ruin’’ (CX/481).
thematically linked. In that way, The Cantos is a didactic poem which will teach a new understanding of history.
In the attempt to measure the importance of Pound’s wandering through Europe and its repercussions on The Cantos, we can look at the first evidences of the City in The Cantos’: firstly comes Ithaca (I. 25), Ulysses’s dream-place and the royal island to which he tries to return; then Mantova, Sordello’s birth place—Sordello is a poet and one of the many personae Pound endorses through his poem (II. 4); then comes La Dogana, i.e. Venice— which is Pound’s dream-place and the city where he eventually decided to settle (III. 1); followed by a ‘‘Palace in a smoky light’’ (IV. 1), which evokes Troy but represents the destruction of civilization; and finally Ecbatana (Nearly every city name, family name, etc, in The Cantos is ‘‘misspelled’’ intentionally by Pound.)—the city of Deioces (V. 1), its builder and a fair judge—‘‘he won the hearts of the people who made him king, after which he built his visionary city’’ (Terrell 14). We can now examine these first appearances side by side with the last one, in Pound’s ‘‘Notes for CXVII et seq.’’:
Then, The Cantos, proceeding by discrimination, pictures, as does every epic, the tragedy of human beings, here the twentieth century human beings who must return home escaping evil: The Cantos are this battlefield of the eternal struggle of good against evil and appeal to them ‘‘to be men not destroyers’’ (Notes for CXVII et sq./802) and dedicate themselves to the betterment of the human condition (Terrell viii).
‘‘I tried to make a paradiso terrestre.’’ (Notes for CXVII et seq./802)
and measure the span of The Cantos, as a real building, a work of art against destruction. Thus, at the very beginning of The Cantos, Pound introduces the theme of the city, at the same time a poetical and a teleological motive, which will give a coherence to The Cantos: The Cantos develops itself as Pound’s linguistic city under construction. In order to imagine how to escape from this ‘‘inferno’’ which is the twentieth century and to imagine a city totally fit for habitation, Pound explores the history of the past, in search of models: heroes, thinkers, poets to ‘‘make it new’’ (LIII/ 265) and build a lasting peace, a constitution and a language, all which may help to reshape the culture of America. This exploration makes of The Cantos a ‘‘no-place’’ and a ‘‘no-time’’ as its progression occurs through obscurity where it encounters the crowds of the people of the past and of the present. This obscurity is at the same time the absence of the lights of civilization and, for the readers, the reading of a rather obscure text. The process of writing will be a re-building and the process of reading will lead the readers from ignorance to knowledge, thus changing them because their part is an active one: they have to find a thread in the apparently disjoined paragraphs of the poem which are, however,
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The obscurity of The Cantos glimmers from time to time, and its shimmering surface is as the idealized form of civilization, which shows itself in different periods of history. Pound explained plainly his project when writing The Cantos, as he says in 1953: ‘‘My Paradiso will have no St. Dominic or Augustine, but it will be a Paradiso just the same, moving toward final coherence. I’m getting at the building of the City, that whole tradition’’ (Pearce 171). This article intends to enhance the different voices of the thinkers of the past that Pound echoes in The Cantos in order to emphasize a thread that readers might follow through a series of cantos, which may seem at first to be parts of a long political and economic development. Pound, as he says, gives us in these Cantos, the fruits of many men’s efforts and tries to shape and harmonize them. This article also intends to illuminate the process of city building throughout The Cantos. It proceeds by antithesis and filiations among the mythical, ancient, medieval, renaissance, and modern cities. Thus the image of real and mythical cities seems to be blurred by the coming to existence of a totally different city, a utopian city able to accommodate a better society. This process can be described first from the architect’s point of view: how, by a look towards the great cities of old and a constant inspection of his growing work requiring his living experience, will he become the inheritor of the builders of the past? This process can also be described from Venice, which we can call Pound’s dream-place, which is inscribed in a tradition, and prefigures the city of the future. In Canto LXVIII/395 Pound again lends his voice to John Adams—to whom he dedicates ten Cantos generally considered as rather obscure—, who studies constitutions and in turn evokes various philosophers through the ages. Drawing both from history and major classical writings, he
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displays the array of questions that crop up with regard to the political, economic and linguistic existence of the city. First answering the question of how to give stability to the city, he says that ‘‘the best form of government is one of divided powers with checks on one another’’ (Terrell 323). What will retain our interest here is that Adams also evokes the philosophers who were auxiliaries to the Prince, engaging in a kind of dialogue with them: through John Adam’s voice the names of Thomas More (LXVIII/395) and Lord Francis Bacon (LXIV/356) are spoken. The names of Plato and Bacon are mentioned when Pound lends his voice to Upward (LXXVII/469). Plato had been previously quoted by Plethon (VIII/31). Pound here refers indirectly to utopian thinkers—as did the utopian thinkers themselves—, showing his concern for the choice of a better constitution which could give stability to the city. At the same time, Pound shows the whole process of the thinking about constitutions performed by John Adams. Pound so insists on John Adams’s opinion that the only way to improve life in society is a comparative study of the governments and the reading of works that are essential to anyone who studies the city: works such as More’s Utopia, Bacon’s New Atlantis, and Plato’s works, in particular his Republic, Book IV and Letter VII. These allusions are announced in the preceding Canto by these lines taken from a letter by John Adams to John Penn: Printed by John Taylor of Caroline in 1814 To John Penn ’76 from J. Adams: no more agreeable employment than the study of the best kind of government to determine form you must determine the end (that is purpose) single assembly is liable to all the vices follies and frailties (LXVII/392)
This example of an American thinker pondering the best constitution and these allusions to the utopian thinkers are found in The Pisan Cantos. But long before writing them, before the collapse of his hopes for the present and the future and before his incarceration in Pisa, Pound had studied the cities of the past, the traditional mythical and historical cities, and had incorporated them into his work. The idea of building according to traditional principles is dominant in The Cantos whose process goes from myth to history and from the ancient to the modern city.
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We can follow the allusions to a mythical city, extending from Canto to Canto, foreshadowing a historical city by retracing in its various stages its historical development: Byzantium, for instance, is announced by the legendary Wagadu—a reference to Frobenius (Laughlin 123–4)—, the city with four names: 4 times was the city rebuilded, Hooo Fasa Gassir, Hooo Fasa dell’ Italia tradita, now in the mind indestructible, Gassir, Hoooo Fasa, With the four giants at the four corners and four gates mid wall Hooo Fasa and a terrace the colour of stars (LXXIX/430)
Byzantium became Constantinople ‘‘Constantinople’’ said Wyndham ‘‘our star’’, Mr. Yeats called it Byzantium, emphorio, to be borne about, to be filled with oinos ( . . . ) (XCVI/661)
and then Istanbul, and its example shows how Pound not only superimposes the real historical development of a city, which will fit with a mythical pattern, but also how he leads his readers through an archeological but ‘immediate’ revival, as Pound says, a search for the ancient cities and their remains in memory, in the ancient texts, and on the ground. With those remains as material, and economic and social reforms, he thinks he will build a city which could challenge the destroyed or decaying ones. In the same way can we read Ulysses’s descent to hell in Canto I. Ulysses descends to hell to learn how to regain Ithaca and recover his kingdom from which he has been so long estranged. Alongside this Homeric descent into hell, Canto I describes another descent into hell, among the damned, present in Homer’s Odyssey as the kingdom of the Kimmerians, which no light penetrates: To the Kimmerian lands, and peopled cities Covered with close webbed mist, unpierced ever With glitter of sun rays Nor with stars stretched, nor looking back from heaven Swartest night stretched over wretched men there. (I/3)
Pound seems to propose this image as a foreshadowing of his contemporary London, of the 1920s’ London, a lost city, a fallen city, abandoned by light and the gods. As such, London will be the point of departure for Pound’s dream and reflections about the city, leading to the utopian city that will rise from the great cities of old.
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Another foreshadowing of the present state of the decaying civilization is the city of Troy in Canto IV, mythical origin of the future Rome,— as Virgil puts it in The Aeneid:
and interpretation, can thus appear as a political text working toward a better life in society which includes a meditation on improving justice and economy.
Palace in a smoky light, Troy but a heap of smouldering boundary stones (IV/13)
The architect shapes the city as the poet shapes the epic. The beauty of bygone cities, says Pound, lies in their carefully planned architecture: Ecbatana, for instance:
As the cities of old, the contemporary cities,—our civilization—are subjected to war and destruction. The rapproachement creates tension, an impetus for renewing ideas about the city. The city needs to be reclaimed, rebuilt in opposition to the contemporary city, and it needs clever inhabitants, such as the heroes of the old epics. For this reason, Pound proposes to explain the political and social situation of the present and at the same time explore the admirable cities of the past. These cities are Wagadu, Ecbatana, Troy, and those in Provence, and in the Italy of the Troubadours: Poitiers, Malemorte, Sarlat, Mantua. Pound believes that they relate to a moment of political harmony, high culture and the development of a near perfect literary form. These remarkable cities are as many utopian places that come to haunt contemporary life, as the heroes of the past seem to haunt the present. Thus far, The Cantos appear in its whole shape as an utopian project. Pound’s aim is to recover a kingdom from which he has been estranged: it is precisely in the period of waiting to return home that a utopia is constructed. In The Principle of Hope Ernst Bloch considers that a utopia’s spring and principle lies in the fact that the Being is unachieved and, at the same time processual. Thus the utopia’s task is to achieve the accomplishment of the Being. In The Cantos, Odysseus and Aeneas waiting to return home—as Pound himself is waiting to return to America—could symbolize hope lasting until the Being is back ‘‘home’’, back to its ontological home where it would realize itself. We could question Pound, as Miguel Abensour (14–15) himself questions Ernst Bloch: would not this utopia resist and go on, as it is based on the illusion of a full coincidence from the self to the self? The Cantos appear too as a utopian work whose allegorical process should lead to a spiritual conversion. It proposes, in the living process of a reconstructed dialogue, the study and comparison between different constitutions, putting side by side the works of the best known utopian thinkers. The Cantos, retracing a spiritual experience that involves a particular effort of writing
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The camel drivers sit in the turn of the stairs, Look down on Ecbatan of plotted streets (IV/16)
In completing his work, the architect, like the poet, must not allow the teachings of the tradition to be lost. From this recovered tradition and in addition to the architect, the hero, and the thinker who bestows his advice on the prince, are also needed to recover, if necessary, then to fashion the political edifice of the future city. The narrator poet assumes a triple face; he is the architect, the thinker, and the hero. As an architect, the poet imagines and builds the city according to the tradition. As a thinker, the poet is also the traveling philosopher, like Plato— we know how important Letter VII is for utopian thinking, and Pound alludes to it in Canto VIII— his words provide a means to truly ponder the city: he is the man of the o´ o. But first of all, the poet is the hero since he announces and guides (in Canto XVI, like a new Perseus, he is cured of his blindness on leaving hell). More importantly, he is Ulysses, the clever one, the Greek who has et who by seeking the truth and seizing opportunity, manages to recover his kingdom. He manages to combat war with trickery, the supreme quality, which in utopian writings can be seen in their textual organization. We can thus speak of textual strategy, The Cantos serving both to entertain and initiate. The readers will wander through the city it figures and encounter the men and women of the past and present times who live in; and he will, in a way, take part to the process of its building. Together with the building of this city is the search for a better political regime and the spiritual experience that this quest represents. Meta¢u oa becomes an instrument for internal rebirth, a conversion, a return, a communion with men and women in the acceptance of basic—ethical—principles of the new regime (Abensour 57–59). The founders of cities and temples, says Pound, are responsible for their underpinnings (in the figurative sense) which must regularly be inspected (Canto XIII Malatesta). By the same token, the politician, the philosopher and the
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man of letters, following Aristotle’s example, must all root their thought in actual human experience. They learn by studying the wisest civilizations (those that Pound names in Canto XIII, for instance), and they in turn educate their readers. The poet, the architect, the philosopher, each gives shape to the epic, to the city and to the constitution after a vision experienced in the reality of their lives. After the poet has exited hell, the sun rises in canto XVII: With the first pale clear of the heaven And the cities set in their hills (XVII/76)
In a sublime, nearly paradisiacal vision, cities are outlined in the heart of a regenerated nature where the call of Dionysus Zagreus can be heard. The canto continues to develop with an ambiguous use of vocabulary: In the near, the gate cliffs of amber (XVII/77)
blending architecture and natural relief, artistic technique and natural achievements, the image of a city rising that has the perfection of a dream. This city is not Rome, as in canto XII, but seems to have the golden shimmer of Byzantium and to bear traces of the tides as do the palaces of Venice. It is the city that has been rebuilt from disjecta membra as were the walls against the arrival of the Barbarians, over the course of history, from the burning of Troy to Rome, Byzantium, and Venice. The poet’s dream on the steps of the ruined theater is both a historic vision and the dream of a builder. Builders indeed are opposed to destruction and deterioration, their mythological names are Deioces, Cadmus, and Amphion. ‘‘Pound drew on Herodotus’s account of the city that was built by Deioces, a king of the Medes . . . Deioces had a great signification for Pound; it stood for the paradiso terrestre, the earthly paradise ( . . . )’’ (Laughlin 122). The oracle at Delphi instructs Cadmus to found Thebes. A dragon that was guarding a spring killed his companions; Cadmus in turn killed the dragon. Athena ordered him to sow the dragon’s teeth, from which armed warriors arose. They fought until only five of them were left: the Spartoi, ancestors of the greatest Theban families who founded Thebes with Cadmus and his men. According to the myth, the stones and the walls of Thebes rose to the rhythm of the music Amphion played on his harp. The walls were built as a magic protection for the archetypal city.
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And it turns out that John Adams, in the writings that Pound quotes in The Cantos (for instance LXII/341), regrets that he is not Amphion. Alas! I am not Amphion. I have been thirty years singing and whistling among my rocks, and not one would ever move without money . . . I cannot sing nor play. If I had eloquence, or humor, or irony, or satire, or the harp or lyre of Amphion, how much good I could do to the world (John Adams [I, 448], qtd. in Terrell 271)
Amphion thus appears as the epitome of citybuilders and those who aim to establish the best possible constitution. He represents the ideal advisor to the prince, as utopian thinkers since Plato have dreamed of being. These mythical tales also bring together various archetypal cities that their ritual construction has made invulnerable. These stories authorize an allegorical interpretation: Pound as a poet is perhaps able to claim the role of Amphion and, as destroyer of usury and injustice, aspires to the role of Cadmus. The construction of The Cantos could lead to the building of a city or a state, forming an alliance between the power of the prince and the art of the poet, poetry taking on a magical, didactic role through its incantatory nature. The poet-philosopher Pound could become advisor to the prince. Thus, from the mythical city imagined by the poets, a transition occurs to the real, degraded, twentieth-century contemporary city, the city of those who indulge in all kinds of traffic: money— usury—, merchandise, and art. The city of the heart is the inner construction which cannot be destroyed as was the ant-hill. Thus the transition from dream to reality is accomplished, from the remembered, dreamed city—the exact opposite of infernal London and the situation Pound endured when incarcerated in Pisa—to the city that is built in defiance of deterioration and destruction, a prosperous city with well-planned architecture and embellished by art. Venice is the accomplishment of the failed attempts of Ecbatana, Troy, Thebes, Rome, and Byzantium. Which is to say: they build out over the arches and the palace hangs there in the dawn, the mist, in that dimness, or as one rows in from past the murazzi the barge slow after moon rise and the voice sounding under the sail. (XXV/117)
Pound alludes to the Palace of the Doges, just off the Southeast corner of the Piazza San Marco in
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Venice, which is shown during its embellishing process. In cantos XXI and XXV we discover Venice’s role in descriptions of the ideal city, and in cantos LXVII Pound quotes John Adams comparing Neuchatel ˆ and Rhodes’s constitutions. (Terrell says: ‘‘JA observes ( . . . ) that it was ‘‘the only constitution in which the citizens can truly be said to be in that happy condition of freedom and discipline, sovereignty and subordination. . . . [IV, 377].)
returned numerous times: 1908, 1920, 1924, 1958 after his first trip to Europe with his aunt in 1898, which retained the freshness of a happy memory (CII/728). It is also a city, finally, where the individuals could assert themselves and whose achievements were never hampered:
. . . H, to rule and to be ruled.’’ The words constitute a theme in Greek political thought, going back as far as Solon and reappearing in Aristotle’s Politics ( . . . ) JA believed that the constitution of ancient Rhodes was probably very similar to the constitution of Neuchatel. ˆ (Terrell 321)
and, given to us as a consolation for the future pains we are promised.
Pound is thus in concord with Francis Bacon whose Bensalem in his New Atlantis has much in common with seventeenth-century Venice (Le Dœuff 46) and Pindar’s Rhodes (Le Dœuff 49)—whereas More’s city, Amaurot, more resembles sixteenth-century London. Pound turns out to be as powerful as a God building the achieved city he has conceived over time, whereas the men and women who must live in it are, themselves, involved in an educational process through his reading of The Cantos, which will allow them to discover the political and economic laws to develop in harmony. Pound changes the development of history, creating new possibilities for the future and explaining history with a fresh vision. The beacon cities are Ecbatana, Thebes, Rhodes, Byzantium, Athens, Paris—which appears in the ‘‘Pisan Cantos’’—and Venice. Venice in the later cantos appears as a city that has reached an apex, democracy, in its political development. It is a democracy modeled on the writings of Plato, whose conception of government is aristocratic, and of Aristotle, who sings the praises of the ot tradition of moderate democracy in which law rules and citizens share a concern for material welfare. His ot is a mixture of aristocracy and democracy, a mixed constitution in which education and laws have a major importance, as they do for Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. In Canto LXVII/394, we read: Venice at first democratical . . .
The city of Venice achieved an economic stability that allowed it to develop art and science to the utmost. Venice is also the city where Pound chose to live his last years, 1970–72, and to which he
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But in Venice more affirmations of individual men From Selvo to Franchetti, than any elsewhere. (CIV/743)
In the catalogue of maritime cities that Pound names in the last cantos, a tie is slowly woven. From the first cantos to the ‘‘Thrones de Los Cantares,’’ Pound retraces filiations from Greece, with Ulysses, to Byzantium and Torcello, island in the lagoon of Venice, the first to be inhabited, by mentioning the Byzantine basilica of Santa Maria, and from there comes the tie of Byzantium to Venice, the height of civilization. Pound, in The Cantos, quoting Confucius (Terrell 422) also seems to emphasize peace: there are no righteous wars (LXXVIII/483)
which is necessary in order to construct or reconstruct the destroyed city, rebuilt in a filiation of civilizations. Pound then stresses justice in the various governments he refers to. This demand for justice also has sources in ancient history: in addition to Aristotle, he refers to Deioces the Fair, King of Medes, founder of Ecbatana, to Athena setting up the court in Athens at the end of Aeschylus’s Oresteia, also to the fair laws passed in Rhodes that Pindar speaks of in the 7th Olympia, and finally to Leo the Wise’s Book of the Eparch, to which Byzantium owes its prosperity. According to Pound, another imperative is economic in nature: the state must first provide food for the people, which is also one of the first principles of Thomas More in his Utopia (More 82, 147); thus some citizens must not get rich at the expense of others, therefore, the interest rate must remain as low as possible, and the leader of the city should coin money and let it circulate. These stable economic conditions should allow every citizen to procure necessities and allow city improvement to proceed and the arts to develop—proof, for Pound, that
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the government is wise and that it has achieved a high degree of refinement. These are the foundations on which to build a city. This demand for immediate justice cannot abide waiting for the Last Judgment in which justice would be handed down by God. For Pound it is a matter of changing something in the order of the world, the king or the governor taking the place of God as benefactors of their subjects. This transformation becomes possible through the comparative study of various political regimes and the history of events that constitute them, making possible a reflection on the political and economic problems posed by the government of cities. We know that Pound gave great thought to Clifford Douglas’s social credit idea and the theories of Silvio Gesell. The advent of justice also implies acquiring a construction technique and a layout for the streets and the various buildings that make up the city as well as drawing up rules of conduct for its inhabitants, a need for inner peace and the smooth functioning of the State. Pound as a writer seems, however, like most utopian thinkers, to be circuitous in his thought (Abensour 77). He does not state his opinions directly but instead introduces them through the voices of thinkers such as Plethon, Adams, and Upward. In this way he marks a distance between himself and the thinkers who express one opinion or another. Pound chose to borrow the voices not of fictitious characters, as did Thomas More for instance, but historical figures. Thus, taking much less risk, he protected himself and justified himself beforehand by using words historically spoken or written and thereby leaving the matter in the hands of ‘‘authorities.’’ The poetry in The Cantos is also circuitous in that it obliges the curious readers to consult the very sources Pound used in order to understand the poem’s meaning and Pound’s thought processes. The readers’ search turns out to be endless, and the enigma Pound offers up perpetually recedes as we read on, each new relationship that he makes calling into question the semantic path the readers had previously cut out. Pound himself claims to have hidden behind masks because these personae helped him to be more truthful. He indulged in the game of writing specific to the utopian writer who masquerades as another so that, thus concealed, the utopian writer can advise the prince without running the risk of being persecuted. Here, surely, is a refinement of language If we never write anything save what is already understood, the field of understanding will never
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be extended. One demands the right, now and again, to write for a few people with special interests and whose curiosity reaches into greater detail. (XCVI/659)
The utopian writer, and I quote Abensour in L’Utopie de Thomas More a` Walter Benjamin, ‘‘substitutes knowledge for opinion’’ (90); this writer consciously makes his writing difficult to understand so as not to be persecuted, as Socrates was, because the results of his philosophical investigations might upset the established order (49). The utopian writer also wagers that ‘‘the desire for truth goes hand in hand with the desire for freedom’’ (93) and in this way he will be heard. In The Cantos, though, this dissimulating writing is sometimes inter-spliced with lines in a prophetic tone that reveal a demand for justice. For Pound, this demand amounts to an idea borrowed from Thomas More: that no one should ever lack necessities (More, L’Utopie 123, 130), which implies a criticism of capitalism and the search for and disclosure of a new mode of production, a higher one, intended to replace capitalism. Moreover, the writing of The Cantos, as well as their form, makes them a work that poetically rehabilitates humanism within both a processoriented and unfinished philosophy, it being forever a ‘‘work in progress’’ and not coming to an end strictly speaking. Pound, it would appear, thus ‘‘resisted’’ the illusion of social accomplishment encouraged in his time and worked to shape his aspirations for a better social life. For this reason he was required to resort to a new form of writing. As he writes The Cantos, Pound invents a new language, made of many foreign languages: wellknown languages, including Chinese, music, hieroglyphics and pictograms. By including these written signs, he creates an optical effect, seducing the reader’s eye and conferring mystery to his poem. He manages a distance, while at the same time, inviting the readers to read, to think, and to live in another way, playing with the secret at the visible surface of the text and inside the text. He invites the readers to disclose this secret themselves. The Cantos are, at the same time, a synthesis of the past, and of the present—they include many of the ancient and present languages and also give the wider example of rhythms and structures existing in the modern English language (Fauchereau 44)—, and an attempt to shape the future. Pound does not give us a model for a perfect society. He does not give us a solution which would mean the end of history. He proposes an enigma to the readers, inducing in
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them an allegorical reading: the quest for a better government that becomes a spiritual experience (Abensour 39). His quest does not end: it is an invention and a perpetual reinvention. Pound is also a utopian in choosing two simultaneous means of communication: one addressing the ‘‘Prince’’—through The Cantos—, the other addressing the people: his appearances on Radio Rome. Lastly, the relationship between insanity and utopia must be emphasized: the utopist who conceives an independent philosophy stands alone against the ‘‘doxa,’’ a force too powerful for him to vanquish it alone. He thus resorts to insanity, a weapon that will allow him to continue speaking while avoiding death. So Pound salvaged his speech, perhaps his credit and even his life, by his internment in St Elisabeth’s. It would seem that this ‘‘salvaging’’ of society (Benjamin, Paris 164), more than generating tension by bringing together the Ancient and the New, implies a halt to what is ‘‘torn from history,’’ from the ‘‘continuum of domination’’ (Benjamin, Paris 152, 167). If Pound is in agreement with what Fourier calls the first and second method—, that is, first, freeing love and individual strengths from the influence of society, then substituting harmonic development for the subversive development of society through economic crises and wars—, in The Cantos he nevertheless exhibits the belief in a ‘‘return’’ of history to a cyclical vision in which events (Sanavio 260), even the most recent ones, have already occurred. He therefore remains in what Walter Benjamin calls the ‘‘mythical conscience’’ (Benjamin, Paris 190). Indeed, what Pound suggests in The Cantos is a revival of myth that blurs the vision of the present; the present then becomes impossible to grasp. It is a sort of heroism that is perfectly suited to imperialistic political ideas and which, by making permanent our pacts and our passions, becomes an atheistic substitute for religion. Mythical forces are also likely to lead back into slumber instead of to a new awakening (Benjamin, Paris 408, 893). It is only by making a clean break with repetition that humanity can do away with evil. We are also justified in asking whether Pound was criticizing capitalism or attempting to reinstate medieval values. He probably was doing both at the same time: he criticized, as did Thomas More in his time, the new means of production, by trying to suggest a new economic order that could
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replace it advantageously but also, in his writings and in his life, he defended ancient values of mutual aid and remains nostalgic for what Marx called the ‘‘use-value.’’ Pound tried to change the English language to allow it to incorporate foreign elements. Thus, understanding The Cantos is an endeavor that causes us to encounter doubt, but also one of the greatest protests that a poet can undertake, that of his mother tongue in which he composed his indictment against the United States, a political protest that perceives a decline, the antidote for which resides in acknowledging a filiation that is evident in Canto LXXVII which is mentioned at the beginning of this article, a filiation that leads from ancient thinkers to the founding fathers of the United States: Jefferson and Adams. Despite the association that Pound makes between Jefferson and Mussolini, despite his irrational conception of society and the State, the ‘‘analytical error’’ Sanavio detects in Pound’s writing, we can acknowledge that in a way The Cantos take part in the plan ‘‘to reinsert poetry into the sphere of the city in other words to reconsider it within the community sphere instead of that of the individual’’ (Di Manno 72), taking into account the disintegration of meter—‘‘It is too late to prevent vers libre’’ (Pound, A Collection of Critical Essays 437)—, and the deterioration of societies. The naming process in The Cantos is not only the reminding of the former deeds of the hero nor the archeological discovery of beautiful remains in the cities of old that were just; Pound tries to build the ideal city. We know that Pound put his hopes in Mussolini and that his reactionary views were not only passeistic in the political models of old and the obsolete theories he chooses (Fauchereau 41) but nostalgic too and were justified by the search of a real living hero who could incarnate strength and wisdom, who could maintain justice, and peace and protect literature and the Arts. Pound’s thought in The Cantos nevertheless goes beyond his political positions. We must persist in keeping together Pound’s search and his ‘‘error’’: I cannot make it cohere. (CXVI/796)
he says when writing the last cantos. As readers proceed through The Cantos, they must reconstruct its cut up narrative following a guiding but concealed thread. Memory has to be recomposed, history to be rewritten following the plan built by Pound which can light the way through The Cantos and unfold their meaning. This coherence leads to the social order. There is obviously a correspondence between this grasp of Pound’s
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conscience about his work and the inaptitude of his utopist thought in reality: the historical failure preventing the structural coherence of the work, or the contrary, we could also say. (Charles Olson exposes the problem of the unescapability and ambivalence of Pound’s work.) What remains in our hands, though, is a red brick (I allude here to the thick red copy of Pound’s Cantos published by Faber & Faber), Pound’s linguistic city. ‘‘What we experience there is certainly not in any normal sense a poem in the English language’’, says Donald Davie but an immersion in a ‘‘polyglot context’’ (Qtd. in Sullivan 321). Wandering through The Cantos is becoming aware of a composition on the page, of the emerging of a shape ‘‘out of the time it takes in the reading’’ says Davie (Sullivan 321). The time of the reading is very slow in The Cantos, and if we take the verse-line as the poetic unit, says Davie, the time the next line takes to come gives weight and value to each single smaller component down to the syllables. Out of these smaller components Pound’s linguistic city is composed of multilayered poems, arranged in various neighborhoods, districts, and suburbs, each of them displaying variations in their structures and shifts in their language, tone, dialect. Pound’s linguistic city as a whole appears more similar to the city of New York from which he fled than to any Italian city of old where he decided to settle. Pound, in The Cantos, seems to give shape to an ancient dream. This dream seems to be foreshadowed by another dream of his: a kind of Le Corbusier architectural project he describes in ‘‘The City’’, an article published in The Exile, in Autumn 1928—a project not achieved in the very homeland of Futurism, but in France, in Sarcelles, for example, and in America. Pound builds his linguistic city by mixing all styles in an apparently incoherent absence of unity, in a tight rumor. This rumor is full of the tenses of life and conversation. At the very end,—1969—, Pound’s linguistic city grows in fragments and reveals itself as an unending work in progress: literature at this point becomes utopia and the writer an utopist, always in quest of what cannot, and by that very fact, must not be settled or become permanent. Source: Chantal Bizzini, ‘‘The Utopian City in The Can tos of Ezra Pound,’’ in Utopian Studies, Vol. 15, No. 1, Winter 2004, pp. 30 43.
Hugh Kenner In this essay, Kenner describes Ezra Pound’s connection to Homer and how this association both inspires and informs The Cantos.
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POUND YIELDED TO NO ONE IN HIS RESPECT FOR FACT, BUT FOR HIM THE ‘FACT’ WAS APT TO BE WHATEVER HE COULD FIND RIGHT THERE ON THE PAGE.’’
No exertion spent upon any of the great classics of the world, and attended with any amount of real result, is really thrown away. It is better to write one word upon the rock, than a thousand on the water or the sand. W. E. Gladstone, Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age
Homer is the West’s six trillion dollar man. For two millennia and a half at least we have kept him alive and vigorous with an increasingly complex and costly life-support system that from earliest times has drawn on all the technology around. To make papyrus in Egypt, then construct and navigate a ship to take it to Athens, entailed most of the chemistry, the metallurgy, the carpentry, and the mathematics accessible to Mediterranean men of the fifth century B.C. What Athenians did with papyrus was, of course, write out on it the two big books of Homer. Parchment came later, and parchment Homers were precious spoil from Byzantium, 1453. Renaissance architects designed libraries that housed handmade copies; blacksmiths forged chains to keep them where they belonged. As soon as there were printing presses in Italy, there was a folio Homer, two volumes, printed in Florence about 1480. The next need was for a Homer you could carry around. That meant both smaller sheets and smaller type. Pound’s Canto 30 shows us Francesco da Bologna incising dies with the Greek letters they’d need for the pocket Aldine Homer. To aid comprehension scholars made Latin versions, their printings embellished by the newly designed Italic characters. Readers of Canto 1 will remember one such version of the Odyssey, Divus’s, dated 1538. And all over Europe lens-grinders were enabling presbyopic and myopic eyes to scan Homer’s lines. Our own silicon technology stores Homer and retrieves him, catalogs his words and crossreferences them, relying on magnetic disks, on air conditioners, on central processing units, on central generating stations, and also on toil and
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ingenuity in California and Japan, to keep alive an old poet whose very existence has been repeatedly questioned. We have no such continuous record of commitment to any other part of our heritage save the Bible. The six trillion dollars I hazarded was rhetorical; what eighty generations have invested in Homer, directly and indirectly, eludes computation and nearly defies comprehension. For we’ve not even settled what the Homeric poems are; something more than Bronze-Age entertainments, surely? Our efforts to assure ourselves that we know what we’re valuing have constituted much of the history of our thought. At one time the Iliad and Odyssey were esteemed as a comprehensive curriculum in grammar, rhetoric, history, geography, navigation, strategy, even medicine. But by the mid-nineteenth century AD they no longer seemed to contain real information of any kind at all. Had there ever been a Trojan War? Scholars inclined to think not, much as connoisseurs of the West’s other main book were doubting that there had been a Garden of Eden with an apple tree, or that planks of an Ark might have rotted atop Mount Ararat. Both books got rescued by identical stratagems; the Bible was turned into Literature, and so was Homer. That entailed redefining Literature, as something that is good for us, however unfactual. That in turn meant Nobility, and also Style. It also required that Longinus supplant Aristotle as the prince of ancient critics, and that Matthew Arnold become the Longinus of Christian England. He said that Homer was rapid and plain and noble: by Longinian standards, Sublime. Those were the qualities a translator should reach for, in part to sweep us past mere awkward nonfact. The Bible in the same way was edifying if you knew how to go about not believing it. In 1861, while British ink was drying on printed copies of Arnold’s three lectures on translating Homer, Heinrich Schliemann was nourishing a dream. He had dreamed it since boyhood. He was going to find Troy! By 1870 he had found it, yes he had, at a place the maps called Hissarlik, found traces, too, of the great burning, and he photographed his wife Sophie wearing what he thought were Helen’s jewels. (A photograph, no light undertaking in 1870, was merely the most recent of the technologies mankind’s Homeric enterprise keeps conscripting.) The story, as so often, now slips out of synch. Andrew Lang, the folklorist, published with one
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collaborator an English Odyssey in 1879, with two others an English Iliad in 1883. These, for various reasons not excluding the fine print of copyright law, remained the standard English versions as late as the mid twentieth century—even the Modern Library used to offer them—and they were already obsolete when they appeared. For Lang and Butcher, Lang, and Leaf and Myers had fetched their working principle from pre-Schliemann times. The way to translate Homer, they thought, was to make him sound like the King James Bible, the idiom of which has great power to ward off questions about what details mean. But what details mean—in particular what many nouns meant—was being settled year by year as men with spades ransacked Troy and Mycenae for such cups and golden safety pins as Helen and Hector knew. Ezra Pound was born in 1885, just two years after the Butcher and Lang Odyssey. One unforgotten day when he was twelve or so, enrolled at the Cheltenham Military Academy in Pennsylvania, a teacher chanted some Homer for his special benefit. After four dozen years, from amid the wreckage of Europe, the man’s name merited preserving: and it was old Spencer (H.) who first declaimed me the Odyssey with a head built like Bill Shepard’s on the quais of what Siracusa? or what tennis court near what pine trees? (C 512)
It was from ‘‘Bill Shepard’’ at Hamilton that he’d picked up his first Provenc¸al enthusiasm, so the heads of these two instigators made a fit rhyme. And hearing Homer declaimed, he testified, was ‘‘worth more than grammar.’’ Though all his life a great connoisseur of detail, he was never easy with schoolmasters’ grammar. It screened out what he thought crucial, the tang of voices. That would have been about 1897, when it was just beginning to look as though the wanderings of Odysseus, too, might mirror an order of factuality analogous to that of the new historic Troy. In 1902 Schliemann’s architectural adviser, Wilhelm Do¨rpfeld, explained the topography of Ithaka; in the same year, Victor Berard published the book Joyce was to use so copiously, about the origins of the Odyssey in Phoenician periploi, a noun Pound was to gloss: periplum, not as land looks on a map but as sea bord seen by men sailing. (C 324)
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Those are arguably the most important lines in The Cantos. It is characteristic of the poem’s way of working that we find then embedded in a narrative about seventeenth-century China. And the word on which they turn came from the edges of the new Homeric scholarship. The periplous (a Greek noun Pound transmuted into an unrecorded Latin form, periplum) registers the lay of the land the way it looks now, from here. Olive grey in the near, far, smoke grey of the rock slide, ... The tower like a one eyed great goose cranes up out of the olive grove.(C 10)
That is an Imagist detail, also ‘‘sea bord seen by men sailing’’: a detail from some imagined periplous. If you were sailing in the track of that skipper you might not find the color useful—light shifts day by day—but ‘‘the tower like a one-eyed great goose’’ would help you be sure of your position: such an apparition is not easy to mistake for some other tower. Likewise the Homer we encounter in the first canto is not to be taken for Pope’s or Lattimore’s. Homer mutates down the centuries; we can only begin to savor the mutations when translators begin to record what they can of them. And translators only began their notes on the periplous past Homeric capes and shoals when they had Homer’s text to translate, some time after Byzantine scholars had carried the precious manuscripts to Italy. The first canto reminds us just what Andreas Divus did: he mapped the words in blind fidelity. The canto’s resonant ‘‘And then went down to the ship’’ follows Divus’s ‘‘Ad postquam ad navem descendimus,’’ which in turn follows Homer’s ‘‘Autar epei hr’ epi nea katelhomen’’: Autar, and; epei, then; epinea, to the ship; katelthomen, we went down. In placing ‘‘descendimus’’ where he did, Divus even kept the order of Homer’s words, putting the Greek into Latin, as he says, ad verbum, the way one inflected language can map another. With his page-by-page, line-by-line, often word-by-word fidelity, Divus was making a crib a student in the sixteenth century could lay open beside the Aldine Greek, to get guidance you and I might seek in a dictionary. When Ezra Pound thought his Latin ‘‘even singable,’’ he was suggesting what much later he would suggest of a fiddle rendition of Clement Janequin’s Canzone degli ucelli, that
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sheer note-by-note fidelity had kept the song audible. Can sheer blind fidelity be faithful to so much? We have come to something fundamental. A while ago we were talking of fact, the order of Homeric fact archaeologists were producing, to supplant the circumlocutions of the lexicons. Pound yielded to no one in his respect for fact, but for him the ‘‘fact’’ was apt to be whatever he could find right there on the page: whatever Dante might have meant by ‘‘the literal sense’’: mere letters, queer sounds, or even just lexicon entries. Letters, sounds, tagmemes: from the 1930s till he died he would love the Chinese character out of conviction that alone among the scripts of civilized men it collapsed all of these, shape, sound, and referent, into a sole inscrutable polysemous sign. The Chinese ideogram for ‘‘man’’ is a picture of a man; the Chinese spoken word for ‘‘cat’’ is what all cats say, ‘‘mao.’’ If you say that ‘‘with a Greek inflection,’’ you are saying the Greek for a catly thing, ‘‘I am eager.’’ That’s a detail we find in Canto 98 (C 686); in the late cantos especially we see words exhibited: isolated words, including a few of Homer’s words, set off on the page by white space. Such words, though no taller than a printed line, are aspiring to the status of the ideogram. They are centers of radiance. We may think of them as opportunisms, like Shakespeare’s when he rhymed ‘‘dust’’ with ‘‘must,’’ mortality with necessity. Such opportunisms irradiate the ‘‘Seafarer’’ of 1911. ‘‘Blaed is genaeged’’ says, word by word, ‘‘glory is humbled.’’ Pound looked at ‘‘blaed,’’ saw a sword-blade, and wrote ‘‘The blade is laid low.’’ There’s no arguing with that, and no justifying either. Nor can we argue when, in Canto 1, by a triumph of the literal, English words map Divus’s words which map Homer’s words and the whole goes to ‘‘Seafarer’’ cadences. He is following Divus because for one thing, he wants to celebrate the occasion when, thanks partly to Aldus and Divus, Homer was recovered for the West; for another because he was himself a man of the Renaissance in having been well-taught his Latin and ill-taught his Greek. Latin, even Latin verse, Pound could read at sight. Greek, even Homer’s, he’d pick at, with a crib. Divus might have labored with Ezra Pound in mind. No one in four hundred years has owed him so much. Now though Divus intended a drudgelike fidelity, still he, too, invented a Homer: whether by sheer human exuberance, or by inadvertence, or via textual error we can’t always say. Now
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and then his Homer is not the Greek scholars’ Homer. For listen: And then went down to the ship, Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea and We set up mast and sail on that swart ship. . . . (C 3)
‘‘On the godly sea?’’ Yes, it’s alive with gods. But any modern crib, for instance, the Loeb, says, ‘‘on the bright sea,’’ and for the good reason that the Greek word is ‘‘dian,’’ a form of ‘‘dios,’’ one of Homer’s favorite epithets, especially for the sea you push a ship into. ‘‘Eis hala dian,’’ reads Odyssey 11.2: ‘‘into the bright sea.’’ It’s a formulaic phrase at the Odyssey’s numerous launchings. But what does Divus have? He has ‘‘in mare divum,’’ as if he were distracting us by a play on his own name. Divus, says the Latin lexicon, ‘‘of or belonging to a divinity; divine.’’ A contracted neuter form would be dium, perhaps close enough to dian to have caused confusion in a shaky time for classical understanding. How did someone, in those days before lexicons, collect equivalences between Greek and Latin words? About Divus we seem to know nothing save that he may have come from East Asia Minor, a better place for Greek than for Latin. But however divum arrived on Divus’s page, Ezra Pound followed him faithfully, and wrote ‘‘the godly sea’’:
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dictionary, eludes mappings of ‘‘meaning’’: the translator has to leap for it, with his own time’s live speech in his ears. Only if he makes that leap has he a chance of making us hear. Hughes Salel, 1545, called Odysseus ‘‘ce ruse personage’’: that is one French way to look at polytropos, the Odyssey’s first epithet, and from our own century we might use ‘‘that tricky bastard’’ as a sightline on Salel. (Yes, ‘‘bastard’’ is extreme, but it’s part of an idiom.) Andreas Divus, 1538, has ‘‘multiscium,’’ much-knowing, as it were ‘‘savvy.’’ Thereafter the reality fades, and the renderings decline. Butcher and Lang, 1879, offer ‘‘so ready at need,’’ like a detail from a hymn. A. T. Murray in the 1919 Loeb tries ‘‘man of many devices,’’ and Liddell and Scott in their lexicon make a stereophonic mumble, ‘‘of many counsels or expedients.’’ ‘‘That man skilled in all ways of contending,’’ says the often admirable Robert Fitzgerald, here smothering perception with poetic dignity. Nobody speaks phrases like those.
—here, as seen by a man who sailed four centuries ago, and whose compass was not wholly reliable. It is an interesting rule, that in the presence of a textual crux Ezra Pound is apt to be utterly literal. Those are just the places where credentialed scholars guess. But Pound would only guess when the text was foolproof. When he didn’t understand the words, or when they diverged from convention, then he’d presuppose someone else who’d known better than he; as Divus had, in prompting him to write ‘‘godly.’’
You cannot cut such a knot with a trick of idiom, not even one as stolidly idiomatic as W. H. D. Rouse’s ‘‘never at a loss.’’ The problem goes far too deep. It has been hard for many centuries to imagine what Odysseus was really being commended for. We have all inherited the Roman distrust for quick Greek intelligence—we associate it with huckstering—and translators, being men of literary cultivation, have additionally been infected with the changed attitude to our hero that set in when his name became Ulixes (‘‘Ulysses’’) and he got tarred with the brush of fatal deviousness. Dante did much to propagate the tricky Ulysses. We need not blame Dante. Though he placed Ulysses in the hell of the false counselors, he had the excuse of never having read Homer. He had read Dictys and Dares, secondcentury popularizers who turned the designer of the wooden horse and vanquisher of the Cyclops into (says W. B. Stanford) ‘‘an anti-hero.’’
‘‘Of Homer,’’ Pound wrote as long ago as 1918, ‘‘two qualities remain untranslated: the magnificent onomatopoeia, as of the rush of the waves on the sea-beach and their recession in ‘‘para thina poluphloisboio thalasses,’’ untranslated and untranslatable; and, secondly, the authentic cadence of speech; the absolute conviction that the words used, let us say by Achilles to the ‘dog-faced’ chicken-hearted Agamemnon, are in the actual swing of words spoken.’’ When men speak, not by the book but as they are moved to, uncounterfeitable rhythm asserts itself—‘‘the actual swing.’’ It eludes the
Pound read Homer’s Greek slowly, Dante’s Italian fluently, and it is unsurprising that the way he conceives Odysseus owes as much to Dante as it does to Homer. Luckily, he was also misreading Dante, to the extent that he was thrilling to the eloquent speech and disregarding the great flame in which the evil counselor is imprisoned. So he stressed what the speech stresses, an urgent thirst after novelty, and read it back into Homer where it is not to be found. It is Dante, not Homer, whose Ulysses grows bored in Ithaca, where no amenity, no, not the bed of Penelope,
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Could conquer the inward hunger that I had To master the earth’s experience, and to attain Knowledge of man’s mind, both the good and bad.
That was where Tennyson had found a Ulysses . . . yearning in desire To follow knowledge like a sinking star Beyond the utmost bound of human thought,
and that is what Pound is echoing in his own way: Knowledge the shade of a shade, Yet must thou sail after knowledge.
In its place in The Cantos that is a doom laid on Odysseus, spoken in the regretful voice of Circe. In making it a doom Pound is faithful to one aspect of Homer, whose Odysseus thought nothing was worse for mortal man than wandering and for whom no place was sweeter than home. That is Pound’s way of compromising Homer as little as possible, all the while he is handling the hero’s need to sail after knowledge, weaving it right back into a scene in Homer’s tenth book, where the Greek is innocent of any such motif. Odysseus is pleading with Circe in her bedroom to be let go to continue his voyage home, and in Canto 39 the crucial six lines of her response are reproduced in the Greek, word for word and accent for accent (a printer lost one line, but Pound gives the line numbers, and they show what he intended). No other passage of Homer gets transcribed in full anywhere in the long poem. Possible English for what her Greek says might run: ‘‘But first you must complete another journey, to the house of Hades and dread Persephone, to seek the shade of Tiresias of Thebes, the blind seer, whose mind stays firm. To him in death Persephone has given mind, he alone unimpaired while the rest flit about as shades.’’ That is exactly all, and in Canto 39 we see it on the page in Homer’s very words. But eight cantos later we encounter it again, memorably paraphrased and amplified: Who even dead, yet hath his mind entire! This sound came in the dark First must thou go the road to hell And to the bower of Ceres’ daughter Proserpine, Through overhanging dark, to see Tiresias, Eyeless that was, a shade, that is in hell So full of knowing that the beefy men know less than he, Ere thou come to thy road’s end. Knowledge the shade of a shade, Yet must thou sail after knowledge Knowing less than drugged beasts. (C 236)
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That seems to make sailing after knowledge a theme of the Odyssey, as it was certainly a theme for Ezra Pound. It has been recognizably a theme for Americans, in a country whose Enlightenment heritage sets knowing anything at all above not knowing it. (Never mind knowing what; there is an American book on how to win at Pac Man.) Quoting, in another connection, ‘‘Who even dead, yet hath his mind entire!’’ Pound hoped he had done sufficient homage to the Greek veneration of intelligence above brute force (GK 146). Let us concede, though, that there is intelligence and intelligence, and credit Pound with having intended more than bric-a`-brac knowingness. ‘‘Who even dead, yet hath his mind entire!’’ That resonant line is drawn from five words of Homer’s, where ‘‘mind’’ is phrenes, the whole central part of the body, where you know that you are yourself and not a shade, and ‘‘entire’’ is empedoi, meaning firm on the foot, not slipping. Both are body-words: the midriff, the foot. The intelligence is in the body the way the meaning is in the ideogram: intrinsic and manifested, independent of lexicons, not deconstructible. To have merely one’s ‘‘mind’’ entire is a later and less substantial concept. Pound lends it body as best he can with a weight of monosyllables and a stark contrast with how it is to be dead. Homer’s word for how the dead flit about, aissousin, held his attention; it is a word he places on show twice in the Thrones cantos (C 675, 730). Disembodied, they have no minds; they flutter. If intelligence is in them, it is in the way it is in dictionaries. (‘‘The trouble with the dictionary,’’ Louis Zukofsky liked to say, ‘‘is that it keeps changing the subject.’’) A flitting, a fluttering: that was the Greek sense of disembodiment, and it fascinated Pound, and it was not intelligence. (‘‘Butterflying around all the time,’’ he said once, of aimless speculation. He was speaking of Richard of St. Victor’s cogitatio, to be distinguished from meditatio and the highest thing, contemplatio.) So we are learning how to take the stark physicality of the rites in the first canto, in particular how to take the need of the shades for blood. They need blood to get what is peculiar to the body, hence to the phrenes, the totally embodied intelligence. Without blood, the shades cannot so much as speak. Canto 1 draws on the part of the Odyssey Pound judged ‘‘older than the rest’’: Ronald Bush suggests he may have been following
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Cambridge anthropology here—the tradition of studies that, following on The Golden Bough, made Greek intuitions seem so much less cerebral than they had been for Flaxman and Arnold. Or— since I don’t know whether he so much as read such a book as Jane Harrison’s Themis—it is conceivable that in ascribing the underworld journey to ‘‘fore-time’’ he was trusting sheer intuition. It implies, anyhow, the Homeric sense of ‘‘intelligence,’’ of ‘‘knowledge,’’ something so remote from ‘‘ideas’’—a word whose Greek credentials are post-Homeric—as to have drawn the snort, ‘‘Damn ideas, anyhow . . . poor two-dimensional stuff, a scant, scratch covering.’’ To sail after knowledge, then, is to seek what cannot be found in libraries, no, a wholeness of experience. I hope I have suggested that in weaving that phrase back from Dante into Homer, Pound was embellishing less than we may have thought. And it brought him to the superbly colloquial words of Zeus, who, admiring Odysseus, says (in Ezra Pound’s English), ‘‘With a mind like that he is one of us’’. That consorts with a fact that has given scandal but need not, that Homer’s gods are superbly physical, embodied. Odysseus, for such a god, is ‘‘one of us,’’ precisely in having not a Ph.D. but phrenes: ‘‘the embodiment,’’ said Pound’s classmate Bill Williams, ‘‘of knowledge.’’ Having sailed a long circuit after the colloquial, we will not need a second for the other thing Pound wanted, ‘‘the magnificent onomatopoeia.’’ Though ‘‘untranslated and untranslatable,’’ para thina poluphloisboio thalasses
may serve as our terminal emblem: not boom rattle and buzz but the rare identity of words with whatever they signify, achieved with the signifying sound the way Chinese calligraphers achieved it with a signifying outline. Pound listened and heard the wave break, and in the sibilants of thalasses heard ‘‘the scutter of receding pebbles’’ (L 274): that whole mighty recurrent phenomenon incarnated in a few syllables represented by a few marks. The way into understanding this is like the way into understanding Homeric intelligence, something only there when it is embodied. So meanings are only there when the words embody them; otherwise, like the dead, they flutter, aissousin. And we are back, in a circle, to ‘‘the actual swing of words spoken,’’ the other stamp that can authenticate language. Pound first encountered Homer through a man speaking: Mr. Spencer, at the Cheltenham Military Academy, the man ‘‘who first declaimed
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me the Odyssey,’’ and was remembered for that after forty years. Scholars now imagine an ‘‘oral-formulaic’’ Homer, a poet continually speaking, but speaking with the aid of formulae to fill out the meter. When Pound, aged eighty-four, heard an exposition of that, he responded that it did not explain ‘‘why Homer is so much better than everybody else.’’ That was very nearly all that he said that day. Why Homer is so much better than everybody else is a thing there’s no way to explain; nor why, having sailed after knowledge and turned astray, Ezra Pound should have fulfilled Dante’s image with such precision: transmuted after so much eloquence into a tongue of flame, and a tongue that went silent. Source: Hugh Kenner, ‘‘Pound and Homer,’’ in Ezra Pound Among the Poets, edited by George Bornstein, University of Chicago Press, 1985, pp. 1 12.
M. L. Rosenthal In the following essay, Rosenthal discusses The Cantos as a work that must be read ‘‘experientially’’ rather than ‘‘schematically’’ and how this reading exposes its historical scope and its multiple voices. Space forbids our going into The Cantos in even as much detail as we have into Mauberley. We have already, however, noted some of the leading ideas behind this more involved and ambitious work, and though we cannot here trace their handling throughout its winning, Gargantuan progress, a few suggestions concerning its character as a poetic sequence may be useful. First of all, we may take as our point of departure the fact that in motivation and outlook The Cantos are a vast proliferation from the same conceptions which underlie Mauberley. The difference lies partly in the multiplicity of ‘‘voices’’ and ‘‘cross-sections,’’ partly in the vastly greater inclusiveness of historical and cultural scope, and partly in the unique formal quality of the longer sequence; it is by the very nature of its growth over the years a work-inprogress. Even when the author at last brings it to conclusion, reorganizing it, supplying the withheld Cantos 72 and 73, completing his revisions, and even giving his book a definitive title, it will remain such a work. Each group of cantos will be what it is now—a new phase of the poem, like each of the annual rings of a living tree. The poet has put his whole creative effort into a mobilization of all levels of his consciousness into the service of The Cantos; there has been a driving
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THE MANY VOICES, VARIED SCENES AND PERSONAE, AND ECHOES OF OTHER LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES THAN ENGLISH REFLECT THIS EMPHASIS ON EXPERIENCE ITSELF: SOMETHING MYSTERIOUS, UNTRANSLATABLE, THE EMBODIED MEANING OF LIFE WHICH WE GENERALIZE ONLY AT PERIL OF LOSING TOUCH WITH IT.’’
central continuity, and around it new clusters of knowledge and association linked with the others by interweavings, repetitions, and overall perspective. Pound has staked most of his adult career as a poet on this most daring of poetic enterprises; literary history gives us few other examples of comparable commitment. The Cantos has been called Pound’s ‘‘intellectual diary since 1915,’’ and so it is. But the materials of this diary have been so arranged as to subserve the aims of the poem itself. Passage by passage there is the fascination of listening in on a learned, passionate, now rowdy, now delicate intelligence, an intelligence peopled by the figures of living tradition but not so possessed by them that it cannot order their appearances and relationships. Beyond the fascination of the surface snatches of song, dialogue, and description, always stimulating and rhythmically suggestive though not always intelligible upon first reading, there is the essential overriding drive of the poem, and the large pattern of its overlapping layers of thought. The way in which the elements of this pattern swim into the reader’s line of vision is well suggested by Hugh Kenner, one of Pound’s most able and enthusiastic interpreters: The word ‘‘periplum,’’ which recurs continually throughout the Pisan Cantos [74 84], is glossed in Canto LIX: periplum, not as land looks on a map but as sea bord seen by men sailing.
Victor Brerard discovered that the geography of the Odyssey, grotesque when referred to a map, was minutely accurate according to the Phoenician voyagers’ periploi. The image of successive discoveries breaking upon the consciousness of the voyager is one of Pound’s central themes. . . .
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The voyage of Odysseus to hell is the matter of Canto I. The first half of Canto XL is a periplum through the financial press; ‘‘out of which things seeking an exit,’’ we take up in the second half of the Canto the narrative of the Carthagenian Hanno’s voyage of discovery. Atlantic flights in the same way raise the world of epileptic maggots in Canto XXVIII into a sphere of swift firm-hearted discovery. . . . The periplum, the voyage of discovery among facts, . . . is everywhere contrasted with the conventions and artificialities of the bird’s eye view afforded by the map. . . . Thus, the successive cantos and layers of cantos must be viewed not so much schematically as experientially. Here we see how the early Pound’s developing idealization of the concrete image, the precise phrase, the organically accurate rhythm are now brought to bear on this vast later task. The many voices, varied scenes and personae, and echoes of other languages and literatures than English reflect this emphasis on experience itself: something mysterious, untranslatable, the embodied meaning of life which we generalize only at peril of losing touch with it. So also with Pound’s emphatic use of Chinese ideograms, whose picture-origins still are visible enough, he believes, so that to ‘‘read’’ them is to think in images rather than in abstractions. His use of them is accounted for by the same desire to present ‘‘successive discoveries breaking upon the consciousness of the voyager.’’ The first effect of all these successive, varied breakings is not intended to be total intellectual understanding, any more than in real experience we ‘‘understand’’ situations upon first coming into them. But by and by the pattern shapes up and the relationships clarify themselves, though always there remains an unresolved residue of potentiality for change, intractable and baffling. Pound’s ‘‘voyager,’’ upon whose consciousness the discoveries break, is, we have several times observed, a composite figure derived first of all from the poet-speaker’s identification with Odysseus. A hero of myth and epic, he is yet very much of this world. He is both the result of creative imagination and its embodiment. He explores the worlds of the living, of the dead, and of the mythic beings of Hades and Paradise. Lover of mortal women as of female deities, he is like Zagreus a symbol of the life-bringing male force whose mission does not end even with his return to his homeland. Gradually he becomes all poets and all heroes who have somehow vigorously impregnated the culture. He undergoes (as do the female partners of his procreation and
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the personae and locales in time and space of the whole sequence) many metamorphoses. Hence the importance of the Ovidian metamorphosis involving the god Dionysus, the sea (the female element and symbol of change), and the intermingling of contemporary colloquial idiom and the high style of ancient poetry in Canto 2. The first canto had ended with a burst of praise for Aphrodite, goddess of love and beauty, and in language suggesting the multiple allusiveness of the sequence: to the Latin and Renaissance traditions, as well as the Grecian-Homeric, and to the cross-cultural implications suggested by the phrase ‘‘golden bough.’’ The second canto takes us swiftly backward in the poetic tradition, through Browning, then Sordello and the other troubadours, and then to the classical poets and the Chinese tradition. All poets are one, as Helen and Eleanor of Aquitaine and Tyro (beloved of Poseidon) and all femininity are one and all heroes are one. In the first two cantos, then, the ‘‘periplum’’ of the sequence emerges into view. Three main value-referents are established: a sexually and aesthetically creative world-view, in which artistic and mythical tradition provides the main axes; the worship of Bacchus-Dionysus-Zagreus as the best symbol of creativity in action; and the multiple hero—poet, voyager, prophet, observer, thinker. The next four cantos expand the range of allusiveness, introducing for instance the figure of the Cid, a chivalric hero, to add his dimension to the voyager-protagonist’s consciousness. Also, various tragic tales are brought to mind, extending the initial horror of Odysseus’ vision of the dead and thus contributing to the larger scheme of the poet in the modern wasteland. In absolute contrast, pagan beatitudes are clearly projected in Canto 2 in the pictures of Poseidon and Tyro: Twisted arms of the sea god, Lithe sinews of water, gripping her, cross hold, And the blue gray glass of the wave tents them. . . .
and, at the scene’s close, in the phallic ‘‘tower like a one-eyed great goose’’ craning up above the olive grove while the fauns are heard ‘‘chiding Proteus’’ and the frogs ‘‘singing against the fauns.’’ This pagan ideal comes in again and again, sharp and stabbing against bleak backgrounds like the ‘‘petals on the wet, black bough’’ of the ‘‘Metro’’ poem. Thus, in Canto 3: Gods float in the azure air, Bright gods and Tuscan, back before dew was shed.
In Canto 4:
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Choros nympharum, goat foot, with the pale foot alternate; Crescent of blue shot waters, green gold in the shal lows, A black cock crows in the sea foam. . . .
In 4 and 5 both there are deliberate echoes of such poets as have a kindred vision (Catullus, Sappho, and others), set against the notes of evil and damnation. The lines from Sordello in 6 serve the same purpose: Winter and Summer I sing of her grace, As the rose is fair, so fair is her face, Both Summer and Winter I sing of her, The snow makyth me to remember her.
The Lady of the troubadours, whose ‘‘grace’’ is a secularized transposition from that of Deity, is another manifestation of ‘‘the body of nymphs, of nymphs, and Diana’’ which Actaeon saw, as well as of what Catullus meant: ‘‘‘Nuces!’ praise, and Hymenaeus ‘brings the girl to her man. . . . ’’’ After these archetypal and literary points of reference have been established, Cantos 8–19 move swiftly into a close-up of the origins of the modern world in the Renaissance, and of the victory of the anticreative over the active, humanistic values represented by Sigismundo Malatesta and a few others. (Canto 7 is transitional; in any case we can note only the larger groupings here.) The relation between the ‘‘Renaissance Cantos’’ (8–11) and the ‘‘Hell Cantos’’ (14–16), with their scatological picturings of the contemporary Inferno, is organic: the beginning and the end of the same process of social corruption. The beautiful dialogue on order in 13 provides a calm, contrasting center for this portion of the sequence, and is supported by the paradisic glow and serenity of Elysium, revealed in 16 and 17. The earlier cantos had given momentary attention to Oriental poetry and myth and, as we have seen, Elysian glimpses also. Now these motifs are expanded and related to a new context, bringing the sequence into revised focus but carrying all its earlier associations along. This leaping, reshuffling, and reordering is the organizational principle behind the growth, the ‘‘annual rings,’’ of The Cantos. The next ten cantos interweave the motifs of these first two groups and prepare us for the next leap (in Cantos 30–41) of perspective. There are various preparations for this leap, even as early as Canto 20, in which there is a moment of comment from the ‘‘outside’’ as if to take stock before hurtling onward. From their remote ‘‘shelf,’’ ‘‘aerial, cut in the aether,’’ the disdainful lotuseaters question all purposeful effort:
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‘‘What gain with Odysseus, ‘‘They that died in the whirlpool ‘‘And after many vain labours, ‘‘Living by stolen meat, chained to the rowingbench, ‘‘That he should have a great fame ‘‘And lie by night with the goddess? . . . ’’
Is the question wisdom or cynicism? No matter. The poem, given the human condition and the epic tasks that grow out of it, is held in check but an instant before again plunging ahead. The Cantos accepts the moral meaning and the moral responsibility of human consciousness. The heroic ideal remains, as on the other hand the evil of our days remains even after the goddess’ song against pity is heard at the beginning of 30. The new group (30–41) is, like the later Adams cantos (62–71), in the main a vigorous attempt to present the fundamental social and economic principles of the Founding Fathers as identical with Pound’s own. Adams and Jefferson are his particular heroes, and there is an effort to show that Mussolini’s program is intended to carry these basic principles, imbedded in the Constitution but perverted by banking interests, into action. Pound works letters and other documents, as well as conversations real and imagined, into his blocks of verse, usually fragmentarily, and gives modern close-ups of business manipulations. The method has the effect of a powerful expose´, particularly of the glimpsed operations of munitions-profiteers. The cantos of the early 1930’s have, indeed, a direct connection with the interest in social and historical documentation and rhetoric that marks much other work of the same period, and at the end of Canto 41 (in which Mussolini is seen) we should not be surprised to find an oratorical climax similar in effect to that of Poem IV in Mauberley (1919). As in the earlier groups, however, we are again given contrasting centers of value, especially in Canto 36 (which renders Cavalcanti’s A lady asks me) and in Canto 39, whose sexually charged interpretation of the spell cast over Odysseus and his men on Circe’s isle is one of Pound’s purest successes. The Chinese cantos (53–61) and the Pisan group (74–84) are the two most important remaining unified clusters within the larger scheme. Again, the practical idealism of Confucianism, like that of Jefferson and Adams, becomes an analogue for Pound’s own ideas of order and of secular aestheticism. Canto 13 was a clear precursor, setting the poetic stage for this later extension.
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‘‘Order’’ and ‘‘brotherly deference’’ are key words in Confucius’ teachings; both princes and ordinary men must have order within them, each in his own way, if dominion and family alike are to thrive. These thoughts are not cliche´s as Pound presents them. We hear a colloquy that has passion, humor, and depth, and what our society would certainly consider unorthodoxy. Kung ‘‘said nothing of the ‘life after death,’’’ he considered loyalty to family and friends a prior claim to that of the law, he showed no respect for the aged when they were ignorant through their own fault, and he advocated a return to the times ‘‘when the historians left blanks in their writings, / I mean for things they didn’t know.’’ The Chinese cantos view Chinese history in the light of these principles of ordered intelligence in action, with the ideogram ching ming (name things accurately) at the heart of the identity between Confucian and Poundian attitudes. ‘‘The great virtue of the Chinese language,’’ writes Hugh Gordon Porteus, ‘‘inheres in its written characters, which so often contrive to suggest by their graphic gestures (as English does by its phonetic gestures) the very essence of what is to be conveyed.’’ The development of Pound’s interest in Chinese poetry and thought, as well as his varied translations from the Chinese, is in itself an important subject. This interest, like every other to which he has seriously turned his attention, he has brought directly to bear on his own poetic practice and on his highly activistic thinking in general. With the Pisan Cantos and Rock-Drill we are brought, first, into the immediately contemporary world of the poet himself, in Fascist Italy toward the close of World War II, in a concentration camp at Pisa, during the last days of Mussolini; and second, into a great, summarizing recapitulation of root-attitudes developed in all the preceding cantos: in particular the view of the banking system as a scavenger and breeder of corruption, and of ancient Chinese history as an illuminating, often wholesomely contrasting analogue to that of the post-medieval West. Even more than before, we see now how The Cantos descend, with some bastardies along the line, from the Enlightenment. They conceive of a world creatively ordered to serve human needs, a largely rationalist conception. Hence the stress on the sanity of Chinese thought, the immediacy of the Chinese ideogram, and the hardheaded realism of a certain strain of
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economic theory. The Pisan Cantos show Pound’s vivid responsiveness as he approached and passed his sixtieth birthday; his aliveness to people his Rabelaisian humor, his compassion. The lotuseaters of Canto 20, aloof and disdainful, have missed out on the main chances. Canto 81 contains the famous ‘‘Pull down thy vanity’’ passage in which the poet, though rebuking his own egotism, yet staunchly insists on the meaningfulness of his accomplishment and ideals. As the sequence approaches conclusion, the fragments are shored together for the moral summing-up. In the RockDrill section, Cantos 85–95, the stocktaking continues and we are promised, particularly in Canto 90, an even fuller revelation than has yet been vouchsafed us of the Earthly Paradise. Cantos 96–109 begin to carry out this promise, though after so many complexities, overlappings, and interlocking voices it must be nearly impossible to bring the work to an end. It is essentially a self-renewing process rather than a classical structure, and there is no limit to the aspects of history and thought the poet has wished to bring to bear on the poem. Canto 96, for instance, touches on certain developments after the fall of Rome, especially two decrees in the Eastern Empire by Justinian and Leo VI concerning standards of trade, workmanship, and coinage. The special emphasis in this canto on Byzantine civilization is particularly appropriate because of Byzantium’s historical and geographical uniting of East and West as well as its mystical associations pointing to a new and dramatic paradisic vision. Although the memory of earlier glimpses of ‘‘paradise’’ and the recapitulative, self-interrupting method militate against an effect of a revelation overwhelmingly new, the pacing of the whole sequence has made this difficulty at the end inevitable. Pound’s conclusion must be introduced as emergent from the midst of things, still struggling from all in life and consciousness that makes for disorder. Source: M. L. Rosenthal, ‘‘The Cantos,’’ in A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Walter Sutton, Prentice Hall, 1963.
SOURCES Saturday Review of Literature, June 18, 1949, pp. 7 9, 38. , ‘‘Treason’s Strange Fruit: The Case of Ezra Pound and the Bollingen Award,’’ in Saturday Review of Literature, June 11, 1949, pp. 9 11, 28. Kenner, Hugh, The Poetry of Ezra Pound, University of Nebraska Press, 1985.
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Pound, Ezra, The Cantos, Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1996. Shapiro, Karl, as quoted in ‘‘The Question of the Pound Award,’’ in Partisan Review, Vol. 16, No. 5, May 1949, p. 518. Sutton, Walter, Ezra Pound: A Collection of Critical Essays, Prentice Hall, 1963.
FURTHER READING Barnhisel, Greg, James Laughlin, New Directions, and the Remaking of Ezra Pound, University of Massachusetts Press, 2005. In this book, Barnhisel argues that the way Ezra Pound’s work was published and mar keted in the 1950s saved him from obscurity and disgrace. Even though Pound objected, his American publisher, James Laughlin of New Directions Books, urged readers and profes sors to read only the poetry in The Cantos and to ignore the politics and economics. Coats, Jason M., ‘‘‘Part of the war waste’: Pound, Imag ism, and Rhetorical Excess,’’ in Twentieth Century Liter ature, Vol. 55, No. 1, Spring 2009, pp. 80 114. Coats surveys criticism that focuses on Pound’s political opinions and how these affected his craft and tries to explain what he calls Pound’s ‘‘curious habit of conflating aesthetic taste with political dogma.’’ Case, Kristen, ‘‘On Reading The Cantos: A Pragmatic Approach,’’ in Southwest Review, Vol. 91, No. 4, Fall 2006, pp. 483 500. In this most readable essay, Case describes a first time approach to Pound’s epic, somehow humanizing both its off putting opaque layers of allusions and use of foreign languages and its achievement as a world classic, which she describes charmingly as ‘‘a monument to all I didn’t know and hadn’t read, like a locked door into the secret past.’’ Case finds ‘‘indispensable’’ the Terrell companion, cited below. Casillo, Robert, The Genealogy of Demons: Anti Semitism, Fascism, and the Myths of Ezra Pound, Northwestern Uni versity Press, 1988. In this book, which has been praised as an outstanding discussion of intolerance, Casillo explores Pound’s fascist and anti Semitic ideas. Henriksen, Line, Ambition and Anxiety: Ezra Pound’s ‘‘Cantos’’ and Derek Walcott’s ‘‘Omeros’’ as Twentieth century Epics, Rodopi, 2007. In her study of two modern epics, Henriksen explores the contrasts between Pound’s cultur ally supremacist voice in The Cantos and the reconfiguration of epic as created within the economically marginalized culture of Walcott. Both poets draw on the European tradition of epic but with different perspectives and styles.
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Longenbach, James, ‘‘Ezra Pound at Home,’’ in South west Review, Vol. 94, No. 2, Spring 2009, pp. 147 160. Longenbach explores the idea of place and home. He describes the various places Pound lived and explains how these settings connect to what the poet sought to accomplish in writing his epic of the West, specifically a rejuvenation of Western culture. The Pisan Cantos gets spe cial attention in this study. Moody, A. David, Ezra Pound, Poet: A Portrait of the Man and His Work, Vol. 1: The Young Genius 1885 1920, Clarendon Press, 2007. Yet another of several important biographies of the poet that appeared between the early 1990s and 2010, Moody’s study adds new material given his research into the correspond ence and some unpublished materials. Nadel, Ira B., ed., The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound, Cambridge University Press, 2008. This book contains fifteen chapters by estab lished scholars whose contributions are designed to facilitate the study of Pound’s poetry and prose. A wide range of relevant topics are cov ered, including poetics, politics, and the context of modernism. Nadel, Ira B. Ezra Pound: A Literary Life, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Nadel describes Pound’s contribution to mod ernism by closely examining the poet’s develop ment and continued influence. He explains the poet’s contribution to imagism and the modern
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long poem. Pound’s role as an editor and his attempt to complete The Cantos are also covered. Sieburth, Richard, ed., The Pisan Cantos, Norton, 2003. Sieburth examines this part of the epic, along with annotation on the individual poems and an introduction to the work and to the poet. Terrell, Carroll F., A Companion to ‘‘The Cantos’’ of Ezra Pound, University of California Press, 1980. Terrell presents a detailed and helpful annota tion of almost every proper name, place, his torical event, and foreign word used in Pound’s poem. Many readers find this work indispen sable for understanding Pound’s epic.
SUGGESTED SEARCH TERMS Ezra Pound Ezra Pound AND anti Semitism Ezra Pound AND Fascism Ezra Pound AND imagism Ezra Pound AND modernism Cantos Cantos AND epic Cantos AND T. S. Eliot Pisan Cantos
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El Cid El Cid (Cantar de mio Cid) recounts the heroic deeds of the Cid, an exiled member of the lower nobility who wins back his king’s favor by battling the Islamic inhabitants of Spain. A poem based on the exploits of an historical person, Rodrigo (Ruy) D’az de Vivar, (1040–1099), this epic offers an important example of the interaction of history and literature in the Middle Ages. El Cid is best known for its use of irony, heroic drama, and a rare strain of realism that incorporates multifaceted portraits of Moors, Jews, and Christians. One of the oldest Spanish documents in existence, it is also the only extant Spanish epic to have survived almost intact. It is contained in a fourteenth-century manuscript, which bears the date 1207, most likely referring to an earlier version of the poem that was copied in the later book.
ANONYMOUS 1201
Several accounts of the Cid’s life existed before this epic poem was written in manuscript form. Two Latin poems, one written before the Cid’s death and the other just after, chronicle his life. He is mentioned in Arabic sources, and his fame endured throughout the Middle Ages, in works of varying quality. El Cid has been wellreceived as a work of literature for several centuries. The famous 1637 version of the poem Le Cid, by French dramatist Pierre Corneille, demonstrates its lasting popularity in Europe. Printed editions of the poem have existed since the eighteenth century. A fresh edition (1908) was published by the prominent Spanish medievalist,
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Ramo´n Mene´ndez Pidal. Mene´ndez Pidal’s influential work El Cid ensured an international critical audience for this epic. A poem that treats basic themes such as national and religious identity, family honor, and personal prowess, El Cid has earned a lasting place in the ranks of great world literature.
PLOT SUMMARY
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Intense scholarly debate has raged over the identity of the author of El Cid. Basically, critics are divided into two camps, the traditionalists and the individualists. The former group, led by Ramo´n Mene´ndez Pidal, believes that the poem appeared as an oral composition soon after the historical Cid’s death and was written in a manuscript only later, thus reducing the significance of the idea of a single author for the poem. The individualists, by contrast, (championed most by Colin Smith among others) insist that a single, brilliant author wrote the poem in 1207. Some critics point to Per Abbat, the name that appears at the end of the poem, as the author, although the text states that this person ‘‘wrote’’ the text (escrivo´), which indicates that he was the copyist rather than the author. Opinion on the subject is so divided that individualists tend to call the work the ‘‘Poema’’ of the Cid, whereas traditionalists call it the ‘‘Cantar,’’ or Song, of the Cid, to emphasize its oral origins. The interpretation of the text varies according to the a given critic with regards to the text’s authorship and the author’s intentions. The person who wrote the 1207 version of the text was undoubtedly a talented author. The individualist school (especially the British Hispanists) insists that the author had extensive knowledge of the law and the Bible and used written historical documents to bolster the more historically sound sections of the epic. Traditionalists tend to discount all three of these claims, maintaining the oral nature of the transmission of this information during the presumed era of composition, which, for Mene´ndez Pidal, was around 1140. In addition, they note the archaic nature of the language of the 1207 text itself. Despite the quality of this literary text as it has come down to us in its single manuscript, the traditionalist viewpoint has prevailed in modern times. This view is bolstered by new findings in the oral tradition in literature by scholars such as Albert Lord who suggest that the written versions of the most famous epics are but one
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manifestation of a chain of oral versions. The debate about authorship dominated epic research during the twentieth century, but with increased understanding about the role of orality in medieval literature and new scholarship about the status of the author in this era, the problem can be approached in new ways.
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First Cantar The manuscript of El Cid is missing its first manuscript page, and so the poem begins by describing the Cid’s reaction to the news of his banishment. From contemporary Latin histories and from a note later in the poem (stanza 9), it is clear that the reason for the Cid’s banishment is the accusation by King Alfonso VI that the Cid has embezzled money collected from the Moors for the king. This is the second time that Alfonso has banished the Cid, and the missing page might have described this event. The manuscript text itself begins by showing the Cid weeping when he leaves his home village, Vivar, and enters Burgos, a town to the south. He sees crows flying and interprets them as an omen of his ill fortune. The townspeople of Burgos watch him ride by with his ally, Minaya Alvar Fa´n˜ez. A nine-year-old girl is the only person who dares to address him, telling him that the townspeople have been forbidden by the king to offer aid to the Cid. After praying at the church of Saint Mary, the Cid leaves Burgos and pitches his tent outside the city walls. The ‘‘worthy citizen of Burgos,’’ Martı´ n Antolı´ nez, provides supplies for the party and joins the Cid. Together they plan how to get money to support themselves, deciding to take advantage of two Jewish moneylenders, Rachel and Vidas. Martı´ n Antolı´ nez returns to Burgos, finds the moneylenders, and gives them two beautifully decorated chests filled with sand. He proposes to pawn these chests for a sum of money, and the moneylenders agree to give six hundred marks and not to look in the chests for a year. Gleeful at having tricked the moneylenders, the Cid and his companions head to San Pedro de Carden˜a, where they meet Don˜a Ximena (the Cid’s wife) and the Cid’s daughters. The abbot of the abbey, Don Sancho, is delighted to see the Cid and promises to care for the ladies until the Cid can return. At the abbey, he is joined by 115 knights. Don˜a
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MEDIA ADAPTATIONS The best-known modern media adaptation of El Cid, the 1961 film produced by Anthony Mann and starring Charlton Heston and Sophia Loren, draws on later romance versions of the Cid legend and is considered one of the finest epic films ever made. It was restored and re-released by Martin Scorsese for Miramax and is available on home video. Another famous adaptation, also drawing on later texts, is the 1637 play Le Cid, by Pierre Corneille, which was translated by John Cairncross and appeared in a Penguin Classics edition titled The Cid, Cinna, The Theatrical Illusion (1975).
Corneille, in turn, drew from the Spanish playwright Guille´n de Castro’s 1618 play, Las Mocedades del Cid (The Youthful Deeds of the Cid), available from Juan de la Cuesta, 2002. Antonio Sacchini’s opera Il Cid draws on the Cid legends. Il Cid was first performed in London in 1773. It was published by T. Michaelis in 1880. Also drawing on the Cid legends is Jules Massenet’s 1885 opera Le Cid. Originally available on vinyl record from Columbia Records in 1976, it was re-released in 2004 on compact disc by Sony Classical.
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distinguishes himself. After dividing the wealth between his men, the Cid and his army leave Casejo´n, partly to avoid border conflicts with Alfonso. When they arrive at the town of Alcocer, they again decide to invade. The Cid and his army besiege the city for fifteen weeks, and then, short of food and water, they pretend to give up and strike camp. When the inhabitants of Alcocer see the army leaving, they are delighted and leave the city to pursue them. The Cid seizes the opportunity and attacks the Moors, thereby winning the town. His army occupies the town and forces the Moors to serve them. Frightened inhabitants of the neighboring towns tell the Moorish king of Valencia that the Cid threatens their safety, and the king sends an army to attack, which besieges the Cid for three weeks. The Cid’s army prepares for battle, and Pedro Bermu´dez is given the honor of carrying the Cid’s flag. Pedro disobeys the Cid’s orders to wait until given the command to attack the Moors and charges into battle. The Cid and his army follow, and the Moors are defeated, leaving great wealth in horses and armor for the Cid. The hundred horses and a large quantity of silver that the Cid wins is immediately sent to Alfonso, as tribute, and to the abbey at Carden˜a for the care of the Cid’s family. The Cid then sells Alcocer back to the Moors and continues to Valencia. En route, he captures several more towns and is distinguished by his generous treatment of his victims. In the meantime, Minaya has brought the horses to Alfonso, who is duly impressed but refuses to pardon the Cid. The count of Barcelona hears of the Cid’s exploits and wrongly believes that he is despoiling the count’s territory. He attacks the Cid but is captured. The count, deeply embarrassed, refuses to eat until the Cid releases him.
Second Cantar Ximena prays for her husband’s safety, and the Cid parts from his family with great sadness. With promises of rewards to all, the Cid and his party leave the abbey and travel through Castille, gathering men for their army. During the voyage, the Cid is visited in a dream by the angel Gabriel, who tells him that he will be successful in his campaigns. After crossing a mountain range, they leave Alfonso’s lands and thus enter Moorish territory. When the Cid and his army arrive at the Moorish town of Casejo´n, they ambush the residents and capture the town. Minaya, in particular,
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The second third of El Cid begins with the capture of several more towns, including Murviedra, before the Cid turns his attention to Valencia. The people of Valencia attempt a pre-emptive strike against the Cid, but he is assured of his God-given victory, and summons every ally he can to combat the people of Valencia. He captures more towns, plunders the countryside for three years, and finally attacks Valencia itself. He invites anyone who wants to participate in taking the city to join him, fights a great battle, and wins the city. After dividing the booty, the Cid sends Minaya again to visit Alfonso and the abbot of Carden˜a. At the same time a French churchman, Don Jerome, joins the Cid,
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who appoints him bishop of Valencia. As a reward for the capture of Valencia, the king agrees to allow the Cid’s family to join him in exile. The Cid’s renown in Alfonso’s court, however, provokes the jealousy of Count Garcı´ a Ordo´n˜ez. The high-born Infantes de Carrio´n, by contrast, consider marriage with the Cid’s daughters an advantageous match and send their greetings to him via Minaya. Minaya takes the ladies from the abbey and escorts them to Mendaceli where they are met by the Cid’s Moorish ally, Abengalbo´n, who takes them to Molina, where he is governor. They then travel to Valencia, where the Cid welcomes them. The Cid makes a great impression on onlookers with his flowing beard and marvelous horse, Babieca. King Yusuf of Morocco, in the meantime, is furious when he hears ofthe capture ofValencia and brings an army from Morocco to retake the city. With his wife and daughters as witnesses, the Cid with his four thousand knights defeats the fearsome army of fifty thousand. The Cid wins an immense amount of wealth from this battle, including the Moroccan king’s cloth-of-gold tent. Minaya once again goes to Alfonso to beg pardon for the Cid. Alfonso is delighted at the news of the Cid’s victory and by the fantastic present of two hundred horses, which again annoys Garcı´ a Ordo´n˜ez. The king, this time, pardons the Cid and annuls his banishment. The Infantes, in their turn, decide to marry the daughters of such a wealthy and successful man and ask the king to speak on their behalf with the Cid. Minaya reports this news back to the Cid, who agrees reluctantly to the marriages. All the parties agree to meet on the banks of the Tagus River. When the Cid arrives in front of the king, he dismounts, kneels, and pulls up a mouthful of grass with his teeth as a sign of his great humility before his lord. Alfonso is greatly affected and pardons the Cid publicly. The marriages are subsequently arranged, and great festivals are organized in honor of the marriages. The Cid gives the Infantes swords to symbolize his kinship with them, and the marriages are thus begun with great promise.
Third Cantar The Infantes, married for several months, are deeply embarrassed when a captive lion belonging to the Cid escapes in his palace. While they hide under a couch and behind a wine press, the Cid catches the lion with his hands and puts it back into captivity. The court subsequently
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jeers at the Infantes for their cowardice. In the meantime, King Bu´car of Morocco attempts to renew the failed attempt to retake Valencia. The Cid sees the coming battle as a chance for the Infantes to distinguish themselves and regain their lost prestige, but they are only able to do so by convincing Pedro Bermudu´z to support their falsely boastful claims of prowess (this passage is missing in the manuscript, but can be reconstructed through consulting other sources). In the battle, Bishop Jerome proves his bravery, and the Cid wins the battle and kills Bu´car. The Cid praises God when he hears the reports of his son-in-law’s bravery in battle, but his followers remain skeptical of their courage and continue to tease them. Frustrated and angry, the Infantes plot revenge and ask permission to leave the court, ostensibly to return to Carrio´n so as to show their lands to their wives. The Cid agrees to their request, and the two couples leave the court with a suitable retinue. Their first stop is at Molina, where they meet the Moor, Abengalbo´n. Although Abengalbo´n treats them with great respect, the Infantes plot to kill him. The plot is foiled, and Abengalbo´n expresses his disappointment with the Infantes. The party continues, and soon the Infantes send their traveling companions ahead so as to carry out their plot against the Cid’s daughters. When they are alone with their wives, the Infantes beat the women senseless and leave them for dead. Fe´lez Mun˜oz, the Cid’s nephew, is suspicious of the Infantes’ intentions and returns to find the Cid’s daughters unconscious in the woods. He quickly takes them back to the town of San Esteban where they regain their health. In the meantime, the Infantes have returned to Alfonso’s court, where the king is greatly disturbed by their boasting of their humiliation of the Cid through beating his daughters. The Cid hears the news and considers it for a long time before swearing vengeance. The Cid’s daughters return to Valencia via Molina, where they are again hosted by Abengalbo´n. The Cid sends his vassal Mun˜o Gustioz to present the Cid’s claim to King Alfonso. The king is considered to be responsible for the situation, since he had recommended the marriages. The king agrees to summon the Infantes and order them to give satisfaction to the Cid, which takes place in a court of justice in Toledo. Here, a great company of legal scholars, high government officials, and court members assemble to seek justice. The Cid arrives
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with his most faithful retainers and enters the court, making a favorable impression on the onlookers. He has tied a cord around his long white beard so that no one can pluck it—a mortal insult—on purpose or accidentally. Thus the proceedings begin. The Cid first demands the return of his swords, to thus annul this symbol of kinship. He gives these swords to Pedro Bermu´dez and to Martı´ n Antolı´ nez. Although the Infantes believe that this is the only price they will have to pay, the Cid then continues. He demands the return of the money that was given to the Infantes when the marriages were contracted, and they reimburse him by giving him horses and property, borrowing what they no longer own. Then the Cid states his final claim: He challenges the Infantes to a duel against his own champion. At this point, many insults are flung by both sides, accusing the Infantes of cowardice and the Cid of his low birth. According to the Infantes, the Cid’s daughters were of too low birth to marry those of the house of Carrio´n. Finally, the challenges are met, and on a field umpired by specially chosen judges, the Infantes meet the Cid’s champions. Pedro Bermu´dez first defeats the Infante Fernandez, who surrenders. Then Martı´ n Antolı´ nez defeats the Infante Diego, who fears the Cid’s sword Colada. Finally, Mun˜o Gustioz nearly kills Ansur Gonza´lez, brother of the Infantes; the latter’s father is obliged to intercede to save his son’s life. With the field won, the Cid declares he is satisfied and returns to Valencia. Seeing his good fortune, the high-born princes of Navarre and Aragon negotiate with Alfonso to marry the Cid’s daughters. These marriages are carried out, to the benefit of the entire family of the Cid. The kings of Spain, according to the author, are all related to the Cid through these marriages. The scribe completes the manuscript by naming himself ‘‘Per Abbat,’’ who finished the text in the month of May 1207.
CHARACTERS Per Abbat Although some critics consider Per Abbat the composer or author of El Cid, it is more generally thought that he was the scribe of the work, either of the fourteenth-century manuscript, or, more likely, of the 1207 copy. The term escrivo (wrote out or copied down), which is used in the
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last segment of the poem, seems to uphold this interpretation.
Abengalbo´n Abengalbo´n is the Cid’s Moorish ally. He helps the Cid by protecting his wife and daughters when they travel to Valencia. In another appearance, he hosts the Cid’s daughters while they travel to Carrio´n with their husbands and discovers a plot hatched by the Infantes to kill him. His noble behavior as a Moor functions as a comparison with that of the cowardly Infantes and serves as an example of the complex relations between Moors and Christians in Spain during the Middle Ages.
King Alfonso Although King Alfonso VI of Leo´n is portrayed as a harsh ruler at the beginning of the poem when he banishes the Cid, his image gradually improves until, by the end of the text, he proves the Cid’s advocate. According to historical sources, their uneasy relationship stemmed from the Cid’s alliance with Alfonso’s enemy and brother, Sancho. Alfonso banished the Cid twice: once for arriving late to battle and a second time for allegedly embezzling funds he was in charge of collecting for the king. The second exile forms the background of the epic. The relationship of the Cid with his ruler, dominated by exchanges of services and money, provides an interesting example of a Spanish nobleman’s evolving relationship with his king.
Martı´n Antolı´nez Martı´ n Antolı´ nez, the ‘‘worthy citizen of Burgos,’’ is another of the Cid’s military allies and has no historical counterpart; he is probably a poetic creation intended to emphasize the town of Burgos’s support of the Cid’s campaigns. In the final duel, Martı´ n defeats the Infante Diego.
Count Ramo´n Berenguer Ramo´n is the count of Barcelona, who fights the Cid (in the first cantar) for allegedly damaging his territory in his march to Valencia. When Ramo´n is captured by the Cid, he refuses to eat until he is freed. The episode of the count’s imprisonment, which has a historical basis, is used to demonstrate the Cid’s great generosity with his (Christian) victims, whom he frees once they have guaranteed a cessation of hostilities.
Pedro Bermu´dez Pedro ‘‘the mute’’ appears in the poem as another of the Cid’s allies and nephews. He is the Cid’s
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standard-bearer. He is known for his stutter, but he delivers an eloquent speech in which he challenges Fernando, one of the Infantes de Carrio´n, to a duel. A Pedro Vermu´dez is listed in a document dated about 1069, but not in this capacity.
King Bu´car of Morocco In a second attempt to recapture Valencia from the Cid, another Moorish king fails in his attack and is killed by the Cid.
Infantes de Carrio´n The deceitful Infantes are portrayed as cowardly members of the upper class who, seeing the Cid’s swift rise in the king’s favor, contract marriages with the Cid’s daughters, Elvira and Sol. After being embarrassed and subsequently taunted by the Cid’s court when they are frightened by a lion and hide under a couch, the Infantes take their wives from Valencia, then beat them and leave them for dead in the woods. When the Cid obtains justice for this insult, his family is assured a place in the hierarchy of lineage that makes up Spanish medieval society. The historical Gonza´lez brothers actually did not belong to this high level of society and were not married to the Cid’s daughters.
El Cid Campeador See Rodrigo (Ruy) Dı´ az de Vivar
a military hero, but also as a family man, during tender scenes with his wife, Ximena, and his daughters, Elvira and Sol. Generous with his retainers, who join him so as to take part in the amassing of wealth that comes with winning battles against the Moors, the Cid also wins back favor with his king, who had banished him, by sending him extremely valuable gifts. Rodrigo is also a Christian hero in the poem and is shown to be victorious as a Christian who struggles righteously against the infidel, although the historical Cid once was allied with a Moorish emir. By drawing on all the qualities of a traditional epic hero—generosity, religious superiority, clannishness, military prowess, and loyalty— the author of El Cid is able to enhance the already stellar status of a historical hero.
Elvira Elvira is one of the Cid’s daughters, who is married to one of the Infantes de Carrio´n and then to the king of Navarre. In fact the historical Cid’s daughter was named Cristina, and it was her son who became king of Navarre.
Minaya Alvar Fa´n˜ez Minaya is the Cid’s ‘‘good right arm,’’ and is yet another of his nephews. He is the first of the Cid’s allies to be mentioned. However, his historical counterpart did not accompany the Cid into exile, but rather remained in the court of Alfonso VI.
Don˜a Ximena Dı´az See Ximena
Ansur Gonza´lez
Rodrigo (Ruy) Dı´az de Vivar
Ansur is the brother of the Infantes. He appears during the final duel to support his brothers’ claims, and he criticizes the Cid for his low birth.
Modeled after a historic personage who lived from about 1043 to 1099, Rodrigo Dı´ az is the hero of this epic poem. Named ‘‘the Cid,’’ for the Arabic word Sayyidi or leader, with the epithet Campeador, meaning master of the field, Rodrigo Dı´ az appears in the poem as an invincible military leader. He was born into the lower nobility (infanzon) in the small town of Vivar, near Burgos, and was a vassal to the king of Spain. In the poem, this low social status is of great importance, for the Cid is a true social climber, gaining social status by successfully amassing wealth and thus power. When he marries his daughters to the high-born infantes and later to the kings of Aragon and Navarre, successfully fighting for his family’s honor in the third cantar, his success as the founder of a new and great lineage is guaranteed. Unlike most epic heroes, he is depicted as an older man, with a white beard that is a source of great pride and prestige. He is portrayed not only as
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Diego Gonza´lez See Infantes de Carrio´n
Fernando Gonzalez See Infantes de Carrio´n
Mun˜o Gustioz Mun˜o Gustioz is an ally of the Cid, his criado or member of his household and, historically, Ximena’s brother-in-law. In the final duel, he defeats Ansur, the Infantes’ brother.
Don Jerome The historical Bishop Jerome was Je´roˆme de Pe´rigord, who was brought to Spain by the bishop of Toledo to help reform the Spanish church. He became the bishop of Valencia in 1098. In the poem, Jerome is a fighting bishop who, like
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Archbishop Turpin in the Song of Roland, takes part in the battles while guaranteeing eternal salvation to the fighters.
Pedro Mudo See Pedro Bermu´dez
Fe´lez Mun˜oz Fe´lez is one of the Cid’s nephews and is his ally and champion. He is the character who first discovers the Cid’s daughters after their beating and takes them back to their father. There is no historical record of this character.
Count Garcı´a Ordo´n˜ez Ordo´n˜ez is the ally of the Infantes and the bitter enemy of the Cid, rather like Ganelon in the Song of Roland. Although Ordo´n˜ez boasts of his noble lineage, the Cid reminds him that he pulled the count’s beard in the past, a mortal insult.
Rachel One of the two moneylenders who provide the initial source of money for the Cid, who needs capital for his period in exile. The Cid tricks the moneylenders into believing that he has placed all his wealth in two sand-filled chests, and they are persuaded to lend him money while being forbidden to open the chests. The anti-Semitic portrayal of the Jewish moneylenders is a commonplace in medieval texts.
Sol The Cid’s second daughter marries one of the Infantes de Carrio´n and then the king of Aragon. The historical Sol, named Marı´ a, married the count of Barcelona and perhaps the son of the king of Aragon. She died around age twenty-five.
Vidas One of the two moneylenders who provide the initial source of money for the Cid, who needs capital for his period in exile.
Ximena Lady Ximena is the virtuous wife of the Cid. Although she is left behind in the Abbey of Carden˜a with her daughters during the first part of the epic, she later joins her husband in Valencia, where she is met with a joyful welcome. The unusually close relationship between the Cid and his wife is expressed when they first are separated: ‘‘Weeping bitterly, they parted with such pain as when the fingernail is torn from the flesh.’’ Ximena is
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portrayed as a devoted wife who prays for her husband’s safety in an eloquent speech early in the poem. The historical Ximena was the daughter of the count of Oviedo and first cousin of King Alfonso VI, although this is not mentioned in the text. She brought her late husband’s remains to the monastery of San Pedro de Carden˜a near Burgos in 1102. In later versions of the Cid legend, it is Ximena who attracts the most attention; in Pierre Corneille’s Le Cid, she is the epitome of the tragic heroine.
King Yusuf of Morocco King Yusuf comes from Morocco to fight the Cid and thus to regain Valencia, a plan which fails. The historical Yusuf was Yusuf ibn Tesufin, first Almoravid caliph of Morocco (1059– 1106), and he did not come to Valencia to recuperate it but rather sent his nephew. The author is clearly amplifying the action to make the Cid’s deeds appear even more stunning.
THEMES Nobility and Class An epic about a highly successful social climber, the El Cid has much to say about the concept of nobility. For example, the Infantes de Carrio´n are characterized as members of the upper nobility; they have vast landholdings and enjoy high status in King Alfonso’s court. They marry the Cid’s daughters for their money but later describe these marriages as ‘‘concubinage,’’ implying that this match is null and void because of the vast difference in class between the Infantes and the Cid. According to medieval Spanish law, those of illegitimate birth cannot legally marry and can only be concubines, rather than legitimate wives. The hint of illegitimacy can be found in lines 3377–3381, where the brother of the Infantes, Ansur, implies that the Cid is the son of a miller. In the later romances of the Cid, the tradition notes that the Cid’s father raped a miller’s wife, who gave birth to the Cid. The allusion to bastardy on the part of the Cid and, by extension, his daughters, makes the theme of nobility even more dramatic, especially when someone of such low birth garners enough allies and supporters to challenge the insults to the Cid’s family’s legitimacy flung at them by the highest stratum of society. When, by the end of
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TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY El Cid has been a popular subject of artists. Find at least six paintings or illustrations that feature images from the epic and compare the different styles, time periods, and subject matter. What do you like and not like about these works of art? Using the medium of your choice (paint, pencil, or collage, to name a few options) create your own illustration of a scene from El Cid. Mount an art show as a class to display your work. When the apparently advantageous marriages between the Cid’s daughters and the high-born Infantes de Carrio´n have been contracted, the daughters thank their father, saying, ‘‘Since you have arranged these marriages, we are sure to be very rich.’’ What is the place of women in the society described in this epic? Compare the different women in the epic, including Ximena and her ladies in waiting. What is the traditional role of women in epics? How is El Cid different? Why do you think later interpretations of the legend of the Cid concentrated so intensely on Ximena as a heroine? Write an essay arguing your interpretation, using feminist theory to support your points. El Cid is well-known for its relativistic portrayal of Muslims and Christians, especially compared to the contemporary epic, the Song of Roland, in which the Christians are assumed to be right and the pagans wrong. Research the
the poem, readers are informed that, after the Infantes are soundly defeated, the Cid’s daughters marry princes whose alliance cause them to be related to subsequent kings of Spain, it is clear that the Cid, as a self-made man, has arrived in the noble class. Nobility, then, does not simply stem from one’s birth into a social class. An individual, according to El Cid, can work to augment his status as a person of quality. One way to do this, in medieval Spanish society, is to demonstrate great generosity.
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intercultural relationships between Christians, Jews, and Muslims in Spain in the Middle Ages. Try to present the points of views of each of these groups about the other two communities. Have some of the stereotypes about Christian, Muslim, and Jewish cultures persisted into the twenty-first century? In a small group, write a skit that dramatizes the findings of your research. El Cid displays a restless frontier spirit in which a growing population turns its attention to new lands to conquer. Find narratives of the American West and compare them to passages in El Cid that demonstrate similar attitudes towards a frontier. Using a computer, prepare a digital presentation of your compare-and-contrast project and present your work to your class. The Cid, as a character, is sometimes thought of as the most successful medieval outlaw. Compare him to legends of other outlaws, such as Robin Hood, Jesse James, Billy the Kid, Blackbeard, Jean Lafitte, or Joachim Murieta. What is their relation to authority figures, such as King Alfonso? What function might these legends play in a given society? What constitutes a successful outlaw, and does the Cid qualify? Divide the class into debate teams and have each team take a position, using historical fact to support arguments.
Generosity and Greed The definition of a gift economy is one in which an individual gains prestige by giving gifts. These economies are illustrated, for example, by the potlatch festivals in which the chief of certain Native American tribes of the Pacific Northwest give away huge amounts of money and other forms of wealth. In El Cid, the hero proves his worth by, literally, giving it away. This epic is filled with itemized lists of the war booty that the Cid and his followers win after each battle; the
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Cid himself is careful to use his fifth of the winnings to send magnificent presents to the king to, essentially, buy back favor. The Cid also is generous with the Church, sending money regularly to the Abbey of Carden˜a to assure God’s favor. In addition, he is generous with his victims, allowing the residents of one of the cities that he conquers to return to their homes and freeing Ramo´n Berenguer, count of Barcelona, from captivity. An interesting exception to the Cid’s generosity is the repayment of Rachel and Vidas, the Jewish moneylenders who are themselves shown to be especially greedy and whom it seems the Cid never pays back. The Infantes of Carrio´n, the Cid’s typological opposites, are noted for their lack of princely generosity. By the end of the epic, however, the Cid is proven to be a man as worthy as King Alfonso when the king is forced to admit that the Cid’s generosity embarrasses him (l. 2147). It is nobler to give than to receive in this society.
Cowardice and Bravery Just as generosity is the mark of a noble man, bravery in battle is likewise an important characteristic of the ideal hero. The Cid, of course, is the epitome of the brave warrior, using tactics and courage to defeat armies of superior numbers. Bravery, like generosity, is not necessarily linked with one’s inherited social status. The comic episode in which the Infantes de Carrio´n hide under a couch and behind a wine cask when a lion escapes illustrates the importance of bravery in this epic. The Cid is able to tame the lion—the symbol of courage itself—because he is a personage of extraordinary bravery himself. The cowardly Infantes, by contrast, shirk their duties in battle and invent lies to cover their own lack of courage in episodes that demonstrate how unworthy they are as knights.
Honor The important traits of courage and generosity fall under the general rubric of a noble man’s honor. A man of worth, according to El Cid, must work to preserve his honor. The Cid has lost a certain amount of honor by being banished by his king, but he manages to recuperate it by being extraordinarily generous and courageous in battle against the Moors. On a more symbolic level, a man’s honor can be seriously damaged if personal insults pass unavenged. The Cid’s long, flowing beard is so impressive because it has never been pulled—a mortal insult punishable by death. He notes with pleasure that Count Garcı´ a Ordo´n˜ez’s beard has
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not grown back after being pulled by the Cid, implying irreparable damage to his personal honor. The Cid is careful, in public appearances, to keep his beard tied with a cord so as to avoid even accidental pulling. Honor is not only a masculine trait: Women such as Ximena and her daughters are portrayed as honorable ladies through their religious faith and their faith in the Cid. The daughters, although they are humiliated by being beaten by the Infantes, regain their honor when it is defended in duels by the Cid’s men against the Infantes. The proof that their honor has been regained is revealed in the subsequent advantageous marriages that are arranged for them.
Race Conflict One curious theme of El Cid concerns the problem of race relations, in particular the coexistence of Christian and Moor in Spain under the Reconquest. The Cid’s conquest of Valencia was a somewhat isolated success against the Moors during the reign of Alfonso VI, which was characterized by a general gaining of ground on the part of the Moors after initial Christian successes. Moors in El Cid are portrayed alternatively as the fearsome pagans who prove terrifying in battle with their war-drums or as the magnanimous Abengalbo´n, the Moorish governor who welcomes the Cid and his family and who proves a useful ally. The relativistic treatment of the Moors, some of whom revere the Cid as much as the Christians, stands in contrast to other portrayals of Christians and non-Christians as well as to the treatment of Jews in El Cid, who are depicted in negative stereotypes. In a text told by a Christian narrator, it is interesting to discover a measure of cultural relativism.
Exile Exile is an important theme in El Cid because it is the catalyst for the Cid’s campaign against the Moors as he tries to regain favor with King Alfonso. In the process of winning battles and sending gifts to the king, he gains such status among his friends and foes that when his sons-in-law, the Infantes de Carrio´n, try to discredit him and throw away their wives, they instead show the Cid to be braver and more honorable than they are. The Cid is a rare but important example of earned social standing for medieval Spain. His daughters go on to marry kings, securing the family’s status as nobility. First, the Cid has to touch bottom; that is, exile. Although the manuscript is incomplete in the portion that describes why the Cid was exiled, historians have pieced together that it was for
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Detail from the title page of the 1498 edition, titled ‘‘Coronica del cid’’
embezzlement. The Cid curries favor with the king by sending tribute gifts following his military victories, which is a mark of a gift economy and the Cid’s way of showing the king, over and over, that he is not a thief.
Rollant est proz e Oliver est sage; Ambedui unt merveillus vasselage (ll. 1093 94)
The narrative technique of El Cid does share some similarities with this pattern. The epic is constructed of 152 assonanced laisses with a strong caesura, as is illustrated in the following:
STYLE Meter Discussions of the narrative technique in El Cid tend to revolve around the unusual irregularity of the epic’s meter. French epic, for example in the Song of Roland, is characterized by its regular, assonanced ten-syllable lines. The French epic is organized in laisses, or unequal blocks of text that are grouped by their assonance, that is, the similarity of the last vowel of the line. Additionally, each line has a strong caesura, or pause, between the first
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four syllables and the final six. Thus, in The Song of Roland:
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De los sos ojos tan fuertemientre llorando, tornava la cabec¸a e esta´valos catando (ll. 1 2)
However, as this example indicates, the length of the line is extremely irregular and is as a result called anisosyllabic. The line length in this poem can vary from eight to twenty-two syllables. This irregularity has puzzled critics who attempt to locate the variance in meter to the original source of the epic. P. T. Harvey and A. D. Deyermond
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compare the epic to the oral literature researched by Albert Lord and others. When collecting epic songs from the so-called singers of tales in Yugoslavia, these scholars noted that, while the meter of the songs remained regular when they were sung, when the researcher requested that the singers recite the works without singing, the meter became irregular. Harvey and Deyermond theorize that El Cid may have been originally collected from a recited, rather than a sung, source, which might explain its metrical irregularity.
Epic Epithet The epic as a performed literary form tends to present characters as representatives of certain human traits. One technique that works to emphasize these specific characteristics is the epic epithet. This technique reminds the reader/listener to concentrate on the most important traits of a given character. The Cid, for example, is ‘‘El de Bivar,’’ ‘‘the man from Vivar,’’ emphasizing the importance of the Cid as a landowner and locating him within a matrix of local politics. He is the good ‘‘Campeador,’’ ‘‘master of the battlefield.’’ King Alfonso, interestingly, receives few epithets while his relations with the Cid are antagonistic. When he pardons the Cid, he receives more favorable epithets. Important places, such as Valencia, can also receive epithets.
Ring Composition The form of many epics, as oral literature, is shaped, according to some scholars, by the characteristics of oral memory and composition. Specifically, patterns of repetitions, formulary expressions, and standard themes such as battles, marriages, and reconciliations emerge. Often, a circular pattern that serves as a frame adds shape and clarity to the narrative. El Cid has such a shape according to Cedric Whitman and Walter Ong. The first cantar reveals the ring composition. In line 1, readers learn of the adversities and anguish resulting from the Cid’s exile and of the convocation of vassals; and later, in lines 48 through 63, the benefits and jubilation resulting from the Cid’s conquests and of the increase in number of his vassals are reported. Similarly, this type of repetition of themes and ideas can be seen in lines 2 through 22, with the departure from Castile accompanied by ill omens and the promise of masses, and in lines 40 through 47, with the depicted return of Minaya Alvar Fa´n˜ez to Castile with favorable omens and masses paid. Ring composition draws the listener’s attention to
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important parallels in the work and is a device commonly used in oral literature.
Foil Character The Infantes de Carrio´n are foil characters for the Cid. A foil character is one who embodies traits that are opposite those of the main character with the intention of highlighting the important qualities of the main character. In El Cid, the Cid is renowned for his bravery, his honorable treatment of people— whether they are enemies or family members—and his generosity. The Infantes, by contrast, are cowards, behave dishonorably toward their wives, and are ungenerous. Unable to quell the gossip of their cowardice, the Infantes seek to attack the Cid by abandoning their wives and declaring him to be beneath their social station. The Cid is the hero of this story and his honor and prestige are impeccable, which leads to their downfall as their attack on him illustrates just how pathetic they are.
HISTORICAL CONTEXT Spain and Feudalism The shape of Spanish society, as opposed to the situation in France, was not strictly or formally organized by feudal ties that linked a lord to a vassal who, in return for protection, provided military services. Although the social structure in Catalonia (the northeastern corner of Spain) was influenced by France, the northwest was original. The fine gradations of northern feudal society in Spain become a more or less direct relationship between a man and his king. As El Cid shows, the sign of the lord-vassal relationship is the kissing of hands. The reason for this less-stratified shape of society has to do with the Reconquest of Moorish Spain and with the resettlement of the lands taken from the Moors. Peasants occupied these frontier lands, often taking up arms to defend their new territory, militia-style. The king, by contrast, retained his power as warlord, as the organizer of these campaigns against the Moors. The kings of the Spanish provinces ruled effectively over their comparatively small kingdoms, thus remaining in touch with their subjects. Northern feudal society is characterized by two factors: the vassal-knight’s monopoly of military duty and the dominance of the various ties of vassalage. Vassalage refers to the dependence and reliance of one man on another over other forms of government. Spanish society, organized to combat a numerous and formidable enemy, rather than to maintain interior peace, took on a different shape.
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COMPARE & CONTRAST Eleventh century: Setbacks for the Christians occur when the North African ruler Yusuf ibn Tashufin initiates a military campaign to strengthen Arab holdings in Spain. Only the Cid is able to withstand the African advances. His conquest of Valencia is a shattering but isolated event; Christian occupation of the city does not survive his death. Today: Spain’s government supports the invasion of Iraq in 2003, despite popular opinion overwhelming against Spanish involvement. On March 11, 2004, days before a federal election, terrorist bombs explode on trains in Madrid during rush hour, killing 191 people and wounding more than 1,800 others. After the election, wherein control of the government goes to the Socialist Party, Spain pulls its troops out of Iraq. Eleventh century: The agricultural economy of medieval Spain is influenced by the Reconquista`. The repopulation that accompanies the capture of Moorish territory leads to the establishment of fortified Christian towns, which become economic centers for international trade. El Cid, however, depicts an archaic gift economy, in which a man’s status depends on how much wealth he can win and then distribute. Today: Spain’s inclusion in the European Union shows that it has a strong economy; however, the unemployment rate in the first quarter of 2009 rises to 17 percent. Some blame this increase on the surge in immigrants between 2004 and 2007, bringing the total number of immigrants in Spain to 5.2 million or 10 percent of the population. Eleventh century: Christian culture is in the process of a great renewal, and Church reforms begin in the monasteries of Cluny and Cıˆ teaux in France. The arrival of Bishop Jerome in El Cid demonstrates the effect of the French reforms on the Church of Spain.
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Today: Spain has no state religion, but the Roman Catholic Church receives state support. Eighty percent of Spaniards consider themselves to be Roman Catholic, but most are not practicing. Twenty percent of Roman Catholics in Spain attend church regularly and 50 percent go to church only for weddings and funerals. Eleventh century: The feudal system of government, characterized by a personal relationship between a vassal and a lord, becomes more common in the eleventh and twelfth centuries in Spain. Spanish feudalism consists of the promise of service to a lord and is sealed by kissing the lord’s hand. In Spain, the triangular shape of feudal society is overshadowed by the role of the king as military leader; for example, the Infantes and the Cid all work for the king, although they are of unequal rank. Today: Spain is a constitutional monarchy led by the popular King Juan Carlos I, who regained the throne after the dictator Franco died in 1975. Jose´ Luis Rodrı´ guez Zapatero, head of the Socialist Workers’ Party, is elected prime minister in 2004. Eleventh century: Spain is noted for the sometimes uneasy cohabitation of Muslims, Jews, and Christians. El Cid chronicles the efforts of Christians to reclaim lands Muslims took in the eighth century. In Christian territory, Jews are isolated but are also under the protection of the king. Muslims are distrusted and isolated in ghettos in the cities. In Muslim territory, whose inhabitants have constructed a particularly brilliant culture, Jews and Christians enjoyed relative lenience. Today: In Spain, there are about two million Protestants, 50,000 Jews, and a growing Muslim community of over one million whose numbers increase with immigration from North Africa.
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In El Cid, written down in the early thirteenth century, the emergence of the state as a larger organizing force can be charted in the evolution of the portrayal of King Alfonso who, once he pardons the Cid, acts as an arbiter between warring clans. The people who made up Spanish society then included the Christians, who organized themselves in households (made up of criados), and who were classified as ricos hombres or wealthy men; infanzones, also called caballeros (the Cid is an infanzon); and knights. There were two types of peasants, the solariegos, or serfs, were tied to the land and were not free to move, and the behetrı´as, who were freemen and sometimes moved to the borderlands to become peasant knights.
Late Twelfth-century Politics and the 1207 Cid An important study of the cultural context within which El Cid was written is Marı´ a Lacarra’s 1980 investigation of history and ideology in this epic. She found the poem to be a frankly propagandistic work that functions as a denunciation of an important Leonese family whose ancestors were hostile toward the Cid. The historical background of the tension between the powerful Beni-Go´mez family and the historical Cid seems to uphold this theory. During the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, a power struggle developed between the provinces of Castile and Leon. The historical Cid was involved in one phase of these developments. The Cid was the head of the armies of King Sancho II of Castile, but upon Sancho’s death, his brother Alfonso VI became king of Castile and Leon. Alfonso cultivated relations with the obviously talented Cid, marrying his cousin Ximena to the Cid and verifying his land holdings in Vivar. Alfonso sent the Cid to collect tribute from the Moorish king of Seville in 1079. While in Seville, the Cid confronted Garcı´ a Ordo´n˜ez, who was attacking Seville in the company of the king of Granada. The tension between the Cid and Garcı´ a Ordo´n˜ez is charted in the epic and is expanded to reflect the clan feud that marked Castilian politics of the late twelfth century. When the young Alfonso VIII of Castile ascended the throne in 1158, as often happens when a child becomes king, a struggle ensued for control over his education and for control of the government. The Lara clan, staunch supporters of Alfonso VIII, were soon embroiled in a feud with the powerful Castro family, whose interests were not served by Alfonso VIII’s lifelong program to unite Castile and Leon against the Moorish threat to the south. A
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critical moment was reached in 1195, when Alfonso VIII of Castile attacked the Moorish stronghold Toledo. Alfonso VIII suffered a monumental defeat at the hands of the Moorish Almohad caliphs. Importantly, Pedro Ferna´ndez de Castro, head of the Castro family who were related to the Infantes de Carrio´n and the Beni-Go´mez clan, fought on the Moorish side in this battle. The Lara family, who had remained loyal to Alfonso VIII of Castile, saw Pedro’s actions as traitorous to the cause of Castile and Leon. Joseph J. Duggan, a noted El Cid scholar, viewed the 1207 El Cid as a praise poem for the historical Cid that is also a shame poem for the Beni-Go´mez family, a representative of whom was considered a traitor to Alfonso VIII who was a descendant of the Cid himself. The Lara family, in addition, benefited from a praise-poem about the Cid since they were related to him through marriage. By writing a poem about the exploits of a famous fighter of Moors who, in the process of winning lands and booty, caused a rival clan to lose face, the author of the 1207 Cid might have been writing a propagandistic poem that praised an ancestor of Alfonso VIII and the Lara clan while functioning to incite renewed efforts against the Moors after a dramatic defeat during the darker days of the Christian Reconquest of Spain.
The Reconquista` Never far in the background of El Cid is the long history of the Spanish Reconquest of Muslim territory, which began in the early eighth century and was nearly completed by the middle of the thirteenth century. The last Muslim enclave, Grenada, was annexed by Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain in 1492, thus completing a long and painful reordering of the Spanish peninsula. In the early history of the Reconquest, Christian success came in direct proportion to the strength of Islamic Spain. Tension between the kings of Asturias, Castile, and Leon and the rulers of Portugal, Navarre, and Aragon-Catalonia often undermined the Christian program to gain territory, but by the late fifteenth century, only Portugal remained separate. With the Reconquest and the resettling of territory came accelerated development of the towns, with the consequences, among others, that Christian religious centers were reestablished, restored, and expanded. With the expansion of Christian territory, many Muslims and Jews came under Christian rule. For the most part, a relatively stable coexistence was maintained; Muslims and Jews were allowed freedom
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This statue of Rodrigo Dı´az de Vivar (called El Cid) is located in Burgos, Spain. (Image copyright Marek Slusarczyk, 2010. Used under license from Shutterstock.com)
of religion and their own law codes as long as they paid regular fees (tribute) to the Christians.
The Church in Medieval Spain During the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the Church in Spain was in upheaval. With Muslim conquests across the Spanish countryside and Christian reclamation, people were converting to Islam at high rates or moving away altogether to avoid persecution and discrimination. The Roman Catholic leadership, including the pope, took an interest in Spain, not wishing to lose its foothold there, where the Muslims were, for a time, taking over most of the peninsula. The papacy installed bishops, such as Bishop Jerome in Valencia in El Cid, in reclaimed territories.
CRITICAL OVERVIEW The critical reception of El Cid must be studied in two parts; first, the evolution of the epic itself, and how the story was retold in the Middle Ages
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(approximately fifth through sixteenth centuries) and in later literary periods, and second, the reception of the epic by modern critics. The Cid’s heroic deeds were recorded in a Latin poem, titled the Carmen Campidoctoris around 1093, and in a shorter Latin chronicle, or historical document, the Historia Roderici around 1110. Although other fragments of the story of the Cid exist in several chronicles, including the prose Primera Cro´nica General, El Cid is the only Spanish (Castilian) epic to have survived in nearentirety. A later text, written around 1250, bridges the gap between the epic and the romance tradition of literature: The Mocedades del Cid tells of the deeds of the Cid during his youth. This text is full of fanciful and romantic anecdotes about the Cid, contrasting strongly with the heroic, venerable Cid of the epic tradition. Interestingly, the epic version of the Cid’s legend had almost no effect on later literature; it is the romance tradition that fed the fanciful ballads of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The 1618 play, Las Mocedades del Cid, by Spanish playwright Guille´n de Castro’s inspired Pierre Corneille to compose Le Cid in
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1637, which provoked an important literary discussion in France about appropriate literary subject matter. In these romantic versions of the Cid legend, the authors focus on the relationship between Don˜a Ximena and Rodrigo (the Cid), with the larger historical question of the battles between Christian and Moors relegated to the background. While the epic was never entirely forgotten— the manuscript was rediscovered in Vivar in the sixteenth century and was passed among scholars for many years—it was not until the late nineteenth century that it began to receive serious scholarly attention. The single extant manuscript is in very bad condition, due to the use of reagents, or acids, which were applied to places in the manuscript where the ink had faded (ultraviolet lamps and infrared photography is now the preferred method to decipher difficult to read documents). In the late nineteenth century, the Spanish scholar Ramo´n Mene´ndez Pidal turned his attention to the work, publishing a three-volume edition between 1908 and 1911. Mene´ndez Pidal’s dominant position in Cidian scholarship ensured the duration of critical topics that he thought were important. A scholar of the generation of 1898, an intellectual movement that opposed the restoration of the monarchy and favored a political return to the so-called purified origins of Spain, Mene´ndez Pidal believed that El Cid, as the ‘‘national epic of Spain,’’ reveals the origin of Spain’s national character. He also believed that El Cid should be studied as an accurate historical document. Finally, he supported the traditionalist viewpoint that the epic had been composed gradually in the oral tradition by generations of folk poets. The search for origins, with an interest in seeking the roots of European culture and which often led to fanciful reconstructions of literary texts, was an important characteristic of nineteenth-century philology. Mene´ndez Pidal’s nationalist, historicist, and traditionalist views dominated the approach of Cidian scholarship for many years. The sharpest debate about this epic involved the battle between the individualist belief in a single author of the epic versus the traditionalist approach, which, following Mene´ndez Pidal and, later, Albert Lord and others, insists that all epic literature has oral composition at its earliest stages. Although the individualist thesis has lost ground, Colin Smith’s book The Making of the ‘‘Poema de mio Cid’’ (1983) demonstrates that it is not yet dead. Other scholarly problems that have attracted attention revolve around the date of composition of the poem and of its manuscript; problems of
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authorship; origins and influences (especially French) of the themes in the epic; the relation of El Cid to other types of medieval Spanish literature, including the Romanceros and the Cro´nicas; aesthetic evaluation of the epic as literature; mythic or folkloric aspects of the Cid; and finally the application of social science methodology to the study of this epic. Mene´ndez Pidal’s nationalism, the result of his political ideology, did not affected subsequent scholarship as much as his historicism. An important debate between this scholar and another eminent medievalist, Leo Spitzer, revolved around the place of history in this epic, which contains much accurate historical detail. While Mene´ndez Pidal thought that El Cid could be read as an historical document; Spitzer disagreed, writing that the fictional events (almost the entire second half of the poem) of the epic are as important as the historical elements and must be weighed as such. In the late twentieth century, historicist treatments added an important facet to Cidian studies. Marı´ a Lacarra, in particular, characterized this epic as a propagandistic poem that rewrote history to better present a particular clan’s interest. Joseph Duggan and Michael Harney have studied larger social structures of the era, linking them to problems that are raised in the text itself. In the early twenty-first century, scholars have focused on the structural qualities of El Cid. Juan Carlos Bayo, in a 2001 essay for the Modern Language Review, abandoned the usual approach of breaking down the epic by laisse and looked at other forms of poetic discourse patterning in the epic. Jack J. Himelblau, a professor of Spanish literature, examined the structural composition of El Cid in his 2010 book Morphology of the Cantar de Mio Cid. He argued that this epic is comprised of nineteen smaller stories that build upon one another in systemic fashion similar to folktales, firmly linking El Cid to the folklore tradition. Cidian criticism seemed to have nearly surpassed the individualist/traditionalist battle and, in the early 2000s appeared to be headed in a direction that might shed light on the cultural function of literature.
CRITICISM Jennifer Looper In the following essay, Looper analyzes the propaganda function in epic literature, explaining how El Cid was used to promote the political and economic aims of medieval institutions long after the death of the historical Cid.
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As an epic, compared with other examples from the genre, El Cid stands out not so much in its form as in its content as a literary reflection of history. A text that probably underwent many transformations as oral literature before it was written down by a talented poet, El Cid shares the epic epithets, stock themes, and formulas typical of other early epics. As the tale of a heroic individual whose existence is well documented, El Cid offers a unique example in the epic genre of the relationship between literature and history. The link between the Cid as a man, the legend that quickly evolved about his deeds even during his lifetime, and the use of this story as a political tool in the turbulent twelfth century in Spain, during which time the descendants of the Cid won the throne of Castile, lends itself to a fascinating reconsideration of the way literature is used to change history. Since the El Cid does recount the tale of a famous historical figure who is also well-documented, one of the most important questions to ask about the epic surrounds the cultural and historical impetus behind its composition. Why, in 1207, was the epic first written down? Why was it again recopied one hundred years later? With regards to the events that are recounted in the epic itself, one can ask why certain fictional elements were added to the historical narrative, as well as why certain historical elements were retained though others were omitted. Two interesting phenomena illustrate the way this epic was used to promote the political and economic interests of certain medieval institutions many years after the Cid died. One example of the way that the poem was used to promote the political interests of King Alfonso VIII of Castile and his allies in the late thirteenth century demonstrates the propagandistic element of epic literature. A second example of the exploitation of the epic illustrates its commercial use: the development of a tomb-cult, a sort of tourist site at the Abbey of Carden˜a, where the Cid was buried. The hypothesis that El Cid was written as a praise-poem for the ancestor of the king of Castile (Alfonso VIII) and the king’s allies, the Lara family, who were related to the Cid by marriage, is best summarized by Joseph Duggan, who follows Marı´ a Lacarra in much of his argument. Duggan explains that the question of family integrity and illegitimacy, which dominates the narrative even over the conquest of Valencia—a monumental historical event—is related to the twelfth-century political struggle between Castile and Leon. It is important to remember that the historical Ximena, the Cid’s wife, was of royal blood, a cousin to Alfonso VI of
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EL CID SHOWS HOW LITERATURE ABOUT A HISTORICAL FIGURE CAN REFLECT AND EVEN INFLUENCE LOCAL POLITICS AND, LATER, GENERATE REVENUE FOR A MEDIEVAL TOURIST SITE’’
Castile. In the epic, however, no mention is made of this connection, and the poet concentrates on the insults that are hurled at the Cid by the Infantes de Carrio´n, who maintain that the Cid is a member of the lower class: ‘‘Who ever heard of the Cid, that fellow from Vivar? Let him be off to the river Ubierna to dress his millstones and collect his miller’s tolls as usual. Who gave him the right to marry into the Carrio´n family?’’ (ll. 3377–81). The Infantes insist that the Cid’s daughters are not wives, but concubines, suggesting that they are illegitimate, or are born of an illegitimate parent. Duggan shows that the poet’s insistence on ‘‘clearing the Cid’s name’’ relates to a crisis that centered on the marriages of Alfonso IX of Leon and Alfonso VIII of Castile. A common practice in the Middle Ages was to marry a member of an opposing family to restore peace between two warring clans; the historical Ximena was married to the Cid in a peacemaking gesture on the part of Alfonso VI. At the height of the tension between Alfonso IX and Alfonso VIII, after the disastrous battle of Toledo in 1195, the pope stepped in to try to restore peace between the Christian kings so as to better combat the Muslim presence. He excommunicated Alfonso IX of Leon and his counselor Pedro Ferna´ndez de Castro (the man considered a traitor by the Lara clan). Excommunication was a terrible punishment in this period; the victim was essentially ejected from the Christian community. Faced with this threat, in 1199, Alfonso IX agreed to marry Alfonso VIII’s daughter, Berenguela, to make peace. Although it brought peace, this match was problematic in that Alfonso IX and Berenguela were first cousins, and thus the marriage was considered incestuous. Innocent III, the new pope who entered the scene at that moment, was particularly stubborn on the matter of incestuous marriages and insisted that it be annulled, imposing the interdict on Leon and
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WHAT DO I READ NEXT? The Song of Roland, an anonymous epic roughly contemporaneous with El Cid, takes place on the frontier between France and Spain and has an atmosphere of impending doom which contrasts strongly with the exuberant conquests of El Cid. The twelfth-century Pilgrim’s Guide to Santiago de Compostela offers a different view of medieval Spain, that of the pilgrim who traveled to Compostela on the northwest coast of Spain to visit the famous shrine of Saint James. Italica Press published an English translation in 2008.
chivalric romance—the descendant of the feudal epic—as a literary genre.
Ibn Hazm, a theologian from Cordoba (994– 1064), wrote The Ring of the Dove: The Art and Practice of Arab Love, which describes the brilliant Arab culture that developed in Spain before the Reconquest. Luzac Oriental published a translation of this work in 1997.
Miguel de Cervantes’s famous novel, Don Quixote (1605–1615), tells the story of a very different kind of knight than the Cid. This novel illustrates the death throes of the
Castile, another terrible punishment in which no sacred services could be performed. Alfonso IX and Berenguela refused to separate, and Berenguela eventually bore five children. These children were judged illegitimate by the pope, but Alfonso IX ignored this judgment, naming his son, Fernando, heir to the Leonese throne. After a period of intense crisis, Fernando, the son of a daughter of Castile and the king of Leon, finally was given legitimacy by the pope in 1218, and the tension between Castile and Leon was finally ended, as it had been planned by Alfonso VIII, when Fernando became Fernando III, king of Castile and Leon. A crisis that threatened regional stability when popes and kings clashed is reflected and resolved in a work of fiction, in which the Cid is represented as illegitimate but manages to earn, through his intrinsic worth,
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Homeless Bird (2000), by Gloria Whelan, is the story of a thirteen-year-old Hindu girl named Koly who is married and then widowed and abandoned by her in-laws. Whelan’s book explores the experience of women who have no family or financial protection, a kind of vulnerability not unlike that of the Cid’s wife and daughters, who rely on their connection to the Cid for their place in society.
SusanCooper’sfive-book series Dark IsRising, the popular Arthurian fantasy, appeared as a box set published by McElderry in 2007. In the first novel, three siblings find a map while vacationing in Cornwall and must uncover the mystery surrounding the map before it is stolen from them. The historical Arthur was a sixthcentury military leader and became a legendary hero in twelfth century England, much as the Cid did in Spain.
the approbation of his peers and, more importantly, the approval of God. It is important to note that the Cid’s champions, in the final three duels, fight for the Cid and his family’s honor and win, not because of their skill in fighting, but because God wills it. The clash of church and state, illustrated by the series of interdictions imposed on Spanish regions by various popes in the late twelfth century to force them to change their dynastic politics, is resolved in the epic when God remains consistently on the Cid’s side throughout his struggle with the Moors and with those who would insult his family. A political and moral message is thus sent by this text, which works to uphold the prestige of a ruler who is tainted by the hint of illegitimacy. The link between the Church and the Cid’s descendants becomes clear when one takes into
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account the importance of churches and monasteries for royal families in the Middle Ages. In exchange for political and spiritual support in the form of sermons preached and masses said for the benefit of a powerful family, these families often donated great sums of money for the maintenance of the resident monks. Two institutions figure importantly in the history of this epic; the first is San Pedro de Carden˜a, and the second is, according to Duggan, Santa Marı´ a de Huerta. The former was powerful during the reign of Alfonso VI (the king who interacted with the Cid), and the latter was a newer institution, established by Alfonso VIII, who himself placed the cornerstone of the building in the ground. Huerta was also patronized, or given financial support, by the Lara family, allies of Alfonso VIII. Alfonso visited Huerta several times, and Duggan suggests that one of these occasions may have been commemorated by the composition of the 1207 manuscript of El Cid. The mysterious ‘‘Per Abbat’’ who ‘‘wrote down’’ the text may refer to the Abbot Pedro I, who was Abbot at Huerta around 1203 through 1210. He might have presented the manuscript to Alfonso VIII on one of his visits in 1207. Although the thirteenth-century copy of the text, which was later lost, may have been composed at the Abbey of Huerta, the fourteenth-century copy of this manuscript was discovered in the sixteenth century in the archives of the city hall of Vivar, the Cid’s home town. Later it was borrowed by an eighteenth-century scholar and subsequently was passed around Spain for two hundred years. The history of Carden˜a differs from that of Huerta in that it was a Benedictine institution, rather than a monastery such as Huerta, built on a newer, reformed model. It consequently enjoyed less royal favor than Huerta in this period, since Alfonso VIII favored the reformed model. Even a slight lessening of royal favor had serious financial ramifications for any religious institution, and the monks of Carden˜a took action. P. E. Russell states, in a 1958 article for Medium Aevum: ‘‘Carden˜a enjoyed the favor of Alfonso VIII (1158–1214), though, in common with the other Benedictine foundations, it was now no longer closely connected with the life of the court. The monks began to elaborate, with small regard for historical probability, legends designed to keep alive memories of the part they had once played in the early days of the Castilian nation.’’ One method that these monks used to maintain the prestige of their abbey was the production of manuscripts, which served as valuable tools in the
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process of generating support for an element that the abbey wanted to promote. In the case of Carden˜a, it was well-known that the Cid had been buried there after his wife Ximena brought his embalmed remains to the abbey in 1102. The monks of Carden˜a worked to aggrandize the abbey’s link with the Cid: Stories circulated that not only the Cid was buried there, but also his wife Ximena and his famous horse, Babieca. The Cid’s body, like that of a saint, was reported to be ‘‘incorrupted,’’ or in perfectly preserved condition. In El Cid itself, many unlikely details were either added or retained from the earlier version to emphasize Carden˜a’s helpful role in the Cid’s campaigns. Ximena and her daughters, for example, were housed at the abbey in defiance of the king’s orders, according to the text. The Cid is depicted as donating vast sums of money to the abbey in his lifetime. Even the general region in which the abbey was situated is glorified by the invention of Martı´ n Antolı´ nez, the ‘‘worthy citizen of Burgos,’’ who likewise defies the king and joins the Cid in exile. These stories can be seen as a carefully orchestrated advertising campaign that resulted in attracting tourists who brought much-needed revenue to a religious institution that enjoyed less royal favor than their newer counterparts. A tomb-cult quickly developed at Carden˜a: People flocked there to view the tomb of the Cid, elevating his legend to the status of a saint by retelling the tales of his heroic deeds. This phenomenon is not an isolated one: Russell notes that ‘‘The gradual turning of a lay [e.g., not religious] figure into a hagiographical [e.g., saintly] one as a result of a tomb-cult was clearly a general phenomenon.’’ The steady stream of pilgrims to visit the tomb of a popular hero or a saint generated considerable wealth for the church or monastery that housed the relics, or remains, of a popular hero. These pilgrims also ensured the survival and elaboration of these heroic legends, in that they learned the story of the hero during their pilgrimage and returned home to retell it. Perhaps the manuscript was produced as yet another piece of written—and thus more plausible—proof that the relics were indeed worthy of popular veneration. El Cid shows how literature about a historical figure can reflect and even influence local politics and, later, generate revenue for a medieval tourist site. Heroic stories continue to be used to draw parallels between the present and the past. The 1961 Hollywood movie, El Cid, could be interpreted as a reflection of the American public’s veneration
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THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE COLONIZATION DEPICTED IN EL POEMA DE MIO CID AND MODERN IMPERIAL COLONIZATION IS COMPOUNDED WHEN THE UNIQUE NATURE OF THE MEDIEVAL ‘SPAIN’ THAT THE POEM REPRESENTS IS TAKEN INTO ACCOUNT.’’
Detail from the title page of the 1546 edition
of their own heroic leader, John F. Kennedy, who, with his heroic wife, shed glory on an empire of their own. Thus, an epic can be generated for the most self-serving of reasons. Source: Jennifer Looper, Critical Essay on El Cid, in Epics for Students, 2nd ed., Gale, Cengage Learning, 2011.
Malachi McIntosh In the following essay, McIntosh discusses postcolonial theory as it has been applied to El Cid. In the past two decades postcolonial theory has seen a rise in scope and diffusion. Due at least in part to the incisiveness of the ‘Holy Trinity’ of theoreticians: Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Homi K. Bhabha, postcolonial study has grown from a small subcategory of literary analysis to an influential academic presence. The bulk of postcolonial scholarship is concerned with the deconstruction of imperial discourse and the reconceptualization of the relationship between colonial and neocolonial ‘centres’ and their ‘margins’. While the majority of critical considerations focus on colonialism in the modern period, the lack of a definitive starting point for colonial oppression, as well as an often explicit questioning
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of ‘neat chronologies’, results in a degree of flexibility in historical focus (Moore-Gilbert et al. 1997: 2). Although the seminal ideas of Said, Bhabha and Spivak grew from critical analyses of specific temporally and situationally bound discursive acts, their theories on oppositional binaries, on the construction and maintenance of the idea of ‘race’, and on the role of literature in control, seem to be at least partially practicable in the study of any time in history. Of the work of these theorists, Edward Said’s Orientalism stands out as the widest-ranging study of imperial discourse with the greatest potential for historical application outside its field of focus. Often considered to be the inaugural work of postcolonial criticism, Said’s book, first published in 1978, illuminates the role of writers, scholars and texts in the subjection of the East by the West. Though Said limits his study to a tradition of nineteenth-century writing on the Orient, he claims that ‘every writer on the Orient (and this is true even of Homer) assumes some Oriental precedent’ and that ‘colonial rule was justified in advance by Orientalism [ . . . ] the absolute demarcation between the East and West [ . . . ] had been years, even centuries in the making’ (Said 2003: 20; 39). According to Jan Gilbert, these statements illustrate the fact that Orientalist discourse ‘is not confined to nineteenth-century colonial conquest and domination’, and can therefore be illuminated in pre-Modern texts (Gilbert 2003: 49). Utilizing Said’s theory, Gilbert reads medieval Spanish ballads in an effort to alter perceptions of the works and of the time of which they are products, by exposing their Orientalizing nature. Gilbert’s concern with reimagining the Middle Ages in the light of a new conception of modernity
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is not new. This act, described by John Dagenais as ‘colonising the past’, has occurred throughout European history; empires have repeatedly shifted their focus back to this period in order to generate images of their birth that serve their interests (Dagenais 2000:431–3). In a similar way, though with obverse goals, some contemporary historians and critics have studied the Middle Ages with the intention of exposing them as the birthplace of their concepts of empire—recasting, resetting and remodelling them as a time that did not merely lay the foundations for simple global dominance, but for global dominance predicated on abuse and exploitation. Though critical studies that attempt to find the origins of imperial practices in the Middle Ages can be seen as attempts at historical ‘decolonization’ or reclamation, these efforts often utilize the same techniques as the initial acts of historical ‘colonization’. In order to craft teleological histories of oppression, this kind of structural approach to persecution ‘traces the pedigree of stereotypes in order to establish the existence of a ‘‘discourse’’ about the ‘‘other’’ and fix its origins. It treats intolerance entirely as a problem of the migratory history of ideas, ignoring social, economic, political, or cultural variables’ (Nirenburg 1996: 4). Like imperial manipulations of the past, in these studies events are reformulated and particularities overlooked in favour of constructing smooth chronologies. Any application of postcolonial discourse theory on the ‘other’ generated from a reading of nineteenth-century texts to Middle Age texts is bound to elide the unique composition of a historical moment, ignoring the social, economic, political and cultural specificities of an era or locale in order to craft a teleology of persecution that glosses over context and complications in favour of coherence. The articles ‘The docile image: the Moor as a figure of force, subservience, and nobility in the Poema de mio Cid’ (1984) and ‘The Moor in the text: metaphor emblem and silence’ (1985) by Israel Burshatin are examples of this type of historicism. Both articles deal with the representation of Moors in El poema de mio Cid, and though Burshatin’s arguments in each are quite compelling, they are reductive, and fail to account for the unique portrayals of Moors in the text in an attemptto position it as an ideological precursor to later xenophobic Spanish discourse and eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury Orientalist thought. Burshatin fails to appreciate the range of representations of Moors
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in favour of advocating a binary representation that is particularly damaging in its assessment of the role of the Moor Abengalbon. Burshatin claims that El poema de mio Cid presents a dichotomous representation of Moors as either dehumanized spoils of war or Orientalized projections of the Cid’s hegemony. Even the most cursory reading of the poem reveals the material preoccupation of its characters: the rise of the Cid and his men through an accumulation of wealth and renown is the prime focus of the text. In the wake of every victory the Cid and his vassal Minaya count and distribute the wealth obtained from their defeated foes; the poem’s descriptions of the spoils of war often exceed the descriptions of the battles through which they have been gained. It is from this seeming fixation on material goods won from dispatched, often Muslim, adversaries that Burshatin constructs the first pillar of his argument. He avers that the act of counting the booty won as a result of every Moorish defeat serves to negate the Moor as a fighter and challenger, separating him from his property and portraying him as an object, like his tents and other possessions, under total Christian dominance (Burshatin 1984: 274). The Moor is removed and dissociated from his possessions with such regularity that he eventually becomes a metonym for wealth (Burshatin 1985: 101). To Burshatin, the individual Muslim challenger’s threat and subjectivity are wholly negated, and his primary function in the poem is that of a stand-in for gold, or a representative of potential profit. Burshatin illustrates this point by showcasing the Cid’s translation of a horde of invading Moors into a metaphor for Moorish service and gain in ll. 1644–50 of the poem (1985: 100). According to Burshatin, this reworking of the teichoskopia topos (1) ‘turns an image of Moorish force into a projection of [the Cid’s] own overwhelming presence. Moorish weapons, tents, horses exist in the poem only to be detached from armies whose defeat is episodic and invariable’ (101). Burshatin claims that, in addition to being metonyms for booty, Moors in the poem are fancifully portrayed as reassuring and Orientalized projections of the Cid’s sway over reconquered lands (100). To expand on this point, Burshatin directs attention to the Cid’s capture and abandonment of the city of Alcocer. Shortly after subduing the city’s defenders and establishing himself within its walls, the Cid decides not to enslave the Moorish inhabitants because ‘los moros e las moras vender non los podremos, que
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los descabecemos nada non ganaremos’ (ll. 619–20) [‘we shall be unable to sell the Moors, we would gain nothing by beheading them’]. (2) Then when he needs to defend the city against an attack, the Cid expels the Moors from its walls because they cannot be trusted (ll. 679–80). Finally, in spite of all of this ill-treatment, the Moors of Alcocer weep when the Cid abandons them to continue his campaign (ll. 851–6). Burshatin claims that these Moors are transformed, no longer seen as potential traitors or items to be disposed of at the Cid’s whim; the Moors become sentimental loving followers who weep at the departure of their conqueror, subordinates to the hero who reflects his control over them (1984: 272). Burshatin argues that the Cid’s Moorish vassal, Abengalbon, is analogous to the people of Alcocer, merely a sentimental character who reinforces the Cid’s power and influence. Like the inhabitants of Alcocer, Abengalbon comes from a city that has fallen under the Cid’s sway. Though a conflict is never explicitly detailed in the text, Burshatin locates in l. 867 the moment when Molina, Abengalbon’s home, has a tribute imposed upon it. He claims that Abengalbon is an example of the same alchemical process that produced the sobbing Moors of Alcocer, that is, that he was originally a metonymic enemy who, after a conflict, becomes nothing more than a sentimental representation of the Cid’s power over Moorish territory (1985: 275). Burshatin asserts the poem shows that Abengalbon, though he is ostensibly honourable, is not a true noble like his lord. The trappings of his nobility are evident as only trappings in his declaration to the Infantes de Carrion that:
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Burshatin’s analysis of the role of Moors in El poema de mio Cid is an application of Edward Said’s Orientalism to a medieval text. Both articles draw liberally on Said’s concept of the Orientalist’s vision. Explained by Said as a means of organizing the panorama of the Orient into a set of reductive categories, this vision, or view ‘from above’ is assumed to be a better portrayal of the Orient than that which the Orient itself can provide (Said 2003: 239). Because of the supposed authority of the Orientalist’s viewpoint, ‘any vision of the Orient comes to rely for its coherence and force on the person, institution, or discourse whose property it is’ (239). Burshatin’s critique of the teichoskopia in the poem figures the Cid as an Orientalist reducing and conscribing the ‘Orient’, represented by the invading Moors, through a discursive act. Further, Burshatin clearly sees the relationship of the Cid with the Moors as a microcosm of the relationship between the Occident and Orient, described by Said as a ‘relationship of power, of domination, of varying degrees of complex hegemony’ (5). These ideas are implicit in Burshatin’s concept of two portrayals, as either Oriental ‘others’ or as potential booty, of Moors in the poem. In his analysis Burshatin attempts to position El poema de mio Cid as an antecedent to later European Orientalist discourse, stating in ‘The Moor in the text’ that the metonymic reduction of the Moor in the teichoskopia is a key moment in shaping Spanish Orientalist tradition (Burshatin 1985: 102).
If I did not restrain myself because of My Cid of Vivar, such a thing I would do to you that news of it would echo throughout the world, then I would take back to the loyal Battler his daughters. You would never enter Carrion again! ll. 2677 80
Regardless of Burshatin’s attempts to prove otherwise, Said’s theories in Orientalism are not applicable to medieval texts. Despite Said’s claim that Orientalist concepts of East and West ‘had been years, even centuries in the making’, in his introduction to Orientalism he brackets off the purveyors of Orientalist discourse, claiming that Orientalist practice is mainly the domain of England and France, a tradition that roughly begins in the eighteenth century and continues on to the present day, a product of ‘European-Atlantic power over the Orient’ (Said 2003: 1–3; 6).
Abengalbon is restrained by his fealty, his true desires manipulated by his relationship with the Cid. Because of this he is always ‘Moorish’, just another metonymic item to be detailed in Minaya’s booty lists, a conceit whose possibilities are defined and circumscribed by the Cid (Burshatin 1984: 276–7).
It is questionable how Said can cordon off his analysis to a small section of Europe at a particular moment in time yet still make the connections to antiquity noted by Gilbert. Though Said’s temporal situation of Orientalist discourse has often been criticized (Moore-Gilbert et al. 1997: 25), in this case the seeming contradiction of referring to
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ancient Greece in his explicitly limited study is easily overcome. As noted by Denys Hay, Greeks distinguished between Asians and themselves, associating ideas of splendour and vulgarity with the East, but, as Hay goes on to mention, the Greeks also distinguished themselves as separate from, and superior to, western Europeans (Hay 1957: 3; 5). Orientalist discourse is predicated on the notion of European superiority, a notion that cannot exist without a concept of Europe as a cohesive unit. Perhaps ideas of the East as a culturally foreign land date back to Homer, but the formal practices that Said dubs ‘Orientalism’ do not. In addition, the medieval style of colonization represented in the poem is not wholly equatable with modern colonialism. Although European expansion during the Middle Ages was similar to modern expansion, it possessed its own structural features. According to Robert Bartlett, medieval colonizers were not engaged in the creation of a pattern of regional subordination. What they were doing was reproducing units similar to the ones in their homelands. The towns, churches and estates that they established simply replicated the social framework they knew from back home. The net result of this colonialism was not the creation of ‘colonies’ [ . . . ] the formu lation ‘core periphery’ is not entirely fortunate [ . . . ] as a tool to describe the expansionism of the High Middle Ages. (Bartlett 1994: 306)
As noted by Benedict Anderson, colonial racism and oppression was supported by an idea of the superiority of the metropolitan centres to their overseas possessions (Anderson 1991: 150). Clearly these ideas of superiority are incommensurable with a colonial system that was not engaged in ‘regional subordination’. Because of this, Said’s theory, or any theory built on a conception of how the European ‘centre’ regarded its ‘margins’, cannot capture the unique nature of medieval colonialism or discourse. The difference between the colonization depicted in El poema de mio Cid and modern imperial colonization is compounded when the unique nature of the medieval ‘Spain’ that the poem represents is taken into account. Because of the constant cultural contact and exchange between Muslims and Christians in thirteenth- to fifteenth-century Iberia, the discourse of the era is of a different nature from that of early-modern colonialists in the East. The poem predates concepts of race buttressed by science and law; at this time
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‘Christian’ and ‘Muslim’ were considered permeable religious affiliations, not strictly divided races believed to possess distinct characteristics. This is evidenced in Alfonso X’s law code, Las Siete Partidas, which details the ways in which a Muslim can become a Christian and vice versa, and calls for distinguishing dress to identify different groups (Alfonso X 1992: 418; 421; 423). The period was characterized by cultural syncretism that is evident in artefacts such as bilingual tombstones, legal documents and other printed texts, architecture, games, song structures and artwork that showcase a deep level of interaction (Miller 2000: 418). Even as Christians advanced in ‘reconquest’, their newly conquered territories often had no clear geographical boundaries separating them from Muslim land. Borders were often accidentally crossed by both groups with no sanctions levelled against trespassers (MacKay 1977: 199), and as Christians and Muslims became increasingly separated, political alliances often overrode supposed dividing lines (Menocal 2000: 5). This is not to say that Spain was a site of an idyllic convivencia of peaceful interaction and mutual respect. Eruptions of violence along the frontier and within cities characterized the years of Muslim presence in Spain (MacKay 1995: 228). In addition, ideas that would be important in later colonial ages can be detected in the cultural products of the time. In the same law code mentioned above, notions of the corruption caused by intermarriage between groups indicate that one of the primary concepts of racism, that of purity of blood, was in a prenatal stage (Alfonso X 1992: 420). Despite the fact that these emerging ideas were present to a degree, to view all interactions in the light of them, and thereby read the texts of such a singular time and place in history as perpetuating a binary discourse is to overestimate their influence. Although El poema de mio Cid can be manipulated to uphold an Orientalist reading, it is a reading that ignores the temporality of the work and attempts to override the social, economic, political and cultural singularity of the time it represents in order to fit a modern matrix. Unlike the idea advocated by Burshatin, there is no Manichaean, either/ or portrayal of Moors in the text. There are a variety of types. Muslims are portrayed as the fearful, yet cunning inhabitants of Ateca, Terrer and Calatayud who persuade Tamin, the king of Valencia, to come to their aid and attack the Cid by manipulating his desire to maintain his empire (ll. 624–32). Tamin, far from an Orientalized
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projection of the Cid’s power, plots to capture the hero in an attempt to have full vengeance for the Cid’s challenge to his authority, and is never brought over to the Cid’s side or subjected to his dominance. Muslims are not a cohesive group: they have alliances, and their rulers have different lands under their control, evidenced by the flight of King Fariz and King Galve after their failed attempt to recapture Alcocer. King Fariz is able to shelter in Terrer but Galve is denied entrance (l. 774), highlighting the fact that Muslims are not one amorphous undifferentiated mass in the poem but distinct groups, with separate rulers who have different areas under their control. There are even Moors who fight alongside the Count of Barcelona and his Christian knights (l. 968). The Moors themselves allude to differences amongst them, the inhabitants of Alcocer falling prey to the Cid’s trap because of the fear that the men of Terrer will get to his supposedly abandoned camp before they do (l. 585). African Moors are distinguished by their position ‘de alent partes del mar’ (l. 1620) [‘beyond the sea’], and use of drums in battle (ll. 1660; 2345), a martial strategy that is unfamiliar to and unused by Iberian Moors (l. 2346). Just like the Cid’s own group, the Moors in the poem are a diverse cast of characters; although there are many instances in the text where they are referred to simply as ‘moros’ or ‘moras’, it is in the portrayal of the named individuals that the diversity and plurality of the group is most evident. There is no single response to defeat that characterizes all Moors in the poem or exemplifies their symbolic relationship with the Cid. This lack of one overarching understanding of the ‘other’ further highlights the role of Moors in early medieval Spain. Moors fought both against and alongside Christians. Even under Christian rule they were more than colonial subjects of exploitation; they worked with Christians as artisans, philosophers, converts and royal guards. Unlike later French, British and even Spanish colonies, in medieval Spain no group saw itself as clearly superior in culture, intellect and physiology to its co-inhabitants. Burshatin’s study does help to illuminate some of the ways in which the Cid’s hegemony is portrayed in the poem. His analysis of the metonymic reduction of invading Moors to potential wealth does illustrate the poem’s equation of conflict to gain, but in an effort to apply the concept of Orientalism Burshatin limits his survey and focuses only on the Moors, ignoring the fact that all characters in the poem are equated to potential gain for
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the Cid. From the Cid’s deception of the Jewish moneylenders Raquel and Vidas to his betrothal of his daughters to the princes of Navarre and Aragon, the hero uses everyone he comes into contact with as a means of increasing his wealth or prestige. Moors in the poem are no more commodified than any other characters. Further, this equation of individuals with gain is not solely the Cid’s practice. All of the characters in the poem are engaged in a complex network, every association possessing potential material benefit. Burshatin notices this interdependence but fails to appreciate it, seeing the poem’s economy as feeding only on ‘beaten Moors’ (Burshatin 1995: 103), when in actuality these monetary connections extend in all directions, the feudal society represented in the poem relying on a ‘constant circulation of goods’ (Harney 1993: 86). Alfonso accepts the Cid back into his fold primarily because of the Cid’s tireless dispatch of tribute to him (ll. 1856–17). The Cid sells Castejon to Moors (l. 520). The men who join up with the Cid seek him out because they expect to become wealthy (l. 1197). The Cid gives gifts to the people of Alcocer (l. 802). The Infantes plot against Abengalbon to take his riches (l. 2663). The examples are plentiful, but the most important point is that monetary flow is not upwards from opposing, downtrodden Moors to Christians, but through a complex network. Taking all of the above into account, Burshatin’s understanding of the role of the Moor Abengalbon appears to be an inaccurate formulation. To say that the character is an Orientalized celebration of the Cid’s hegemony is to force a text that shows a plurality of types to become a text that advocates a binary. As shown by Michael Harney, the poem portrays a fictive kin-group with links ‘analogous to real kin ties’. Abengalbon, like Minaya and even the Cid, is a part of this kin group, a vassal, an amigo de paz, a member of a cohesive unit that thrives on ‘reciprocal generosity’ (Harney 1993: 67–9; 72). Rather than mark Abengalbon as subordinate and irrevocably different, the poem shows many similarities between the character and other members of his kin-group. As noted by Colin Smith, the Cid’s success is due to his capacity for loyalty, justice and charity, all qualities that Abengalbon and the other vassals also exhibit. Smith claims that the poem ‘emphasises the Cid’s mesura, which is in part prudence, good sense, tact and considerateness in dealing with others as well as a gravitas in bearing and speech’ (Smith 1972: lxvii; lxix).
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Rather than showcasing the ill-fit of his noble trappings, ll. 2677–80 display Abengalbon’s ties to the other members of the Cid’s group through his exhibition of mesura. Despite his natural impulse, his nobility causes him to restrain his anger in order not to upset the Cid’s affairs. Burshatin’s criticism of this act which, as he notes, is not punished or criticized in the text, seems to stem from a reconsideration of the action in the light of its consequences. He claims that an attack by Abengalbon would have been the ‘authentically heroic course of action’ (Burshatin 1984: 277), but of course such an action would have distanced him from the Cid, and served as evidence of some unrestrainable Moorish predilection for violence, supporting a binary. The episode also can be paralleled with the Cid’s own restraint of his natural impulse in order to comply with his lord when he assents to Alfonso’s desire to marry his daughters to the Infantes (l. 1940). Abengalbon is not a Moor with his spirit broken, but another loyal vassal like Minaya and others. When given a task by his lord his words of acquiescence even mirror Minaya’s (ll. 1487; 1447), demonstrating their equivalent bearing and roles in the Cid’s group. Though the customs of Abengalbon mark him as a Moor (l. 1519), this distinction does little to reduce his valour in the poet’s eyes or the Cid’s. Abengalbon, like the Cid, is a paragon of restraint and noble bearing whose prime function in the story is to contrast with the impulsive and quickly angered Infantes de Carrion. Abengalbon says of the Cid:
... such is his prestige even if we did not love him we could not harm him, in peace or in war he will have what is ours. (ll. 1523 6)
Rather than reflecting the nascent hegemony of the Cid over all Moors and their subordinate role as his property, this statement forecasts the Cid’s nascent hegemony over everyone. The words of l. 1526 are applicable to all who attempt to hinder not only his ascension but that of his entire kingroup; from Alfonso, to the Count of Barcelona, to the lion that escapes into his castle as he sleeps. The primary opposition in the poem is not docile Moors versus virile Christians, but the Cid’s group versus any that oppose them (Harney 1993: 169). The Moorish identity is present, but ultimately the only meaningful distinction
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between the characters is whether or not they accept the inevitability of the Cid’s rise. As noted by Thomas F. Glick, Muslims were never assimilated, but merely integrated into medieval Christian Spanish society (Glick 1992: 4). Because of this their distinction as separate, distinct, even ‘other’, will always be evident in the texts of this age to some extent. Nevertheless, any attempt to import postcolonial discourse theory to understand these representations of alterity inevitably glosses over the major differences between medieval and modern colonization, as well as the unique social, economic, political and cultural composition of medieval Iberia. Though Burshatin’s articles are almost twenty years old, the colonization of medieval Spain by postcolonial theory has continued. Though they are far from rampant, critical considerations of this time period that utilize imperial discourse theories, such as David Hanlon’s application of Homi Bhabha’s theory of race to a reading of medieval Spanish texts (Hanlon 2000), and Jan Gilbert’s use of Orientalism in a study of Spanish frontier ballads (Gilbert 2003), still occur. (3) According to Catherine Belsey ‘we misread fiction if we misread the practices of the period’ in which it was composed (Belsey 2000: 108). Studies of medieval texts, or in fact any texts, that import theories constructed from close readings of the products of particular temporal and physical localities are bound to ‘misread the practices’ of a period, in favour of creating linkages between the period of which the theory is the product and the one to which it is applied. It is often tempting to see antecedents of current trends in the past; but synchronic, rather than diachronic readings, that analyse texts in historical and social context, rather than as members of long discursive traditions, are more useful in illuminating the roles of texts in, and their relation to, the societies they represent. It is necessary to attempt to ground theory in accounts of the practical consciousness of the time, rather than import the consciousness of the present in order to facilitate the construction of smooth teleologies (Giddens 1987: 173). In his introduction to the 2003 edition of Orientalism, Said claims it is the intellectual’s responsibility to ‘complicate and/or dismantle the reductive formulae and the abstract but potent kind of thought that leads the mind away from concrete human history’ by providing ‘alternative models to the reductively simplifying and confining ones, based on mutual hostility’ (Said 2003:
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xvii, xviii). Said dedicated his life and his work to challenging reductive discourse. Rather than viewing his theory, and those of other postcolonial theorists, as a means to showcase the existence of a subjugating European empire that stretches through time, this work is better used as an example of the ways in which simplifying discourse can be illuminated and challenged. Though critiques of racism and exploitation are necessary in liberating peoples and nations, if their end result is simply a rearticulation of ‘us against them’ reversing the centre and margins and reinforcing the distinct nature of empires and natives, they achieve nothing, and are ultimately without value. Source: Malachi McIntosh, ‘‘The Moor in the Text: Modern Colonialism in Medieval Christian Spain,’’ in Journal of Romance Studies, Vol. 6, No. 3, Winter 2006, pp. 61 70.
Joseph J. Duggan In the following excerpt, Duggan describes the action in this epic and discusses differences between it and other romance epics. He concludes that heroes such as the Cid, though they possess less than ideal lineage, attain nobility and legitimacy through their deeds. The Chanson de Roland and the Cantar de mio Cid are often compared, but usually for the wrong reasons. The Spanish poem has a documentary quality about it, and the single poetic version which has survived the Middle Ages, in a manuscript identified as the product of one Per Abbat, a scribe, was composed within a hundred and eight years of the hero’s death. The Cid is thus much closer in narrative type to, say, Garin le Loherain or to the Canso d’Antiocha than it is to the Roland, which in its earliest extant form is at least three hundred years removed from the historical events it reflects and which is marked by notable geographical and temporal distortions. What justifies considering these two poems together is that they both incorporate myths looking back to a foundation, the Cid for the Spanish kingdom born of the union of Leon and Castile, and the Roland for the Carolingian Empire. The relationship between literature and history underlies notions of the epic to a greater extent than it does conceptions of other genres. During the last hundred and fifty years certain models of that relationship have been dominant. For the Romantic critics, the people spoke by and large as if with one voice, and the role of individual poet-craftsmen who gave form to that voice was
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EVEN THE MOST CURSORY RECITAL OF THE POEM’S THEMES CONFIRMS THAT ECONOMIC INTERESTS DOMINATE.’’
usually passed over. More than any other type of poetry, the epic embodied the people’s sentiments, preserving the memory of heroes to whose model it had looked in the past for leadership in life and an exemplary way to die. Because of constant rivalry between modern France and Germany, two powers which were at least theoretically united in Charlemagne’s empire, the question of whether the French populace was more closely linked to a Germanic or to a Roman ancestry preoccupied scholars who were concerned with the origins of the French epic. Even those who were cognizant of the Franco-Prussian War’s distorting effects on French intellectual life may register surprise at the formulation found in the second edition of Le´on Gautier’s Les Epope´es franc¸aises: the French epic is surely of Germanic origin, Gautier tells us, because its leading female characters are utterly without shame and their actions must thus be based on Germanic models of womanhood. The myth of origins itself—and here I use ‘‘myth’’ in the pejorative and popular sense of a belief which is not backed up by verifiable facts—is a historical concept conditioned by political and intellectual categories which are now outmoded. It is no secret that questions formerly asked about origins are now more often framed in terms of manifestation or development. But all too often the issues posed by the giants of nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century scholarship—Gautier, Gaston Paris, Joseph Be´dier, Ramo´n Mene´ndez Pidal, and others—are still being discussed in the same terminology which they bequeathed to us. In particular the perception of history as a sequence of striking events brought about by the potentates of this earth has survived largely intact in the work of many literary scholars concerned with the relationship between epic and history in western Romania. In the framework of their interpretations, great personages manipulate the epic to support their own drive for hegemony. Be´dier’s idea that the French epics were first created in the eleventh century through a collaboration
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between clerics and poets seeking to promote the fame of certain shrines situated along the great pilgrimage routes derives from a related view of history in that it posits that the motivation and working habits of medieval poets did not differ from those of later and better documented authors: witness Be´dier’s pronouncement that a masterpiece begins and ends with its author, his comparison of the Roland with Racine’s Iphige´nie, and his citation ` of La Bruyere’s statement that making a book is no less a feat of craftsmanship than making a clock. But eleventh- and twelfth-century poets could not have worked in the same ways as those of the seventeenth, because the processes of poetic creation are a function of social, economic, and intellectual circumstances which vary from period to period and from one type of society to another. The manner in which a poet creates is conditioned above all by what French historians of the Annales school call mentalite´s, perceptual categories which shape the way in which phenomena are viewed. Substantial though they be, differences in educational background and in political and social milieu are less important than diversity in mental framework, a basic and all-pervasive variance that prevents us from reconstructing adequately the world view of medieval poets. In studies on the Cid, a similar reliance on the concept of history as a sequence of noteworthy occurrences prevailed. While Mene´ndez Pidal appreciated the import of political events and the effects of Muslim pressure on the kingdoms of northern Spain, he gave less attention in La Espan˜a del Cid to social and economic forces; although he took great pains to establish the geography of the epic Cid’s progress from Burgos to Valencia, he seldom referred to medieval conceptions of time and space which contribute to the skewing of geographical reality. Pidal’s achievements in filling in the backdrop against which the historical Cid acted are undeniable, and even his detractors make use of the data he collected. His discussion of the Chanson de Roland’s manuscripts is a masterful treatment of how medieval texts recorded from oral tradition differ radically from what we in the twentieth century normally mean when we speak of a text, and as such it contributes in a major way precisely to that history of mentalities which is so regretfully lacking in the Espan˜a del Cid. In reading the Cantar de mio Cid with greater attention to its social aspects and to the relationship between political and economic history, I believe one can approach with greater hope of success a realization of the poem’s significance.
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Dealings between men as they are represented in the Cid cannot all be subsumed under the terms ‘‘vasselage’’ or ‘‘feudalism.’’ Social relationships are marked by an economic give and take which mirrors a particular state of society best qualified as a ‘‘gift economy’’ in which exchanges of money and goods take place continually, but not under the conditions which one normally calls ‘‘economic’’ in the modern sense. The historian Georges Duby has drawn upon ideas developed by the socioanthropologist Marcel Mauss to sketch out a description of exchanges in the early and high Middle Ages which can illuminate the meaning of giftgiving and other processes of the eleventh- and twelfth-century economy as they are reflected in the Cantar de mio Cid. Conquests and the payment of various types of feudal dues and rents supplied political leaders and fighting men of that period with an abundance of wealth beyond what was needed for their sustenance. The economic workings of society required that such wealth be circulated to others, with the result that generosity in its distribution was not merely an option open to the powerful, but an uncodified obligation. Recipients of seignorial largess were not all of a lower rank then benefactors: gifts from inferior to superior were also immensely important. At the top of the social pyramid the king was forced to have at his disposal sources of wealth which he could dole out to those who came to test his liberality, and while conquest and plunder provided much of this wealth, so did the offerings of lesser men. The relationships whose existence was fueled by these gifts were of a mutually beneficial nature. Giftgiving was probably never considered to be disinterested. Between military men and their followers, of course, service was commonly exchanged for largess; tributes guaranteed against attacks; even stipends and legacies made in favor of the Church brought a return, in the form of divine favor. The economic system sustained by this movement of commodities and coin in many cases had no relation to mercantile trade, but nevertheless effected a flow of goods which maintained the poor, supported significant numbers of able-bodied if occasionally idle monks, provided motivation for the warrior class, and acted in general as a cementing element in the social edifice. While the gift economy dominated in the early Middle Ages, its main traits were still present in the period 1050 to 1207, that is during the Cid’s career and the time in which the poem in all probability took shape in something close to the form in which we have it. More than one observer
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has called the Cid a bourgeois hero, the poem a bourgeois epic. Such a formulation could only be based upon the conviction that obsession with wealth is a monopoly of the city-dwelling, mercantile class; as Duby has shown, this is manifestly untrue for the eleventh and twelfth centuries. No hero in all of epic literature is as concerned with money and possessions of various kinds as is the Cid, but his insistence on the prerogatives of nobility is unmistakable. Even the most cursory recital of the poem’s themes confirms that economic interests dominate the Cantar de mio Cid to an extent unmatched in the Romance epic, and yet the outcome of the social process set in motion by the hero’s acquisition of wealth is attainment of the very highest level of the aristocracy. In tracing the motivations for actions in the Cid, one is forced to consult the prose version found in the Cronica de Veinte Reyes, since the poetic text as found in Per Abbat’s manuscript lacks a beginning. The chronicle tells us that King Alfonso of Leon and Castile believed the accusations of evil counsellors to the effect that his vassal Rodrigo Diaz of Vivar was withholding from him tribute that was supposed to have been delivered subsequent to a mission to Seville and Cordova. While he was in Seville, Rodrigo had defended Alfonso’s tributary against an attack from Cordova, and had earned by his prowess and magnanimity the honorific ‘‘Cid Campeador.’’ Whatever the historical Alfonso’s motive for exiling the Cid, the poet responsible for the Per Abbat text assumes that popular opinion lent credence to the accusation that the hero had profited at his lord’s expense. After receiving six hundred marks from the Jewish money-lenders Rachel and Vidas in exchange for two chests which supposedly contain money but are actually full of sand, the Cid is financed and ready to face his exile which he will begin with a series of raids. That an epic poem should devote any attention at all to how a military campaign is funded is extraordinary, let alone that negotiations should occupy a major scene. Why is the poem anomalous in this respect? In placing the Cid in the context of medieval Romance epic, one must refer primarily to the one hundred or so French works which are extant, a preponderance of evidence against which the three fragmentary Spanish poems and the half-dozen Provenc¸al titles represent comparatively little. Allowance should be made, first of all, for differing social conditions. Undoubtedly the landed estate, the classic base for feudalism of
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the French variety, played a lesser role in Spain than it did north of the Pyrenees. In addition, whatever benefit might accrue from possession of a territorial foothold was denied to the Cid in his exile. A more important factor is also at work, deriving both from the particular circumstances of peninsular history and from the epic’s role as a genre which holds up models for emulation. In the expanding world of northern Spanish Christendom, in which land was available for capture by force from the Arabs and in which one of the chief political problems was how to motivate fighting men to leave familiar surroundings so as to take advantage of the military inadequacies of weak and fragmented Muslim principalities, the Cantar de mio Cid furnishes the exemplary model of a noble of relatively low rank rising to the highest level of the social hierarchy without having at his disposal the power base of the landed estate. The poem is both an entertaining tale of military prowess and an economic and social incentive for ambitious Castilian knights of low rank and narrow means. The acquisition of booty, its proper distribution among the knights and soldiers, the appraisal of precious objects, and the use to which wealth is put join together to form one of the poem’s major thematic complexes. The poetic Cid achieves his reintegration into the social fabric directly through economic power, and succeeds in proportion to his personal enrichment, beginning with the unhistorical raid on Castejo´n. Time and again, the type and quantity of booty are enumerated: coined money, shields, tents, clothing, slaves, camels, horses, beasts of burden, and other livestock. At times the amounts are stated to be beyond reckoning, but this type of comment is only a figure of speech since the poet also depicts the tallying up of loot by the quin˜oneros, officials whose job it was to divide and count the spoils. Repeatedly and as early as the first major engagement the fighting men are termed ricos. As lord, the Cid receives a fifth of all plunder. The relative worth of objects is of less interest than what their possession connotes in social terms. In the Cid, wealth and fame are closely linked, from the hero’s first proclamation inviting others to join him in his exile, which frankly appeals to the desire for rritad, through the marriage of his daughters Elvira and Sol with the heirs of the house of Carrio´n, to the climax at the court scene in Toledo where the Cid is dressed in his most luxurious finery. Throughout the poem he displays his wealth
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by bestowing gifts on those who surround him, although he is never seen receiving them. The outstanding examples of interested gift-giving are the three embassies which carry extravagant offerings to King Alfonso. In return the Cid receives first the lifting of the king’s official displeasure, then that his wife and daughters be allowed to join him in Valencia, and finally full pardon and, without his having requested it, his daughters’ marriage to the heirs of Carrio´n. The link between wealth and honor is nowhere more apparent than in the hero’s dealings with the heirs. The villainous motives of this pair are epitomized when they accept booty from the victory over King Bu´car in spite of having acted in a cowardly fashion on the battlefield. The five thousand marks that come to them on this occasion lead them to the mistaken belief that they are now rich enough to aspire to marriage with the daughters of kings and emperors. Whereas for the Cid courage brings material benefits in the form of possessions which can then be exchanged for the prerogatives of birth and can even, in a sense which I will discuss shortly, compensate for the inadequacies associated with doubtful lineage, for the heirs of Carrio´n high birth conveys an intrinsic value which makes it unnecessary for them to put themselves to the test of battle. As they leave Valencia supposedly to escort their wives to Carrio´n, the Cid gives them more wealth in the form of a bridegift: three thousand marks and the precious swords Colada and Tizo´n. That this contrast is essential rather than coincidental is seen in the aftermath of the incident at Corpes in which the brothers beat the Cid’s daughters and leave them for dead. Surprisingly for the modern reader, the hero places loss of the wealth he has distributed to the heirs of Carrio´n on the same level as his daughters’ dishonor: ‘‘Mios averes se me an levado que sobejanos son, / esso me puede pesar con la otra desonor.’’ This preoccupation with worldly goods as a symbol of intrinsic worth continues during the court scene at Toledo. The Cid makes three legal points against the heirs of Carrio´n, of which the first two concern possessions: that they return the two swords, and that they give back the bride-gift of three thousand marks. The third point is a moral accusation, but it is framed in an economic metaphor: the brothers are worth less, since they struck their own wives. The key term menosvaler sums up emblematically the relationship between wealth and honor, economic and moral ‘‘worth.’’
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The poem ends in a curiously unhistorical fashion. The Cid’s daughters will become queens of two kingdoms, according to the poet, who returns to this theme just before he refers to the Cid’s death: Los primeros (casamientos) fueron grandes mas aquestos son mijores; a mayor ondra las casa que lo que primero fue: !ved qual ondra crec¸e al que en buen ora nac¸io quando sen˜oras son sus fijas de Navarra e de Aragon! Oy los reyes d’Espan˜a sos parientes son.
The Cid’s historical daughters, Cristina and Marı´ a, married respectively Ramiro, lord of Monzo´n in Navarre, and Ramo´n Berenguer III, Count of Barcelona. Thus neither of his daughters became queen, and they did not marry the infantes of Navarre and Aragon, although confusion on these points is conceivable in a poet composing in the mid-twelfth century or later since the son of Cristina and Ramiro became King of Navarre in 1134 and Barcelona was united to Aragon in 1137. Questions of title are not generally obscure to contemporaries, so that it is likely the poem was composed in a form not too far from the one in which we have these lines long enough after 1137 for people’s memories to have become clouded regarding the chronology. In any event it is more than surprising that a poet who knows the names of the Cid’s minor historical associates, such as Pero Vermu´dez, Mun˜o Gustioz, Martin Mun˜oz, Alvar Salvado´rez, and Diego Te´llez, should err on whether the hero’s daughters were queens, and of what political entities. His inaccuracy on these points, although partly justified by later historical developments, at the very least exaggerates the Cid’s rise to respectability among the very highest class of nobles. Why should a singer of the twelfth or early thirteenth century be so intent on depicting his hero’s meteoric ascent as to represent the Cid’s immediate progeny as queens at the risk that some members of the audience would recognize the error? The answer to this question provides an explanation for the poet’s concern with the acquisition of wealth, gift-giving, and other economic phenomena. Let us return to the court scene. There are two heirs of Carrio´n, each of whom is challenged to single combat by one of the Cid’s men, who will use the swords Colada and Tizo´n in their respective duels so that, fittingly, the two brothers will be tested by the very instruments which they received under the false pretense of marriage-alliance with
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the Cid. But unexpectedly a third duel is proposed, provoked by Asur Gonc¸a´lez, elder brother to the heirs of Carrio´n, who enters the palace and flings an apparently gratuitous insult at the Cid: ‘‘!Hya varones! ?Quien vio nunca tal mal? !Quien nos darie nuevas de mio C¸id el de Bivar! !Fuesse a Rio d’Ovirna los molinos picar e prender maquilas commo lo suele tar! ?Quil darie con los de Carrion a casar?’’
This curious intervention might at first seem to be only an attack on the hero’s position at the low end of the noble hierarchy, since as an infanzo´n he was entitled to collect feudal dues on the use of mills which came under his jurisdiction. But as Mene´ndez Pidal points out, mills were prized possessions of the seignorial class. Asur Gonc¸a´lez is probably not simply assimilating the Cid’s possession of a mill to the actual operations performed by the miller, for as rude as such a quip might be, it would hardly justify a challenge to mortal combat such as Mun˜o Gustioz subsequently proffers, nor is it equal in weight to the outrage of Corpes which will be avenged by the other two duels which are to be fought on the same occasion. The maquila was a portion of wheat given to the miller in return for his services, and the Cid as an infanzo´n would hardly be expected to receive recompense under that rubric, although he would take other types of payment from a miller working under his jurisdiction. Asur Gonc¸a´lez’s words convey a far greater affront, an innuendo about the Cid’s birth, suggesting that he is descended from a miller and thus entitled to a miller’s pay. Verse 3379, scornfully exhorting the Cid to go to his mill on the river Ubierna, the location of Vivar, and roughen the millstones, can only mean that for Asur Gonc¸a´lez the Cid is a miller. A person of such low rank would indeed be ill-advised to aspire to a marriage tie with the powerful combat family of the VaniGo´mez. An obscure legend, preserved primarily in the romancero, has it that the Cid was the illegitimate son of Diego Laı´ nez, and one version reports that his mother was a molinera. The agreement between this detail and Asur Gonc¸a´lez’s otherwise senseless insult can hardly be coincidental. Acceptance of the Cid’s daughters as queens of Aragon and Navarre would be convincing proof that his accomplishments transcended and annuled the disadvantages of his bastardy. Asur Gonc¸a´lez’s defeat at the hands of the Cid’s vassal shows that God approves of the hero’s deeds in spite of the fact that he was conceived out of wedlock, for the duel takes the form of an ordeal.
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The Cantar de mio Cid differs from the other extant Romance epics in its author’s obsession with the acquisition of wealth, then, not only on account of the differing social and political conditions of Reconquest Spain, but because, unlike most of the heroes whose legends are recounted in poems belonging to this genre, the Cid does not enter the struggle with his honor intact. The amassing of riches and their proper use allow him to rise to the dignity and rank which great nobles of unblemished descent, such as the heirs of Carrio´n, could claim by birth. He is a king by right of conquest, excelling in knightly virtues that might well have been called into doubt by his maternal ancestry. Seen in this light, the Cantar de mio Cid is the story of how courage and prowess are transmuted into economic power, and wealth into lineage, the highest in Spain. As such it is a message to the lesser nobles of Castile, because if the Cid, whose line of descent was in question and whose king exiled him from his land, could raise his kin to the level of royalty through his participation in the Reconquest, then other nobles of his class could legitimately aspire to the same heights of success in invading Arab-controlled lands which enjoyed, despite their political troubles, the most prosperous economy in medieval Europe at this time. The obscure allusion to Rodrigo of Vivar’s bastardy calls to mind a similarly fleeting reference in the Carolingian foundation myth as it is found in the Oxford manuscript of the Chanson de Roland. I refer, of course, to Charlemagne’s Sin. As with the Cid . . . , the question of Roland’s parentage is clouded. Neither the poet of the Oxford Chanson de Roland nor the one who composed the extant Cantar de mio Cid devotes more than a passing allusion to the issue of the respective hero’s birth; it is nonetheless intriguing that in each case the problem of illegitimacy surfaces. In societies such as these where kinship is a pervasive social bond, and in which a person is considered to be legally responsible for acts committed by his kinsmen—above all in a genre in which lineage, one of the two principal meanings of the term geste, is one of the most important determinants of character—illegitimacy, whether it results from royal incest or simply from a paternal liaison with a commoner, represents a most serious deficiency. Roland’s case differs from the Cid’s in obvious ways. Nevertheless I believe that as with the Cantar de mio Cid, the meaning of the Oxford Chanson de Roland in its social context is closely linked with the theme of the hero’s birth.
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While historians of the Romance epic, dominated by a concern for origins, formerly sought to isolate the historical kernel preserved in each work, a focussing of attention on how singers have distorted history and on the circumstances or purposes which have led them to do so will undoubtedly teach us more about the genre’s function in society. Modern political forces tend in sometimes subtle ways to appropriate for themselves the ‘‘tale of the tribe,’’ as Ezra Pound characterized epic. This deformation of the past is an interesting phenomenon in itself, and its study will enable us to compensate in part for a collective wish to see the past in certain ways. The philologist’s task is to appreciate medieval uses of epic legends, although at the same time he realizes that total awareness of them is unattainable. No one knew the Cid tradition as manifested in epic, chronicle, and romancero better than Mene´ndez Pidal, but he failed to see the meaning of a key element in the Cantar de mio Cid, one without which the poem’s ending is a puzzle. Be´dier was aware of the motif of Charlemagne’s Sin, but, oblivious to the Oxford poet’s admonition against ignoring it, he did not consider it to be an important theme. One cannot help thinking that these giants of scholarship were little inclined to pursue clues leading to revelations which might be considered unflattering for the foundation myths of their respective nations. Not that either one was consciously engaged in obfuscation. Rather in one instance the political and intellectual climate fostered by the Generation of ’98, and in the other a propensity to identify Roland’s Franks with the French, may have left no scope for the idea that the greatest of heroes were tainted by the circumstances of their birth or that the ‘‘national’’ epics, nos e´pope´es as both Gautier and Be´dier preemptively referred to them, could have such a theme among their key interpretive elements. The different versions of the Chanson de Roland have taken on various meanings for their singers and audiences. To the late eleventh-century noble French public, however, about to heed Urban II’s exhortation that it follow in the footsteps of the epic Charlemagne to recover the Holy Land from the Arabs, Roland is an exemplary hero because he was able to overcome the impediments of his birth. To Castilian singers whose lords had to resort to unique forms of land tenure in order to encourage repopulation of border territory vacated by the retreating Muslims, the Cid represented an ideal model, achieving for his descendants access to the highest level of society although he may himself have been a bastard. Both these heroes,
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deprived of the privileges of irreproachable ancestry, acquired legitimacy in the eyes of the epic public through their own actions. Source: Joseph J. Duggan, ‘‘Legitimation and the Hero’s Exemplary Function in the ‘Cantar de Mio Cid’ and the ‘Chanson de Roland,’’’ in Oral Traditional Literature: A Festschrift for Albert Bates Lord, edited by John Miles Foley, Slavica Publishers, 1981, pp. 217 34.
Ramo´n Mene´ndez Pidal In the following excerpt, Mene´ndez Pidal examines the similarities and differences between the historic Cid and the title character of the epic. He also comments on the historical and literary contributions of each figure. As an epic hero the Cid stands in a class by himself. History has little or nothing to say about the protagonists of the Greek, Germanic or French epics. From the ruins revealed by learned excavators we know that the Trojan War was an event that actually took place at Troy, so that the excavations confirm and illustrate the veracity of Homeric poetry. But we shall never know anything about Achilles, nor, for that matter, about Siegfried, whom we can only suspect to have been an historic personage, as Gu¨nther, the King of Burgundy, at whose Court Kriemhild’s husband loved and died, undoubtedly was. The historians of Charlemagne assure us that Roland, Count of Brittany, really existed; but beyond this fact all we know of him is his disastrous end. Those heroic lives will for ever remain purely in the region of poetry and intangible for the purpose of historical analysis. The Cid, however, is a hero of a very different type. From the height of his idealism he descends with a firm step on to the stage of history to face unflinchingly a greater danger than had ever beset him in life, that of having his history written by the very people on whom he had so often waged war and by modern scholars who as a rule show even less understanding than the enemies he humiliated. For the Cid, unlike the other heroes, did not belong to those early times when history still lagged far behind poetry. The broad stream of poetic creation along which Achilles, Siegfried and Roland glide, may be likened to a mysterious Nile whose sources have never been explored; whereas the epic river of the Cid may be traced to its earliest origins, to the very heights above their confluence, where poetry and history rise. Philological criticism enables us to explore primitive history and takes us back to the poetry of the hero’s
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of producing erudite works in prose; as historiography advances, the epopee loses its pristine vigour. FOR THE TRUTH IS THAT HISTORY AND POETRY, IF TAKEN TO MEAN DULY DOCUMENTED HISTORY AND PRIMITIVE POETRY, SHOW RARE AGREEMENT IN CHARACTERIZATION, IN SPITE OF THE FACT THAT ON NO OTHER EPIC HERO HAS THE LIGHT OF HISTORY SHONE MORE RELENTLESSLY.’’
own age, the works inspired either by his deeds or by a vivid recollection of them. This contemporary poetry, which has come down to us about the Spanish hero but not about the others, may help to complete our historical knowledge of the heroic character, just as, when it agrees with the records, that poetry has helped us to establish the facts of the hero’s life.
But in Spain, the scene of the last heroic age of the western world, that age coincided with the historic age, and epic poetry continued to be the vehicle for conveying the news of the day down to the time of the Cid despite the fact that history had already reached a fair stage of development. Thus, in view of the difference in time and circumstance separating the heroic age of Spain from that of other countries, it is not to be expected that the mind of the Campeador would work in unison with that of Beowulf. And so it is that we do not claim to have discovered in the Cid the heroic, but merely an heroic, character. Our main interest will lie in obtaining a close view of a hero, the last hero to cross the threshold from the heroic to the historic age.
Renan is utterly mistaken when, in docilely acknowledging the divorcement by Dozy of the poetic from the historic Cid, he considers that ‘‘no other hero has lost so much in passing from legend to history.’’ For the truth is that history and poetry, if taken to mean duly documented history and primitive poetry, show rare agreement in characterization, in spite of the fact that on no other epic hero has the light of history shone more relentlessly. Often, indeed, the character of the real Cid is found to be of greater poetical interest than that of the traditional hero. Legend achieved much that is of poetic value, but it left unworked many veins that appear in the rock of the hero’s real life in the rough, natural state in which the beauties of nature occur.
The most modern trait in the character of the hero, who lived during this period of transition, is his loyalty. His is not the loyalty of a vassal in the rude heroic ages to the lord for whom he fought; it is the loyalty of a vassal to a king who persisted in persecuting him, a virtue that none of the other persecuted heroes of epic poetry possessed. The Cid of reality, though exiled, remained true to his king; though grossly insulted by Alphonso, he bore with him and treated him with respect. According to law, he owed no fealty to the King, and yet his loyalty was unswerving. Though the King was openly hostile to his occupation of Valencia, he placed the city, to use his own phrase, ‘‘under the overlordship of my lord and king, Don Alphonso.’’ These words are recorded by the Arab historian and are echoed in the old Poem, where Alvar Han˜ez is sent by the Cid to offer the conquered city to the King in spite of his having obstinately refused to lift the ban of exile.
Much has been written about the ‘‘heroic age’’ and the society and culture of those barbaric and lawless times, when pride in personal glory and lust for wealth overruled all other feelings. Yet to my mind, the heroic age, in the widest sense of the term, is distinguished by one essential characteristic only, and that a literary one; it is the age in which history habitually takes on a poetic shape, the age in which an epic form of literature arises to supply the public want of information about events of general interest either of the time or the recent past. This epic form of history, of course, only appears in primitive times, before culture has reached the stage
This attitude would be incomprehensible if, as is possible, we were to assume that the motives of the Spanish hero were purely personal. True, all heroes, whether of Greek, Teutonic, or Romance poetry, act under the impulse of personal honour and glory; indeed, the personal motive is so strong that, in the French epic, notwithstanding the highly developed national spirit, the hero who rebels against the King when offended by him, is constantly glorified. But if, on the other hand, the Cid of poetry is on all occasions respectful towards his royal persecutor, it is because the longed-for pardon means reconciliation with ‘‘fair Castile,’’ which he puts before his personal
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pride. The King and his country, his native land, to him are one and the same thing. And so the Cid of history appears eager and, at times, over ready to be reconciled with Alphonso and at the same time distrusts Berenguer and is slow to accept his proffered friendship. The fact that, contrary to the custom established in the law and poetry of the time, neither the Cid of history nor the Cid of fiction makes war on his king but remains loyal to him, shows the extent to which the hero subordinated personal motives to love of country, thereby betraying a spirit practically unknown to the heroic types of older epic poems. This same patriotism also finds expression in his famous resolve to reconquer the whole of Spain and even, as the old poem maintains, lay Morocco under tribute to King Alphonso. The Cid, who refrains from retaliating against his king although authorized by mediæval law to do so, and who ignores the monarch’s insults at Ubeda, is equally anxious to avoid an encounter with the King of Aragon or Berenguer, to each of whom he makes friendly overtures before adopting an aggressive attitude. He grants generous terms to the defeated Valencians, in spite of their repeated infringements of the treaty of surrender; he returns a lawful prize taken from the Moorish messengers when on their way to Murcia; and finally, he refuses presents of doubtful origin when proffered by Ibn Jehhaf. The Cid of poetry, coming at a later time than the other epic heroes, also displays this moderation, which is the outstanding virtue of the chivalrous type that succeeded the heroic type of the earlier ages. But, in depicting him as constantly moderate, poetry diverges from fact. For when the real Cid’s patience was exhausted, his violence knew no bounds. When he realizes that loyal submission is all in vain, he devastates the lands of Alphonso’s favourite vassal; when repulsed by Berenguer, he sets the etiquette of the Court of Barcelona at naught; when the Valencians persist in siding with the Almoravides, he passes from the greatest clemency to the greatest severity. He was, indeed, ever apt to go to extremes. As soon as he had captured Berenguer, his attitude to him at once changed from rancour to the utmost generosity. Enigmatic and capricious, he loved to play with an adversary, as when he scorned the offer of the royal gardens at Valencia, only to seize them later at a most unexpected moment.
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The thirst for treasure which he shares with the heroes of barbaric times, has already been referred to; it forms a strange contrast to the generosity he showed on other occasions. The Cid, as a representative figure of his race, was tightly bound by atavistic ties of both ritualism and superstition. History and poetry agree that he was guided by omens. The birds of prey that crossed his path foretold to him the result of his exile, of the fording of a river, of his daughters’ journey. This superstitiousness was deeply engrained in men-at-arms, though it frequently gave rise to rebuke, such as that which Berenguer hurled at the Cid at Tevar. According to the Poem, the Cid was addicted to ritual. In a moment of great emotion, on his return from exile, he does homage to the King by biting the grass, which is a very ancient symbol of submission. To publish the grief he felt at his unjust banishment, he swore he would never again cut his beard, well knowing that thereby he would make both Moors and Christians talk. To go unshorn as a sign of grief was an old and common custom, but the Cid observed it so faithfully that he came to be called ‘‘Mio Cid, el de la barba grant.’’ The whole Court of Toledo was astonished to see him appear with his beard pleated, a well-known though rare sign of deep mourning; then, hardly has justice been done to him, when he unravels his beard and resumes his normal appearance. Not that he was ever a slave to tradition. He was an innovator in all he did, whether in combating the traditionalism of Leon, abandoning the tactics generally adopted by Spaniards and Burgundians, in order to overcome the Almoravides, in promoting the reform of the clergy, or in revolutionizing, as he actually did, heroic poetry. The Cid’s detractors paint him as a mere outlaw, a bandit who knew no honour; but both the Arab and the Latin historians agree with the early poets that his whole career was governed by his attitude to the law. Here again we find the Cid combining the characteristics of the two epochs, the heroic age and the chivalrous age that followed it. When the chivalrous ideal had been perfected and formulated, it was held to be the duty of a knight to defend the rights of the weak, with the result that a knowledge of legal matters became a knightly accomplishment. Chivalric literature, from its birth to its death, bears this out. Old Gonzalo Gustioz of Salas, in enumerating the attainments of his deceased son, speaks of him as ‘‘learned in the law and fond of judging,’’ and
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the last perfect knight, Don Quixote, also acts as a judge and shows that he possessed a thorough knowledge of the law. The Cid on several occasions gave evidence of this knightly accomplishment: when acting as counsel for the monastery of Carden˜a; as judge at Oviedo, where he interpreted Gothic law and inquired into the authenticity of a deed; and again when drawing subtle distinctions in the drafting of a fourfold form of oath. The Cid of poetry likewise pleaded his cause with skill and method before the court of Toledo. The Cid always applied the law, according to its loftiest conception. In his youth, as champion of Castile, he fought out the legal duel against Navarre, and at Santa Gadea he exacted the oath, no doubt in the same capacity. Later, when aggrieved by Alphonso, as an exile, he had two legal courses open to him, to make war on his sovereign or to seek reconciliation. He chose the second course throughout. Availing himself of the means afforded by mediæval law for regaining royal favour, he twice hastened to the aid of his king; on a third occasion, he attempted to clear himself by the ordeal of a legal oath. It is only when all these attempts at reconciliation have failed and he has been made to suffer fresh and more grievous wrongs, that he exercises his right to make war on the King’s lands; and, when this time comes, the heavy hand of the Campeador achieves what his moderation had steadfastly failed to do. But to call the Cid an enemy of his country, as Masdeu and Dozy call him, is simply absurd. Owing to this failure to recognize his two distinct lines of conduct, the Cid’s relations with the Moors have also been misunderstood. His attitude to the Spanish Moslems may be summed up in his own declaration: ‘‘If I act lawfully, God will leave me Valencia; but if with pride and injustice, I know He will take her away from me.’’ Even the usually malevolent Ibn Alcama admits that the Cid dealt very fairly with the Valencians. But when, in their anxiety to remain under Islam, the Moors of Spain called in the Africans, the Cid perforce took up a different stand: thenceforth the war could only end in the expulsion of the invader and the complete submission of the Spanish Moors. The contrast between these two lines of conduct is most pronounced during the Valencian revolution, when on the assassination of his prote´ge´ King Al-Kadir, the city was handed over to
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the Almoravides. The Cid launches forth on the siege of Valencia, his greatest military enterprise, as an act as much of justice as of policy, and he determines not to rest until he has punished the regicide and driven out the African intruders. On the expulsion of the Almoravides and the surrender of the city, he begins by treating the Valencians with benevolence; but, when he finds that they continue to intrigue with the Africans, he ceases to respect Moslem law and resorts to the mailed fist of the conqueror. His detractors attribute this change of conduct to mere arbitrariness, but the fact remains that it was based on political justice. Although poetic exaggeration clothes all heroes in the mantle of invincibility, it is surprising to find that, so far as the Cid is concerned, fact agrees with fiction. The fame that the Cid enjoyed amongst his contemporaries is expressed in the name of Campeador or ‘‘victorious,’’ given him by Moors and Christians alike; in the phrase ‘‘invictissimus princeps’’ used in the Valencian charter; and in the ‘‘invincibilis bellator’’ of the Historia Roderici, which adds that he ‘‘invariably triumphed.’’ Further, the Poema de la conquista de Almeria, composed in Latin some fifty years after his death, says of the hero: ‘‘of whom it is sung that no foe ever overcame him.’’ Ibn Bassam himself emphasizes the Cid’s extraordinary victories, typical instances of which were the combats at Tamarite, where he overcame odds of twelve to one, and at Zamora, where alone and unaided he defeated fifteen knights. But the exceptional superiority of the Campeador was never more patent than when he tackled the Almoravides as an entirely new and hitherto invincible military organization. He alone, at Cuarte and Bairen, was successful against the invaders, routing their armies and taking a great number of captives; he alone was able to conquer Valencia, Almenara and Murviedro in spite of their determined opposition. This contrast is in itself sufficient to bring out in full relief the military genius of the ever victorious Cid. At times the hero found himself in situations so desperate that to all others everything seemed lost, when of a sudden his keen vision would descry the hidden opportunity that led to success. In emergencies such as a surprise attack by night he would tremble with excitement and grind his teeth; whenever there was the prospect of a battle his heart would leap with joy (‘‘gaudenter expectavit’’).
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The poet is at one with the historian when he tells of the hero’s fierce glee on sighting the imposing array of the Almoravides: ‘‘Delight has come to me from overseas.’’ The Cid’s infallible tactics on occasions struck panic into his enemies. Latin and Arab historians relate how the host of Garcı´ a Ordon˜ez at Alberite, the mighty mehalla of the Almoravides at Almuzafes, and the knights of Ramon Berenguer the Great at Oropesa were all routed without daring even to face the Cid. The battle of Cuarte also suggests panic among the enemy. Legend seized upon this terror-striking ascendancy of the hero to suggest that no Saracen could meet the eye of the Cid without trembling. The Cid’s chroniclers narrate the personal share he took in all his enterprises. The extent to which he exposed himself upon the field of battle is shown by the many mishaps he suffered and the narrow escapes he had. In the sphere of government, he assumed many duties; he administered justice at Valencia several times a week and he it was who exposed the bad faith of the envoys sent to Murcia. His extraordinary powers of organization are seen in the rapid rise of Juballa from a smouldering ruin to a flourishing city and in the way he rebuilt and enlarged the suburb of Alcudia. His prodigious and unremitting energy enabled him to master the highly complex problems of Eastern Spain that had baffled the Emperor, Alvar Han˜ez, the Kings of Aragon, Saragossa and Denia and the Counts of Barcelona. In face of their futile claims, he established and tenaciously maintained his protectorate over the coveted and disunited region. When his work had been twice undone, he patiently built it up again in spite of seemingly insuperable difficulties presented, in the first place, by the jealous rage of Alphonso and, in the second, by the ambition of Yusuf. It savours of madness that a single man, unsupported by any national organization and lacking resources even for a day, should appear before Valencia determined upon restoring a rule that had been overthrown this second time by an enemy who had proved irresistible to the strongest power in Spain; that he should dream of doing what the Christian Emperor had failed to do, and in the teeth of the Moslem Emir’s opposition. That memorable day in October, 1092, when he pitted his will-power against all the chances and changes of fortune, marks the zenith of heroism.
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From which it may be gathered that, even more noteworthy than the Cid’s activity and success, is his exceptional firmness of purpose. Indeed, when he first left for exile, he conceived a plan of action in the East and to its execution he devoted the rest of his life. Ten years after the hero’s death, Ibn Bassam, in a passage vibrant with mingled hate and admiration, pays the highest tribute to the superhuman energy of the Campeador: The power of this tyrant became ever more intol erable; it weighed like a heavy load upon the people of the coast and inland regions, filling all men, both near and far, with fear. His intense ambition, his lust for power . . . caused all to trem ble. Yet this man, who was the scourge of his age, was, by his unflagging and clear sighted energy, his virile character, and his heroism, a miracle among the great miracles of the Almighty.
Thus, like Manzoni in his famous ode on the death of Napoleon, the Moslem enemy bowed reverently before a creative genius that bore the imprint of God. Nemo propheta acceptus est in patria sua.
The Cid was first active in promoting the aims of Castile against Leon and Navarre. His action was decisive at a critical period of Spanish history, for thanks to his victories as the ensign of Sancho II, the political hegemony passed from Leon to Castile. King Sancho and his ensign made an admirable combination: the king, exuberant and ambitious, his vassal restrained and capable. Together, they set out to change the map of Spain. And, although the course of history is shaped more by collective than by individual effort, had this happy association not been brought to an untimely end by the murder at Zamora, it may safely be assumed that the African invasion would have been stayed and the Reconquest expedited by further immediate successes such as Coimbra, Coria and Toledo. This was clearly seen by the men of the time, to whom the hero’s exile appeared a grave blunder on the part of the monarch. This feeling is voiced in the famous line of the old poem: ‘‘Lord, how good a vassal, were but the liege as good!’’ But the King was not the only one to blame. When Alphonso was enthroned in Castile, the barons curried favour with him and turned against the Cid, refusing to admit the exile’s worth. Rejected by Castile, the Campeador had to seek an outlet for his energy elsewhere. After great pains, he succeeded in forging an alliance, first
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with the Count of Barcelona, and afterwards, with the King of Aragon. Thus, his sometime opponents, the Catalans and the Aragonese, came to appreciate the hero before Alphonso and his Castilians. Literature bears out this shifting of the Cid’s activity and fame. As Du Meril and Mila´ indicate, the earliest known song of the Cid, the Carmen Roderici, is of Catalan and not of Castilian origin. Later, and working on independent lines, I proved—I think, conclusively—that the second poetic record, the Poema del Cid, was not of Old Castilian origin either, but was composed in the ‘‘extremaduras’’ or borderlands of Medinaceli by a jongleur whose pronunciation was different from that of the Castilians. Now, on deeper research into the historical sources (and again independently of the former investigations) I find to my surprise that the first historical text, the Historia Roderici, is also foreign to Castile. It was written on the borderland between Saragossa and Lerida, the scene of the Cid’s activities in the second part of his life; and the author even accuses the Castilians of being envious of the hero and incapable of understanding him. The important inference to be drawn from these facts is that admiration for the Cid was first awakened, not at Burgos, but in the more distant lands of Saragossa and what was later known as Catalonia, on the borders of that eastern region which he had made safe during the latter years of his life. It was during these years that Castile, which had witnessed his first exploits, yielded to the all-absorbing character of the Emperor, and the less pliant spirits of Burgos, such as Martin Antolinez, chose to follow the Cid into exile. Thus it came about that officially Burgos only recognized the heroism of her son after his fame had reached her from abroad. True, indeed, it is that ‘‘no man is a prophet in his own country,’’ except he be some local celebrity, quite unknown outside his own narrow circle. The idea of a united Spain, which apparently obsessed the Cid, was, as has been shown above, not of Castilian, but of Leonese origin. A change came, when a new conception of nationhood arose in the minds of Basques and Castilians, to take the place of the Leonese imperial idea, and for this change the Cid was largely responsible. If we were to take the usual view that the idea of Spanish unity was purely Castilian, we should have to regard the Cid, as Masdeu and his followers did, solely from a Castilian angle, and, like
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them, we should fail to understand him. It may be true that he is the hero of Burgos, but his heroism is displayed in non-Castilian as well as Castilian aspects, and it is wrong to regard these as antagonistic. Unquestionably the Cid was the first to abandon the already worn-out idea of a Leonese empire and embrace the new Castilian aims that were to usher in the modern Spain. But when Castile, after the assassination at Zamora, bowed to King Alphonso of Leon, the Cid was compelled to strike out in a fresh direction; and it was as an exile that he outstripped his own country in fighting for the national ideal. In spite of many vicissitudes, the Cid embodied that ideal throughout his exile, from the time when he withdrew before Alphonso, who was working for the old Leonese empire, to the time when he broke the force of the African invasion in campaigns that were frowned upon by the King of Leon and Castile. The exclusion of the Cid from the Court and Castile served but to accentuate his position as a truly national figure; and it is significant that he should have had fighting side by side with his Castilians, the Asturian Mun˜o Gustioz, the Aragonese knights of Sancho Ramirez and Pedro I, and the Portuguese followers of the Count of Coimbra and Montemayor. This co-operation in the common cause is recognized by the early Poem: How well he fights in saddle set in gold, My Cid, the mighty warrior, Ruy Diaz; Martin Antolinez, the worthy Burgalese, Mun˜o Gustioz, brought up by him, The good Galin Garcia, of Aragon, Martin Mun˜oz, the count of Mont Mayor!
These lines, brief as an heraldic motto, are to Spaniards what Homer’s list of ships was to the Hellenes. The fact that knights from so many parts of the Peninsula fought under his banner renders the Cid’s campaigns real campaigns of Spain, and, despite the envy of the barons of Burgos, of Castile as well. But, neither love of his home land nor his wider patriotism made the Cid narrow-minded. The appointment of a Cluniac monk to the see of Valencia shows that he welcomed western ideas as an influence that would lift Spain out of her former isolation. Such an attitude on the part of the most typical hero of Spain may give food for thought to those who, in a spirit of bigoted nationalism, would close the door to all foreign
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influence as being detrimental to ‘‘the descendants of Pelayo and the Cid.’’ The Cid was extolled, not so much for promoting Castile’s hegemonic aspirations, as for his conquest of Valencia. In the early Poem he is frequently alluded to as ‘‘My Cid, who won Valencia.’’ Dozy, in an access of Cidophobia less virulent than usual, sought to belittle this conquest by saying: ‘‘The Cid took the proud and rich city of Valencia, but what advantage did the Spaniards gain from its capture? The Cid’s followers certainly won a great deal of booty, but Spain won nothing; for the Arabs regained the city on the death of Rodrigo.’’ Nevertheless, although he never amended the passage, the author seems to have been so convinced of its absurdity that he deleted it from the second edition of his work (1881). In the first place, the conquest of Valencia set a great example of heroic effort. According to the Aragonese historian, Zurita, it was the most extraordinary achievement ever performed in Spain by anyone but a king. He adds that, even had the King of Castile, the most powerful monarch in Spain, engaged his whole forces in the effort, he would have found it extremely difficult to conquer so populous a city in the very heart of the Moorish country. Alphonso did, in fact, throw his whole strength into the attempt, and failed. In the second place, Dozy, in likening the conquest of Valencia to a mere marauding expedition, is greatly in error. It was far different from the conquest of Barbastro, where the troops of the papal standard-bearer abandoned themselves to plunder and sensuality. The Cid’s work was one of reconquest, and he carried it out after the manner of the Spanish kings; he reorganized the lands that he had won, restored the ancient bishopric, and established himself in the city with his family. Had he been granted the normal span of life, Castile would have seen her dream of consolidating her hold upon the old Carthaginian Province realized, and there would have been a totally different distribution of the realms throughout the Peninsula. In spite of the hero’s premature death, the results of the conquest were highly important. An extraordinary revival was then taking place in Islam. Whilst the Turks in the East were routing the Byzantines and, having captured their Emperor, were depriving him of provinces as large as Spain, the Berbers in the West were defeating and driving back the Emperor of
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Leon. Once again, as in the early days of Arab expansion, the Mediterranean was assailed at either end, but Europe saved the situation by the agency of the Cid in the West and the crusaders in the East. The anxiety of Urban II at the Almoravide invasion of Spain has led to the belief that the crusades were originally planned by the Pope, in ignorance of the divided state of Islam, as a military diversion. However this may be, there is no denying that, whereas the Turks were causing concern in the East alone, the Almoravides were reckoned a powerful danger to Europe, as was proved by the great French expedition to the Ebro valley in 1087. It is clear also that the Cid, in founding his Valencian principality amidst the Moors, anticipated what the crusaders did at Jerusalem, Antioch, Edessa and Tripoli. True, the Valencian principality did not long survive its founder; but then those other Christian principalities were also ephemeral and only lasted longer because the crusaders had all Europe behind them, whereas the Cid could not even count on the help of his king. Moreover, the crusaders established their States in opposition to emirates that were considerably smaller than the Taifa kingdoms, and they soon succumbed when confronted by a coherent power such as that of Saladin; nor could the united forces of England, France and Germany, even under leaders like Richard Cœur de Lion and Philip Augustus, regain Jerusalem or Edessa. The Cid, on the other hand, built up and held his dominions in the teeth of the bitterest opposition on the part of the Taifas and Yusuf ibn Teshufin, one of Islam’s greatest conquerors and head of a huge empire, then at the height of its power. The comparison remains striking even when other factors, such as the distance of the crusaders’ field of operation, are taken into account. Finally, the dominion of the Cid at Valencia was of more immediate importance to Europe as a dam against the Almoravide flood. It is significant, though the fact has hitherto passed unnoticed, that both Ibn Bassam and the Historia Roderici agree that his conquest of Valencia stemmed the African invasion and prevented it from reaching the most outlying Moslem Kingdoms of Lerida and Saragossa. That was the spring-tide of the invasion and, had it flooded the Ebro basin, Aragon and Barcelona, being much weaker states than Castile, would both have suffered a greater disaster than Sagrajas. The threat of invasion held out by Alphonso VI as a warning to the French barons, might then have been fulfilled. Indeed, the German historian, V. A.
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Huber, though unaware of that warning, stresses the importance of the conquests by the Cid as a barrier protecting, not only Spain, but the whole of Western Europe from the Moslem peril. And from all accounts that seems to have been the general impression at the time. (pp. 418–35) We have already pointed out how concerned the Cid was that the law should at all times be observed. That this alone surrounded him with a halo in the eyes of the people is shown by the fact that the most artistic episodes of the two principal early poems are based on a lofty conception of the law. The final scene of the Cantar de Zamora depicts with great dramatic effect the taking of the oath at Santa Gadea. If there the Cid imposed his will upon Alphonso VI, it was not in defence of any personal right or privilege, such as so many mediæval barons exacted of their king, but to protest against the usurpation of the throne and insist upon the fulfilment of the laws of succession. This scene, therefore, endured, not because of the events that gave rise to it, but because of its capital importance in characterizing the hero. As late as that tragic period of transition from the last century to the present, Joaquin Costa, while denying the Cid of armour and Tizon for fear lest his memory should again plunge Spain into warlike adventure, did not hesitate to invoke the Cid of Santa Gadea and would gladly have seen every Spaniard equally solicitous to uphold the law and at the same time demand satisfaction from his rulers. The Poema del Cid presents the great scene of the Cortes at Toledo, where, in striking contrast to the general custom of mediæval epic, the Cid is shown forgoing vengeance in favour of the legal satisfaction afforded by the court. In my work, Poema de Mio Cid, I have pointed out the revolution that choice occasioned in the poetry of the time. There can be no doubt that it reflects the real outlook of the Cid and reveals in him the moral characteristics that inspired the poets. It is astonishing to find moderation poetized as a characteristic of the most redoubtable of warriors; and yet, not only did he always subordinate his own strength to the law, but he knew how to temper justice with mercy. The Poema del Cid shows a keen perception of the value of this self-restraint as a poetic theme and even suppresses the traces of violence to be found in the hero’s true character. The Cid of fact, who waives his right as a nobleman to fight against his
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lord, provides one of the main inspirations of the poem: the loyalty of the hero, despite the unjust harshness of the monarch. Even with the great insult still smarting in his brain, the Cid speaks ‘‘well and in measured language.’’ In this connection, the Poem again strikes a singular note; for, whereas the Spanish cantares and French chansons glorify the rebel exile who rode rough-shod over all who came his way, the jongleur of the Cid, true to the grave conception of life held by his hero, sought ideality in another direction and produced an exile of perfect bearing, moderate at all times, and showing the greatest respect for those social and political institutions that might well have trammelled his heroic energy. The hero and his poet, in imbuing the epic with this ideal, show themselves to be far ahead of their time. For centuries nobles continued to take private vengeance and make war upon their king and country, and the poets kept pace with them by singing of the violence of their heroes and even inventing, in the Mocedades, an insolent and overbearing Cid. Again, the Cid of the Poem forbears to insist on his rights as a victor; witness his treatment of the Count of Barcelona. Anxious to make a good impression on the vanquished Moors, he treats them with generosity, ‘‘lest they speak ill of me,’’ and, when he leaves them, they are sorry to lose his protection: The Moorish men and maids Bless him and wish ‘‘God speed.’’ But, must thou go, My Cid? Our prayers do thee precede.
How different a character from the Charlemagne of the Chanson de Roland who calls for the conversion of the Saracens by fire and sword! The high principles of the Cid, especially at a time of resurgence of spiritual values, are thus one of the main reasons why he was sung, both at home and abroad. Already in the second half of the twelfth century German poets (informed no doubt by pilgrim jongleurs from Compostela) had made an obvious copy of Rodrigo de Vivar in the figure of the margrave Ru¨diger, who was later embodied in the Nibelungenlied as a model of chivalry, brave, triumphant, and loyal: Ru¨diger, the good, the true, the noble, who gave his life fighting for his principles against an overwhelming force. Further evidence of the base upon which the idealization of the Cid as a hero rests, is furnished by the Poema de la conquista de Almeria, written about 1150, when the early gests appeared. The author, after extolling the Cid’s invincibility, proceeds to show that he used his strength, not only
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against the threat of foreign danger, but also against the intrigues of the counts at home: ipse Rodericus, mio Cidi saepe vocatus, de quo cantatur quod ab hostibus haud superatur, qui domuit mauros, comites domuit quoque nostros.
The banishment of the Cid furnishes a typical instance of the instability of the social fabric. The age produced the man required, but Society banned him from his natural sphere. A really invincible captain had arisen in Spain, only to find his efforts frustrated by the antagonistic counts of Najera, Oca and Carrion; he could obtain neither the co-operation of the Count of Barcelona to help him dominate the East, nor that of the Emperor of Leon to prevent the disasters of Sagrajas, Jaen, Consuegra and Lisbon. So far as the Cid was concerned, envy acted as the most powerful dissolvent of the social bonds. The Cid was envied by many of his peers and even by his kinsmen; he was envied by the greatest men at Court, even by the Emperor himself; one and all, they rejected him from motives of pure spite to, as events soon proved, their own detriment. The charge of in-vidia, so often preferred by the Latin historian, connotes a lack of vision: ‘‘castellani invidentes.’’ Such an in-vidente was Alphonso, who found it convenient to promote Garcı´ a Ordon˜ez in preference to the Cid; such also was the Count of Najera himself, who supplanted one who was better than he; such, in short, were all the counts whom the Cid had to subdue. Thus, the phrase of the Poema de la conquista de Almeria, ‘‘comites domuit nostros,’’ acquires a general significance by extolling the Cid as the hero of the struggle with the jealous nobles. In face of this blind, malignant envy, the Cid showed neither discouragement nor rancour. When exiled, he sought no direct vengeance, however much he was entitled to do so; nor did he, like Achilles, sulk in his tent and hope for the defeat of his detractors. On the contrary, he repeatedly went to the help of the King who had exiled him and, in spite of a series of rebuffs from his countrymen, took the only dignified course left open to him; he withdrew his invaluable energy to a distant field where envy and mortification could not reach him, but where he could still co-operate, whether they wished it or not, with his backbiters. The Cid sought and found his support among the enthusiastic and loyal countrymen of the outlying districts and in the spirit of comradeship he instilled into the motley crowd that flocked to
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his standard; courteous towards the humble, he showed himself as deferential to his cook, when the occasion demanded, as he was firm, though respectful, in the presence of the Emperor of the two religions. In the midst of that strange host he displayed his heroism, and no sooner had he conquered a kingdom than he presented it to his unjust sovereign, by recognizing ‘‘the overlordship of his King, Don Alphonso.’’ In seeking reconciliation with the King and humbling himself before him at Toledo in a scene to which the early poet attaches capital importance, the Cid reaches the apogee of heroism by achieving a victory over his own unruly spirit. Though his great victories had rendered him immune from his enemies, he indulged in no vain contempt, but was willing to efface himself before his mean and little-minded opponents, for he desired no more than to take the place in the social order allotted to him, as it is to every man, however eminent. Far from thinking that the sole purpose of things is to pave the way for the superman, he felt that the strongest individuality would be nothing were it not for the people for whom it exists. Source: Ramo´n Mene´ndez Pidal, in The Cid and His Spain, translated by Harold Sunderland, John Mur ray, 1934.
SOURCES Bayo, Juan Carlos, ‘‘Poetic Discourse Patterning in the Cantar de Mio Cid,’’ in Modern Language Review, Vol. 96, No. 1, January 2001, p. 82. Catan, Thomas, ‘‘191 Dead, Thousands of Victims But the ‘Mastermind’ Is Cleared,’’ in Times (London), November 1, 2007. Deyermond, A. D., ‘‘The Singer of Tales and Medieval Spanish Epic,’’ in Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, Vol. 42, No. 1, 1965, pp. 1 8. , ‘‘Tendencies in Mio Cid Scholarship, 1943 1973,’’ in ‘‘Mio Cid’’ Studies, edited by A. D. Deyermond, Tamasis Books, 1977, pp. 13 48. Duggan, Joseph J., The ‘‘Cantar de mio Cid’’: Poetic Creation in Its Economic and Social Contexts (Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature), Vol. 5, Cambridge University Press, 1989. , ‘‘Formulaic Diction in the Cantar de mio Cid and the Old French Epic,’’ in Oral Literature: Seven Essays, by Joseph J. Duggan, Barnes and Noble, 1975, pp. 74 83. Harney, Michael, Kinship and Polity in the ‘‘Poema de mio Cid’’ (Purdue Studies in Romance Literatures), Vol. 2, Purdue University Press, 1993. Harvey, P. T., ‘‘The Metrical Irregularity of the Cantar de mio Cid,’’ in Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, Vol. 40, 1963, pp. 137 43.
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Himelblau, Jack, J., Morphology of the ‘‘Cantar de Mio Cid,’’ Scripta Humanistica, 2010. Kern, Soeren, ‘‘Spain’s Immigration System Runs Amok Spain’s Decline,’’ in Brussels Journal, September 17, 2008. Lacarra, Marı´ a Eugenia, El Poema de mio Cid: realidad histo´rica e ideologı´ca, Ediciones Jose´ Porru´a Turanzas, 1975. Loewenberg, Samuel, ‘‘As Spaniards Lose Their Reli gion, Church Leaders Struggle to Hold On,’’ in New York Times, June 26, 2005. Lord, Albert B., The Singer of Tales, Harvard University Press, 1960, reprint ed., 1971. Mene´ndez Pidal, Ramo´n, ed., Cantar de mio Cid: Texto, grama´tica y vocabulario, 3rd ed., 3 vols., Obras completas, Espasa Calpe, 1954 1956. , The Cid and His Spain, J. Murray, 1934. O’Callaghan, J. F., A History of Medieval Spain, Cornell University Press, 1975. Ong, Walter J., Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, Routledge, 1982. Pingree, Geoff, ‘‘Secular Drive Challenges Spain’s Cath olic Identity,’’ in Christian Science Monitor, October 1, 2004. Russell, P. E., ‘‘San Pedro de Carden˜a and the Heroic History of the Cid,’’ in Medium Aevum, Vol. 27, No. 2, 1958, pp. 67 68.
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Blackburn’s translation takes a liberal approach to the original text in order to create an acces sible version rendered in modern verse. Clissold, Stephen, ‘‘El Cid: Moslems and Christians in Medieval Spain,’’ in History Today, Vol. 12, No. 5, May 1962, pp. 321 28. This article, written for the popular press and including interesting illustrations, appeared after the 1961 film brought renewed attention to the Cid. Linehan, Peter, The Spanish Church and the Papacy in the Thirteenth Century, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought: Third Series, Cambridge University Press, 2005. This book explores the struggle between Chris tianity and Islam for control of the Spanish peninsula and describes the internal conditions of the Spanish Church, its relationship to Christian kings and the major popes. Webber, Ruth House, ‘‘The Cantar de mio Cid: Problems of Interpretation,’’ in Oral Tradition in Literature: Inter pretation and Context, edited by John Miles Foley, Uni versity of Missouri Press, 1986, pp. 65 88. This article includes a useful overview of the individualist and traditionalist controversy in Cidian scholarship.
Smith, Colin, The Making of the ‘‘Poema de mio Cid,’’ Cambridge University Press, 1983. Spitzer, Leo, ‘‘Sobre el cara´cter histo´rico del Cantar de mio Cid,’’ in Nueva Revista de Filologı´a Hispa´nica, Vol. 2, 1948, pp. 105 17. Whitman, Cedric H., Homer and the Heroic Tradition, Harvard University Press, 1958.
SUGGESTED SEARCH TERMS Cid AND Alfonso Cid AND Campeador Cid AND Valencia
FURTHER READING
Cid AND Ximena OR Jimena
Blackburn, Paul, Poem of ‘‘The Cid’’: A Modern Trans lation with Notes, University of Okalahoma Press, 1998.
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Divine Comedy DANTE ALIGHIERI 1321
Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) wrote his epic poem, the Divine Comedy, during the last thirteen years of his life), while in exile from his native Florence. There are three parts to this massive work: Inferno, Purgatory and Paradise. In each section Dante the poet recounts the travels of the Pilgrim—his alter ego—through hell, purgatory, and heaven, where he meets God face to face. The primary theme is clear. In a letter to his patron, Can Grande della Scala, Dante wrote simply that his poem was, on the literal level, about ‘‘The state of souls after death.’’ It is, of course, that and much more; the poem works on a number of symbolic levels, much like the Bible, one of its primary sources. Like that sacred text, Dante meant his work and his Pilgrim traveler to serve as models for the reader. He hoped to lead that reader to a greater understanding of his place in the universe and to prepare him for the next life, for the life that begins after death. The greatness of the Divine Comedy lies in its construction as a summa, as a summation of knowledge and experience. Dante was able to weave together pagan myth, literature, and philosophy; Christian theology and doctrine; physics, astrology, cartography, mathematics; and literary theory, history, and politics into a complex poem that not just the highly educated could read. For Dante boldly chose to write his poem of salvation in his own Italian dialect, not in Latin, which was the language of church, state, and epic poetry during his time. Its impact was so great that Dante’s Tuscan dialect became what later generations recognized as modern Italian.
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relevant to their lives since its composition in the early fourteenth century. Perhaps this influence is because Dante Alighieri, for all the differences between his era and modern times, wrestled with and wrote about concerns that affect all who take the time to think about them: What is the purpose of this life? Is there an afterlife? If so, how should I prepare for it? Why am I here? Dante’s answers to those questions will not necessarily be the same as those of modern readers, but his asking them forces readers to ask them, too, to wonder how they might answer them for themselves and for their own times. The new millennium’s interest in Dante continues to increase in terms of both scholarship and popular culture. Scholars investigate Dante’s relevance to Chinese, Hebrew, and Islamic traditions. Films, novels, and video games based on Dante’s cosmology saturate the market. Starting with Tolkien and C. S. Lewis in the twentieth century, fantasy and science fiction writers have continued to mine Dante for imaginary alternate worlds or visions of this one. Dante’s map of the cosmos appears to be more relevant than ever for contemporary readers and artists.
Dante Alighieri
As one of the greatest works, not just of the late Middle Ages, but of Western literature, the Divine Comedy has had incalculable influence. The poem was immediately successful—Dante’s own sons, Pietro and Jacopo, wrote the first commentaries on it—and it continues to be read and taught regularly modern times. Many of Western literature’s major figures were indebted to Dante’s masterwork. A highly selective list includes: Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375); Geoffrey Chaucer (circa 1344–1400); Don In˜igo Lopez de Mendoza, the first Marque´s de Santillana (1389–1458); John Milton (1608–1674); William Blake (1757–1827); Victor Hugo (1802–1885); Joseph Conrad (1857– 1924); James Joyce (1882–1941); Ezra Pound (1885–1972); Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986), and Italo Calvino (1923–1985). If this impressive list were not testament enough, one has only to consider the four to five hundred manuscripts of the Divine Comedy in existence (an almost unheard of number), the four-hundred some Italian printed editions, and the hundreds of English translations to get some idea of this work’s impact on Western culture. Clearly, readers have found the Divine Comedy
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AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY As is often the case with medieval authors, relatively little is known about the personal life of Dante Alighieri. In his Convivio (c. 1304–1307; The Banquet), he states that he was born in Florence, and his birth probably occurred in late May or early June 1265, in the San Martino district of that city. His father, Alighiero di Bellincione d’Alighieri, was a notary. His mother, Donna Bella, was probably the daughter of the noble Durante degli Abati. She died before Dante was fourteen, and his father took a second wife, Lapa di Chiarissimo Cialuffi. They had a son, Francesco, and a daughter, Tana. Although the Alighieri family was noble by virtue of the titles bestowed upon it, by 1265 its social status and wealth seem to have declined. Nonetheless, in about 1283, when Alighiero Alighieri died, he left his children moderately well off, owners of city and country properties. Around this time, Dante followed through on the marriage arranged by his father in 1277 and took the gentlewoman Gemma Donati as his wife. They had two sons, Pietro and Jacopo, and at least one daughter, Antonia. (Dante and
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Gemma might have had a second daughter, Beatrice, although Beatrice could have been Antonia’s monastery name.) Dante’s marriage and family life seem to have had no impact on his poetry. He wrote nothing about his immediate family in the Divine Comedy, but there might be a reference to a sister in La Vita Nuova (c. 1292– 1300, The New Life). As a youth, Dante might have attended Florence’s Franciscan lower school and school of philosophy. Brunetto Latini (c. 1220–1294), the distinguished scholar, teacher, statesman, and author, encouraged him to study rhetoric at the University at Bologna. In La Vita Nuova, Dante states that he taught himself to write verse. He became one of Florence’s top poets, associating and exchanging work with other well-known writers such as Guido Cavalcanti (c. 1240–1300), Lapo Gianni (c. 1270–1332) and Cino da Pistoia (c. 1270–1336). Dante was friendly with the musician and singer Casella and might have known the artists Oderisi da Gubbio (c. 1240–1299) and Giotto (c. 1267–1337). In 1274, when he was nine years old, Dante met Bice Portinari, whom he later called Beatrice, ‘‘bringer of blessedness.’’ His love for this beautiful daughter of Folco Portinari was to become one of the strongest forces in his life. When she died suddenly in 1290, Dante collected the lyric poems he had written to her, linked them with prose commentaries and produced La Vita Nuova, the slim volume that is really the beginning of his masterwork, the Divine Comedy. Linking the two is Dante’s love for and idealization of Beatrice, a love which Dante transformed from the physical to the spiritual. Indeed, in the Divine Comedy, Beatrice prepares Dante the Pilgrim for and leads him to his final face-to-face meeting with God. Dante was also a soldier, a politician, and a diplomat. Like other families of the lesser nobility and artisan class, the Alighieri family members allied themselves with the Florentine political faction, the Guelfs. Their opposition, the Ghibellines, represented the feudal aristocracy. Dante saw military service as a member of the cavalry, which he joined in 1289. He fought with Florence and her Guelf allies against Arezzo, in their victory at the battle of Campaldino in 1289 and in the Guelf victory at Caprona in August of that year. As a first step toward holding important public offices, Dante joined the Guild of Physicians and Apothecaries in 1295. That same year
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he served on the People’s Council of the Commune of Florence and as a member of the council that elected that city’s Priors. In 1296, he was a member of the Council of the Hundred, an influential political body involved in Florentine civic and financial matters. He traveled as ambassador to San Gimignano in 1300 and was himself elected that year to the high office of Prior. Again as ambassador, the White Guelfs (his faction) sent him to meet with the pope at Anagni. While he was away, the Whites lost power and their rivals, the Black Guelfs, exiled Dante for two years. They charged him with conspiracy against the pope and Florence. Dante refused to appear at his hearing in 1302 or to pay his fines, since he thought doing so would be an admission of guilt. The Blacks told him that if he ever returned to Florence he would be arrested and burned alive. It is likely he never saw his beloved Florence again. From 1303 on, Dante traveled extensively in northern Italy and lived the rest of his days as a courtier and teacher in exile. In 1303, he stayed in Verona with Bartolomeo della Scala and in 1304 appeared in Arezzo plotting a re-entry into Florence with other exiled Whites and Ghibellines. This effort failed disastrously, and Dante probably moved on to Lunigiana, where he performed diplomatic services for the Malaspina family from 1305 to 1307. Some historians think he journeyed to Paris in 1309 to study at the university. From 1312 to 1318 he lived in Verona, again with the Scala family, this time under the patronage of Can Grande della Scala, to whom he dedicated his Paradise, the third volume of the Divine Comedy. While in Verona, the Florentine government again sentenced Dante to death and this time extended the threat to include his sons. From 1318 to 1321 Dante was in Ravenna under the protection of Guido Novella da Polenta, surrounded by eager pupils and highly praised as the author of Convivio, Inferno, and Purgatory. On September 13 or 14, in 1321, Dante died in Ravenna, where he was buried.
PLOT SUMMARY Dante’s Divine Comedy is bewilderingly complex to the first-time reader, even on the literal level. (This complexity remains after many rereadings, but for many readers, it enhances the poem’s appeal rather than hindering the reader’s understanding.)
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of knowledge bordered on the obsessive, and his Divine Comedy is no exception. Indeed, it is a prime example of this drive to order. Therefore, using its structure helps the reader navigate and make sense of its complex world.
MEDIA ADAPTATIONS
In 1935, Harry Lachman directed Spencer Tracy and Claire Trevor in a film called Dante’s Inferno, about a carnival concession that shows scenes from Dante’s poem.
In 1980, Carlo Maria Guilini, Dame Janet Baker, the Philharmonia Chorus and Philharmonia Orchestra of London recorded Giuseppe Verdi’s Four Sacred Pieces. This work sets some of Dante’s texts to music and is available on a His Master’s Voice recording.
Peter Greenaway’s ninety-minute TV Dante: The Inferno Cantos I–VIII (1989) is available as a Films for the Humanities video. Tom Phillips wrote the screenplay for this highly stylized interpretation of the first eight cantos of the Inferno. It features Sir John Gielgud as Virgil, Bob Peck as Dante’s Pilgrim, and Joanne Whalley-Kilmer as Beatrice. It was titled The Inferno. Dante 01, a 2008 Wild Bunch Production, is a science fiction film set in outer space directed by Marc Caro and based on the Inferno.
Abandon All Hope is a 2009 film available on DVD by Dino Di Durante about the Inferno. From Master Film Productions and narrated by Jeff Conaway, the film features scholars, artists, and art by Gustave Dore.
The 2010 video game Dante’s Inferno, by Electronic Arts, on Platform Xbox 360, has tie-ins of film and book.
The Starz/Anchor Bay 2010 film Dante’s Inferno: An Animated Epic offers a psychological interpretation of Dante’s hell. The adult film stars Mark Hamill and Victoria Tennant and is directed by Mike Disa.
Trying to keep track of the poem’s five hundred some characters often produces frustration, as do attempts to sort out thirteenth- and fourteenthcentury Florentine politics and the city-state’s conflicts with the papacy. Fortunately, Dante lived during a time when categorization and the ordering
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The poem is divided into three books or cantiche: Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise. Each book is then broken down into canti or what we might call chapters: Inferno has thirty-four, Purgatory has thirty-three, and Paradise has thirtythree. There are, then, a total of one hundred canti, and each volume has thirty-three chapters. (The first one in Inferno introduces the entire poem and thus in a sense stands alone.) This ordering system is a prime example of medieval Christian numerology, the science of attributing religious significance to numerals. In this system, three is the ideal number, since it represents the Holy Trinity: God the Father, Christ the Son, and the Holy Spirit. One hundred, the number of canti in the poem, is the square of the perfect number ten. One hundred represents the belief that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are individuals yet indivisible from one another: 100 ¼ 1 þ 0 þ 0 ¼ 1. This simple example only hints at the extent to which Divine Comedy uses such tight structures to produce meaning and to deliver its message of salvation.
Inferno: Layout and Journey Dante’s Hell is cone-shaped and points to the center of the earth. Dante divided his hellish cone into a hierarchy, into an orderly structure that he split into two major divisions, upper and lower Hell. Three rivers circle around three levels of the cone. As they circle, the rivers Acheron, Phlegethon, and Styx flow down to the pit at the bottom of Hell. There they become part of Cocytus, the ice lake that imprisons Lucifer. The upper and lower divisions are set out in ten sections. Through this region (Hell) Dante moved his alter ego, the Pilgrim, and Virgil, the Pilgrim’s guide. Historically, Virgil was one of the greatest classical Latin poets. He wrote the Aeneid, which starts after the Trojan War and tells the story of Aeneas, the Trojan hero who according to the myth founded Rome. In general, Virgil represents Reason, a quality the Pilgrim needs to get him through the first two regions, Hell and Purgatory. When the Pilgrim reaches the third, Paradise, his faith largely takes over, although he is guided there, too. Upper Hell has a vestibule (an entry way) and nine levels around and down which the Pilgrim and Virgil travel. Upper Hell’s five levels
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correspond to five of Christianity’s seven deadly sins: lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, and wrath. Lower Hell holds the shades of those guilty of the other two, envy and pride. Starting at the top, at ground level, and working downward, the divisions of upper Hell are: 1) the Vestibule, which holds the indecisive, including the angels who sided neither with God nor with Lucifer during his revolt; 2) Circle One, Limbo, where those, like Virgil and other classical poets and philosophers, who lived before Christ’s birth are; 3) Circle Two, the lustful; 4) Circle Three, the gluttons; 5) Circle Four, the greedy and wasteful; 6) Circle Five, the wrathful. Here stands the City of Dis, which separates the upper and lower regions. Circle Six begins lower Hell and is the level on which the heretics are punished. Circle Seven punishes three groups of sinners: those who were violent against their neighbors, themselves (the suicides), and those who were violent against art, nature, and God. The Great Barrier, a sheer drop, separates Circle Seven from the rest of lower Hell, and Dante and Virgil descend to it on the back of Geryon, a fantastical, multicolored beast with the face of a man and a scorpion’s tail. Circle Eight is divided into ten concentric circles. These circles are called malebolge, or ‘‘evil ditches,’’ and are crossed by seven bridges, which radiate out from the center like a spokes on a wheel. All seven bridges are broken over the sixth ditch. Into each ditch, or bolgia, are placed sinners: 1) panderers and seducers; 2) flatterers; 3) those guilty of simony (selling pardons for sins); 4) sorcerers; 5) barrators, those who provoked discord or division; 6) hypocrites; 7) thieves; 8) deceivers; 9) others who provoked discord or division; 10) falsifiers. Circle Nine, the last, holds the worst group of sinners: traitors to family, country, guests, and lords. This vast ice lake, Cocytus, is divided into four Circles: 1) Caina; after Cain, the first murderer mentioned in the Old Testament; 2) Antenora, after Antenor, the treasonous Trojan warrior; 3) Ptolomea, either after the biblical Ptolemy, who had his father-in-law and two sons killed or after Ptolemy XII, the Egyptian king who invited Pompey to his kingdom and then killed him; 4) and Judecca, after Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Jesus. At the center of this lake stands six-winged Lucifer, the arch-traitor, who rebelled against God and was banished from Heaven. He is frozen from the waist down, and
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each one of his three heads chews on a legendary traitor: Judas Iscariot, Marcus Brutus, and Caius Cassius. These last two participated in the assassination of Julius Caesar and combine with Judas to create an evil perversion of the Holy Trinity. On each level the Pilgrim and Virgil encounter the shades of sinners who have committed the sins for which they are being physically punished. The deeper into the cone the travelers descend, the more serious the sins become. As the Pilgrim sees and talks to these shades, he learns about the nature of sin and about using reason to avoid sinning himself. Most importantly, he learns to hate the sin and not the sinner; he discovers the difference between feeling sorry for the sinners and pitying their plight. In Dante’s orderly system, all the sinners’ punishments fit their crimes. Dante called this kind of punishment contrapasso. For example, in Canto 5 of the Inferno, the Pilgrim meets Francesca da Rimini and Paolo Malatesta. These two lovers committed adultery and were murdered by Francesca’s husband, who caught them in a moment of passion. Their eternal punishment is to be blown by a hot wind that symbolizes passion round the fifth level with other lustful sinners. Even worse, at least for Francesca, they are joined together, inseparably, for all time. To show how much the Pilgrim has to learn at this point, Dante demonstrates the Pilgrim’s sorrow for these sinners. The Pilgrim does not understand that Francesca lies when she claims that she and Paolo loved each another. He does not understand that the lust they felt, not love, damned them forever. The misguided Pilgrim is so affected that he faints after listening to Francesca’s story. By the time he reaches Lucifer in Hell’s pit in Canto 34, the Pilgrim has a fuller knowledge of sin’s nature. Then, and only then, is he ready to follow Virgil, to climb out of Hell and up the Mount of Purgatory.
Purgatory: Layout and Journey When they emerge from Hell’s pit, the Pilgrim and Virgil find themselves at the foot of the Mountain of Purgatory. This very steep mountain rises at more than a forty-five degree angle, and the narrow paths that circle toward its summit are dangerously unrailed. Unlike in Hell, sinners are not condemned to Purgatory forever. They are there to do penance for their sins. As in Hell, these penances fit the sins. Penance is not punishment, though; it is remedial and corrective.
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This is the primary difference between Hell and Purgatory: The shades in Purgatory have time and the desire to learn from their sins. They know that they will someday rise to Heaven. Hell, by contrast, is a hopeless place. At the Last Judgment it will be sealed forever, and its residents exist with no opportunity for repentance, completely without hope. This is the worst punishment possible in the Christian universe. Dante invented the Mountain and placed it opposite Jerusalem, in what medieval mapmakers thought was the uninhabited southern hemisphere. Since these mapmakers thought this hemisphere was landless and covered with water, it makes sense that Purgatory is a mountain and an island. This region’s layout is somewhat simpler than Hell’s. Dante divided his Mountain into four levels: Antepurgatory, Lower, Middle, and Upper Purgatory. These last three make up Purgatory proper, and Antepurgatory is like Hell’s vestibule or entry way. Atop it all sits the Garden of Eden. The four levels are further divided into circles and terraces. Antepurgatory at the bottom has two circles, and these regions have earthly landscapes. (The sun even rises and sets on the Mountain.) Purgatory proper is made up of seven terraces, all of which are composed of nothing but bare stone. Counting the Garden of Eden at the peak, Antepurgatory’s two circles and the seven levels of Purgatory proper, there are ten levels in all. The most sinful inhabit the lower levels and are farthest from God. The first and lowest level of Antepurgatory is home to two groups of sinners who have not yet begun their penance. This first group contains the excommunicated. The second group inhabits terrace two and contains three subgroups, all of whom lacked spiritual passion. They were, in a sense, spiritually indifferent. On the third terrace, just above these late repentants, is Peter’s Gate, which an angel guards. The Pilgrim must pass through this gate before he moves to the seven upper terraces of Purgatory, each of which contains shades who committed one of the seven deadly sins. On these levels temporarily reside those who misused love: the proud, the envious, the wrathful, the slothful, the greedy, the gluttonous, and the lustful. This order reverses that of Hell, which has the lustful at the highest level and the proud in the pit at the bottom. Therefore, the Pilgrim moves from worst sin in Hell to worst sin on the Mountain. When he reaches the peak, he meets Purgatory’s least sinful souls and is closest to God.
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The Pilgrim’s education continues as he and Virgil wind their way around and up the Mountain to the Garden, much like the souls must do who are destined for Heaven. The Pilgrim participates in his instruction in much the same was as he does in Hell. On the Mountain he encounters various groups and individuals who sinned while alive and who interact instructively with him. From them he learns valuable lessons about, among other things, humility, love of God and misuse of reason, the power of prayer and the power of poetry. Early on an angel inscribes seven ‘‘Ps’’ (signifying the Latin word peccatum, meaning sin) on his forehead, one for each of the deadly sins. As the Pilgrim moves upward toward innocence, one ‘‘P’’ per level is removed by an angel. Reason can lead him only so far, and after crowning his student lord of himself (Purgatory 27), Virgil vanishes from the Garden of Eden (Purgatory 30), which signifies that the Pilgrim has ‘‘graduated’’ and is ready to move to the next and highest level. He has worked his way back to a state of innocence like that lost by Adam and Eve when they lived in the Garden. From Eden, Beatrice and his faith lead the Pilgrim the rest of the way and carry him on to Paradise.
Paradise: Layout and Journey The historical Beatrice died at a young age, in 1290, and Dante’s earthly, physical love for her became intensely spiritual. Her reciprocal spiritual love for the Pilgrim motivates her to lead him to God, source of all love. This she does, as the two travelers are transported heavenward. As they soar toward God, the Pilgrim is amazed to find himself moving through space and wonders if his body or just his soul has taken flight from the Garden at the Mountain’s summit. Beatrice and the Pilgrim find themselves at the edge of another ten-level structure. This one is comprised of nine crystalline spheres, each one placed concentrically inside the other. All revolve, providing the seven planets set in the first seven spheres with motion. (During Dante’s time, astronomers believed the moon and sun to be planets. Neptune, Uranus, and Pluto had not been discovered yet.) Moving outward from Earth, Dante’s planetary spheres are Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Past Saturn are the spheres of the fixed stars and of the Primum Mobile or ‘‘Prime Mover.’’ Medieval astronomers believed that the stars were stationary, fixed in place in the heavens. Thus, they assumed
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there was a crystal sphere which held them all in place. Beyond this eighth sphere of the fixed stars was the ninth of the Prime Mover. God gives it motion, and it turns the eight spheres below and inside it. Beyond these nine spheres is the Empyrean, which is made of pure white light. This region surrounds all the spheres and is where the Pilgrim meets God. Each of the spheres is inhabited by a collection of saints. Like the lower regions, the heavenly spheres and their saints are arranged in a particular order. In Paradise the souls are ordered according to the states of grace they have achieved. Those on the outside rim partake of God’s blessedness to a lesser degree. Nonetheless, all are happy to be in Heaven, and all partake of God’s love as they are able. Moving from the outer rim of the first sphere, that of the Moon, the first seven spheres and their blessed souls are: 1) the Moon and the ambitious who broke vows on earth; 2) Mercury and those who loved glory on earth; 3) Venus and those who were lovers on earth; 4) the sun and the theologians; 5) Mars and those who died as martyrs and Crusaders; 6) Jupiter and the righteous rulers; 7) Saturn and the contemplatives, men such as Saint Benedict and Saint Bernard. In the eighth sphere, that of the fixed stars, the Pilgrim has his vision of the Virgin Mary and of the light of Christ. In the ninth sphere, that of the Prime Mover, the Pilgrim has his vision of Christ. Finally, in the Empyrean the Pilgrim has his face-to-face vision of God. In Paradise, the Pilgrim’s education proceeds in the same way it does in the lower two regions. There are two fundamental differences here though. These souls are all in Heaven and have fulfilled their desire for God. They have nothing more for which to strive and do nothing but gaze in rapture upon his love, his light. Unlike the concrete regions of Hell and Purgatory, Paradise’s residents do not inhabit their fleshly bodies. Therefore, they appear to the Pilgrim as sparks or as light and communicate with him via signs or symbols. For example, when the theologians appear to him, they do so in the form of a circle, symbol of perfection. When the souls in the sphere of Mars materialize, they take the shape of a brilliant cross. As the souls in the sphere of the fixed stars return to the Empyrean, they appear like snowflakes that are ‘‘falling’’ up. The poet had so much trouble explaining such phenomena that he had to invent new words to describe them. Indeed, the closer the Pilgrim gets to God, the more the poet confesses that words fail him.
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Thus, like Virgil whom she replaces, Beatrice leads the Pilgrim through the nine spheres and leaves him in the hands of Saint Bernard, who provides him with his last instructions (Paradise 31). Beatrice also functions as his main teacher in this region and gives him theological instruction. For example, when she realizes that the Pilgrim does not understand how these souls appear to him, she explains, using the Creation story as an example. She tells the Pilgrim that, since human capabilities are so limited, Scripture gives God hands and feet, so as to make him more understandable to mortals. In other words, God looks human in Genesis because that way people see and understand him as a kind of father figure (Paradise 4). Beatrice also introduces the Pilgrim to a variety of blessed souls, some of whom test him to see if he has made the necessary progress. Saint Peter, for instance, asks the Pilgrim some rather difficult theological questions, which he answers perfectly, proving that he is becoming ready for the ultimate vision of God (Paradise 24). In Canto 33 the Pilgrim has that vision, and it comes to him as a blinding flash of wisdom. In that brief moment, he experiences everything that the blessed experience in Heaven. Thus, his desire is momentarily fulfilled and he returns to Earth, ready and most willing to write, for the benefit of his readers, the Divine Comedy, so that people might have a brief glimpse of ‘‘the Love that moves the sun and other stars’’ (Paradise 33, l. 145).
CHARACTERS Beatrice Beatrice summons Virgil from Limbo (Inferno 2) to lead Dante the Pilgrim through Hell, up the Mount of Purgatory to the Garden of Eden. She sits with the blessed in the heavenly rose, where she waits to replace Virgil as the Pilgrim’s guide (Purgatory 30). Beatrice, ‘‘bringer of blessedness,’’ is therefore largely responsible for the Pilgrim’s (and the poet’s) salvation.
Bice See Beatrice
Pilgrim The Pilgrim is the alter ego of Dante the poet, a kind of Everyman (someone to whom everyone can relate) whose travels the reader follows, experiencing the three regions while he does.
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Ideally, as the Pilgrim learns from his encounters with countless shades, the reader attains some degree of enlightenment.
Virgil Virgil is the Pilgrim’s guide through Hell and the lower part of Purgatory. Virgil represents the voice of reason, which gives way to faith as Pilgrim shifts from Virgil’s guidance to that of Beatrice in the upper region of Purgatory and in Heaven.
THEMES Education and Salvation Learning how to attain salvation is the main theme of Dante’s epic and subsumes all its other themes. The Divine Comedy is, therefore, a tale of the Pilgrim’s education and, by association, the reader’s. The reader follows Dante’s Pilgrim through Hell in Inferno and learns with him about sin’s pervasiveness. The torments of the sinners, who exist forever without hope of redemption or an end to their suffering, graphically illustrate sin’s consequences. As the Pilgrim moves through the underworld, the shades provide graphic examples of and exemplary lessons on the seven deadly sins. At the end of Inferno, the Pilgrim is better able to recognize sin in its various forms and to avoid committing it. Salvation and further spiritual education are impossible without such knowledge. In the second section, Purgatory, the Pilgrim move up the Mountain of Purgatory to the Garden of Eden at its peak. Along the way he learns the value of contrition and repentance, of having to suffer for causing suffering and for disobeying God. He learns this again by seeing and interacting with shades who represent the Seven Deadly Sins but who here exemplify the desire for contrition and repentance. The learning process concludes in the third section, Paradise, where a plethora of saved souls appear to the Pilgrim and explain the workings of grace and God’s love to him. In this celestial region, the Pilgrim takes a series of what oral exams during which his growing knowledge is tested. Schooled by his experiences in the three regions, having gained a firm understanding of sin and grace, the Pilgrim passes his exams and graduates to the vision of God. He, then, becomes a teacher, because he returns to Earth with instructions to write about his experiences for the benefit of others.
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Choices and Consequences: Providence and Free Will Inextricably linked to the theme of education and to the soul’s salvation is the theme of free will and its relation to God’s Providence. Following the writings of Boethius and Thomas Aquinas, which permeate the Divine Comedy, Dante shows his Pilgrim that God’s Providence, his vision, encompasses all events and all of time. Since God knows and sees all simultaneously, he knows exactly what mortals will do and when they will do it. Dante’s great-great-grandfather, Cacciaguida, explains to the Pilgrim in Paradise that this does not mean that human actions are predestined, only that God has full knowledge of them. People can and do choose how to act, how to employ free will, and they must accept responsibility for those choices. As he does in the scene with Cacciaguida, over the course of the poem, the Pilgrim comes to understand that his actions have consequences and that he bears ultimate responsibility for those consequences. This lesson is of the utmost importance, for failing to understand this can damn one for eternity, as it has those in Hell.
Art and Experience: The Power of Literature Closely tied to the themes of education and the correct use of free will is that of literature’s power to influence its readers’ actions. Dante made the revolutionary decision to write his poem in Italian and not Latin—the language of epic, of the church and of lofty themes—so that it would reach a wider audience. He meant his Divine Comedy to be an example, to focus the reader on the next life and, if necessary, to change the way he or she is living this life. Some scholars have gone so far as to suggest that Dante expected his poem to be read with the same seriousness as Scripture. Dante himself was profoundly influenced, poetically and spiritually, by sacred and secular texts from his own time and from ancient times. Perhaps most telling for this theme was the impact Augustine’s Confessions had on the poet. In Book 8 of that important work, Augustine (354–430) writes about the power of literature to convert and uses himself as a moving example. He tells of sitting in a garden during a time of intense emotional and spiritual turmoil. In his moment of greatest anxiety, he heard a voice telling him to open the book he had with
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TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY
Read Book Six of Virgil’s Aeneid and compare Aeneas’s encounter with the dead to meetings with selected souls in Inferno by Dante’s Pilgrim. How are the encounters similar? How are they different? Why? Prepare a chart with PowerPoint to use while presenting your findings to a group.
Choose either Inferno, the Mount of Purgatory or the heavenly rose in Paradise. Following Dante’s description and modern illustrations like those printed in your translation, redraw the levels. Choose five levels and put contemporary public figures on them. Give reasons for your choices and placements, according to Dante’s explanation of what happens on each level. Write up this exercise. Have volunteers present their drawings and choices to the group and then discuss the appropriateness of the choices. Dante lived in political exile while he wrote the Divine Comedy. Research the politics of early fourteenth-century Florence. Use your research findings to explain Dante’s criticism of his own city in Inferno or Purgatory. Focus on no more than two characters. Write a research paper on this subject with documentation.
Dante’s love for Beatrice Portinari was at first physical and earthly, and he wrote love poetry to her. Research their historical relationship. Write a short critical paper, explaining how the Pilgrim in Purgatory and/or Paradise used his love to turn Beatrice into his teacher and guide to salvation.
Young Adult assignment: The fantasy writers, the Inklings (J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and Charles Williams) were among the first to use images and themes from Dante for modern fantasy. Using Peter Jackson’s film of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, show clips of scenes that are similar to Dante’s vision of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise and explain to a group how they are used in Tolkien’s story to explain Frodo’s journey.
Read the Epic of Gilgamesh from Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) and compare and contrast Gilgamesh’s journey to find immortality and spiritual truth to the Pilgrim’s in Divine Comedy. Write a paper explaining the wisdom each gains on the journey, including quotations from both poems.
him to a random place and to read. Doing so, he finds Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, the story of his conversion to Christianity. Paul’s tale has such a profound effect upon Augustine that he puts down the book, reading no further. Immediately, his suffering is relieved, and he converts to Christianity. Dante used this episode from the Confessions to make a point about the power of literature and the need for correct reading. In Inferno (5), Dante has Francesca tell of the effect reading had on her and Paolo, her lover. They were not reading Scripture like Augustine, but a medieval romance, Lancelot. Francesca says that she and Paolo reached the place where the lovers in the tale kiss. Then,
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echoing Augustine, she says they read no further, implying that they consummated their adulterous relationship and that Lancelot inspired the act. The difference between these two reading episodes is clear: In each case, the readers were affected by the power of the tales they were reading, but Augustine read Paul’s account correctly and took up the faith, whereas Francesca and Paolo allowed the medieval romance to negatively affect their actions. For misusing the text and the sinful choice they made with free will, they must spend eternity in Hell. The other major example of this theme, and one that counterbalances the Francesca episode, is the meeting between the Pilgrim, Virgil, and
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Statius (61–96 CE ), in Purgatory (22). Ecstatic at meeting Virgil, the great pagan poet, Statius tells him that his Fourth Eclogue, a poem that the Middle Ages read as prophesying the coming of Christ, inspired him to convert to Christianity. Unlikely as this might seem, Dante uses it as another example of the power of literature and the need for right reading, for correctly employing free will in the service of salvation.
Order and Disorder Dante’s age was a chaotic one, and his poem, particularly Inferno, takes the fourteenth century’s sacred and secular strife as a dominant theme. He rails against corrupt popes and clergy and lashes out at politicians, assigning many of them permanent places in Hell. Nonetheless, Dante did not hate the institutions of church or state. As a political and religious conservative, he saw such institutions as vital to maintaining social and spiritual order. Indeed, Dante hoped for a reduction of papal political involvement and that an omnipotent Christian emperor would arise and restore order to his chaotic world. He had great faith in the ability of Emperor Henry VII to do so. Unfortunately, Henry was never able to overcome his political opposition or to maintain papal support, and his unifying efforts failed. A supporter of institutions in the abstract, Dante was angry with those individuals he thought abused their offices or who were corrupt in other ways. For example, he placed Pope Nicholas III (d. 1280) in Hell, angrily stuffing him upside down in a hole, where tongues of fire eternally ‘‘baptize’’ the soles of his feet (Inferno 19). He then goes further and prophesies that Boniface VIII (1217–1303) and Clement V (d.1314) will join Nicholas in his hellhole, where they too will pay for perverting the papacy. Politicians fare no better, particularly the Ghibellines, members of the political party that exiled Dante from Florence. For instance, the Pilgrim finds the Ghibelline leader, Farinata degli Uberti, entombed with other heretics in Hell (Inferno 10). Dante was not above condemning members of his own party, the Guelfs, to Hell either, as seen in the circle of violence. There Guido Guerra and Tegghiaio Aldobrandi run after the green flag with the other naked sodomites. Dante’s Divine Comedy is itself representative of the need he felt for the comfort that comes
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Engraving of a scene from Inferno (Bettmann Corbis)
from order and stability. It is almost as if Dante, through the order he built into his poem, was trying to counteract the disorder he saw all round him. As the last great hierarchical epic of the Middle Ages, this intensely ordered poem attempts to synthesize and summarize the histories of pagan and Christian thought and to weave those systems into a cohesive whole. The sheer complexity of this whole, however, almost works against its author’s need for order and desire for comfort by illustrating just how difficult—if not impossible—constructing and maintaining such a complex system can be.
STYLE Not all epics conform to one definition; however, they share enough of the same poetic characteristics so that they can be grouped under the genre label of epic. Traditionally epics deal with grandly important themes: often begin in medias res in the middle of things): take place over an extended period of time and a large area; have a large cast and involve heroic, often legendary, characters. In keeping with their serious subject matter, epics often involve the gods or God in
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some way. They are narrative in form; in other words, they tell a story. Epics are written in verse of a high register; that is, their authors use formal language and poetic devices such as symbolism and figurative language. Dante’s Divine Comedy has all of these characteristics. Dante’s epic tells the story of the Pilgrim’s journey from sin to grace. For medieval Christians there was no loftier theme about which to write than the soul’s salvation. As the poem opens, Dante the Pilgrim, the poet’s alter ego, finds himself lost in sin, wandering ‘‘in the middle of the road of our life’’ (Inferno 1, l. l). The Pilgrim is at the midpoint along the road of his life, a familiar metaphor. The plural pronoun ‘‘our’’ pulls the reader into the action and includes him or her as virtual pilgrims on this journey to God. Thus, the Pilgrim stands for all Christians, who may read and learn, as he learns, the nature of sin and how to overcome it. Along with this lofty theme and beginning in the middle of things, the Divine Comedy takes place over a number of days and an infinitely large area. The narrative action stretches from Good Friday to Easter Sunday. The setting encompasses nothing less than the entire universe and includes places like the Mountain of Purgatory that Dante invented specifically for the poem. Dante’s Pilgrim travels with his guide, the classical epic poet Virgil, through the depths of Hell, up the Mountain of Purgatory, and through the heavenly spheres to meet God face to face. The theme and scope of this epic are matched by its huge cast of characters, many of them legendary, even mythological. There are over five hundred characters in Divine Comedy, each of them somehow instrumental in the Pilgrim’s theological instruction. There are countless Italian contemporaries of Dante the poet; pagan and Christian heroes and martyrs; kings, queens, emperors, empresses; devils, angels, saints; philosophers, theologians, the Blessed Virgin Mary, Christ, and God the Father himself. There are also a number of poets, past and present. The most important, of course, is Virgil. What more important guide could an epic poet have than Publius Virgilius Maro, whose name—along with that of Homer—is virtually synonymous with the title of epic poet? Virgil’s Aeneid, the tale of Aeneas’ wanderings after the Trojan War, remains one of the great epics of all times. Book 6 of the Aeneid, in which the hero, who is
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predestined to found Rome, travels to the underworld, was especially inspirational to Dante. The Divine Comedy—like the Aeneid and Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey—devotes a good deal of time to supernatural beings. Being a Christian epic, of course, Dante’s divinities are saints, angels, and the Trinity. All of these divine characters intervene in some way to speed the Pilgrim along on his trip to the Empyrean, that space of pure white light where God dwells. The Virgin Mary notifies Saint Lucy that Dante is in spiritual trouble. Saint Lucy, in turn, notifies the blessed Beatrice, who sends Virgil to guide her Pilgrim, the man who loved her on earth, through Hell and Purgatory. Dante chose to tell this massive tale of his Pilgrim’s trip through the three regions in verse, following the epic form. However, he did not write it in Latin, then the language of the church and of most serious religious poetry. Dante wrote in the vernacular, in the Tuscan dialect of his people. He did so because he wanted his message to be available to a wider audience, to include more than just those who could read Latin. Even though he wrote in the common tongue, his diction, the type of speech he used, is of the highest register, which perfectly suited his purposes. Flexible and expressive though it was (and is), Dante’s Tuscan dialect was not completely up to the task. This is no criticism of the language, for it is doubtful whether Latin or any other language would have suited him any better. The problem was that many of the things Dante needed and wanted to represent were just too otherworldly. Put another way, he had trouble describing God and parts of his Creation. Dante invented words, most famously the nearly untranslatable trasumanar, and had to resort to metaphor, to figurative language, consistently as he tried to replicate Creation. The section in which trasumanar occurs stands as a good example of the poet’s acknowledging his impossible task: ‘‘The passing beyond humanity [trasumanar] may not be set forth in words’’ (Paradise 1, l. 70). The closer his Pilgrim gets to God and the more he transcends (his) humanity, the more frequently Dante confesses that language fails him. Indeed, on a truly profound level, the entire poem is a metaphor, a figure for a journey that never happened but that seemingly had to have happened for Dante to write about it for his readers.
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HISTORICAL CONTEXT Papacy and Empire: The Decline Dante Alighieri was born into one of the most chaotic periods of Western European history. His birth in 1265 and death in 1321 meant that he witnessed the decline of the two most powerful social institutions of the Middle Ages, the Holy Roman Empire and the papacy. This degeneration—this loss of power, control and respect—affected Dante emotionally, psychologically, and politically. The conflicts between church and state constitute a major thread in Dante’s Divine Comedy and are the subject of his Latin treatise De Monarchia (On Monarchy). This work is his plea for a universal monarchy, one that would co-exist peacefully with a pope who would hold spiritual sovereignty over the same subjects. The process of decline began well before Dante’s birth and continued long after his death. By the thirteenth century, the papacy’s interests had grown ever more political and less and less spiritual. As C. Warren Hollister writes, it was at this time that the papacy ‘‘[lost] its hold on the heart of Europe.’’ By moving into national and imperial power politics and business, it created and widened the gulf between its increasingly secular agenda and the increasing spiritual needs of its members. Not only had the Roman Catholic Church lost the respect of its flock, it found itself constantly at odds with purely secular authorities. Kings of western and northern European countries were centralizing their power during the thirteenth century and felt threatened by the presence in their midst of this independent, very powerful institution. These monarchs found themselves in constant conflict with this massively influential power, an institution controlled from Rome and, therefore, less easy to control on a local level, for the hearts, minds, and coffers of its subjects. Such was particularly the case for the kings of England and France. After Boniface VIII passed the bull Unam Sanctum in 1302, declaring that all Christians concerned with the salvation of their souls owed allegiance to the papal monarchy, the situation decidedly took a turn for the worse. The king of France, Philip the Fair, captured Boniface at his palace in Anagni and tried to spirit him off to France for trial. Philip’s spiritual coup failed, but Boniface died in shame soon after. After Boniface’s death, the papal cardinals elected as pope the politically subservient
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Frenchman Clement V. Clement’s moving the papacy from Rome to Avignon in 1309 instituted the so-called Babylonian Exile or Captivity, which lasted until 1377 and meant the end of the strong medieval papacy. The secular empire fared no better. Moving back three decades or so before Dante’s birth to the reign of the Sicilian-born emperor Frederick II, chaos was the norm in the secular realm, too. Pope Innocent III was Frederick’s mentor and supported his bid for the throne, thus demonstrating one significant instance of papal involvement in secular politics. Frederick’s desire to unify a fractious Italy and to make it the imperial center earned him the hatred of the papacy, caused him to lose a good portion of his German holdings and set much of Italy against him in rebellion. His enterprises made particular enemies of Gregory IX and Innocent IV. These popes built political alliances and used all their powers and sanctions to thwart Frederick’s plans, until 1245 when Innocent and a universal Roman Catholic Church council excommunicated this enemy of the papacy, this so-called Antichrist. The deposed Frederick died in 1250 and was not succeeded until 1273. In that year, Rudolph the Hapsburg was crowned emperor after a nineteenyear interregnum that further weakened the already unsteady imperial monarchy. Like Frederick in Italy, Rudolph wanted to extend and solidify his holdings, and, like his predecessor, aroused nothing but princely discontent. This discontent and the events leading up to it meant the start of six hundred years of German instability. Henry of Luxembourg followed as emperor in 1308, submitted to papal authority, and pledged to restore peace, beginning with Italy. Dante had high hopes for Henry’s monarchy, hopes which were never fulfilled. By this time Dante had grown more critical of Florentine politics and of the papacy, and he went so far as to urge Henry to attack Florence in 1311, when he was in Italy for his coronation. The emperor marched on Florence, but his efforts failed and meant, according to Marguerite Mills Chiarenza, ‘‘the end of Dante’s hopes for the reestablishment of effective imperial power in Italy in the foreseeable future.’’
Florence: Civic Strife Before and during Dante’s time, Italy was, as Charles T. Davis writes, ‘‘a peninsula united by language and history but not by any central government.’’ Indeed, according to Davis, ‘‘Italy remained, after the failure of Frederick II’s
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COMPARE & CONTRAST
1300s: The geocentric order of the Solar System, explained by Claudius Ptolemy (100–178), is accepted by educated people across Europe. Today: The heliocentric order of the Solar System, argued by Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) and others, is understood as fact.
1300s: Christians believe that God presides over all creation and that all created entities are divinely arranged in a fixed hierarchical order. Today: Secular and religious hierarchies are widely observable in diverse societies, with money and power concentrated at the top among a few and increasingly larger groups
attempt to conquer her, in her habitual state of political chaos.’’ Dante was intensely displeased with the state of Florentine politics. Although the Florentine city-state was one of the most prosperous of its day, and although it flourished artistically, intellectually, and commercially, it had long been the site of intermittent civil war, gang violence, and family feuds, which took on regional and even international dimensions. This highly accomplished place was, then, something of a paradox: a thriving commercial and artistic center and yet politically a very dangerous place. This paradox produced Dante’s love/hate relationship with his native city. It did not help that he thought of Florence as the ‘‘most beautiful and famous daughter of Rome,’’ as he referred to it in De Vulgari Eloquentia (On the Vulgar Tongue). Much of the internal strife in Florence was caused by the Guelf and the Ghibelline parties, Italianized forms for the German Welf and Weiblingen. These groups had a long-standing adversarial relationship in Germany, dating to the twelfth century. Guelfs were traditionally associated with papal power and the French monarchy and the Ghibellines with imperial power, although the situation is far more complex than that. They
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in descending economic classes. Conspicuous consumption characterizes the wealthy; starvation and widespread disease plague over one billion living in extreme poverty.
1300s: The Roman Catholic Church is the strongest religious institution in Europe. Along with its spiritual duties, the Church is involved in local and international politics, and learned men in all regions within the its influence speak its language, Latin. Today: International organizations such as the International Monetary Fund, United Nations, and North Atlantic Treaty Organization have worldwide influence. English is an internationally used language.
were introduced into Florentine politics following a quarrel arising out of the murder of Buondelmonte de’ Buondelmonti by members of the Amidei family on Easter Sunday, 1215. The Buondelmonti family headed the Guelf faction and the Uberti the Ghibelline one. After the murder, the Guelfs reached out to the papacy for support, the Ghibellines to the empire, and Florence became bitterly divided. Their struggles lasted in earnest (although did not really end) for sixty-three years, until 1278, and control of Florence shifted back and forth, from Guelf to Ghibelline hands. In 1266, one year after Dante’s birth, the Guelfs regained control of Florence and began nearly thirty years of peace and prosperity. They prevailed but in 1300 split themselves into factions, the White Guelfs and the Black Guelfs. The Whites were led by the rich and powerful Cerchi, a family of prosperous merchants who eventually associated themselves with the Ghibellines. The Blacks were led by the Donati, a family with banking interests all over Europe. Dante was intimately involved in this conflict, and although he was born into a Guelf family, he came to side with the Whites and the Ghibellines in opposition to a papal monarchy
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that if he ever returned to Florence he would be arrested and burned alive. It seems probable that he never did return there.
CRITICAL OVERVIEW
Manuscript page from the Divine Comedy (The Library of Congress)
and to Charles of Valois. Dante participated in military service as a member of the cavalry, which he joined in 1289. He fought with Florence and her Guelf allies against Arezzo, in their victory at the battle of Campaldino in 1289, and in the Guelf victory at Caprona in August of that year. In 1295, he served on the People’s Council of the Commune of Florence and as a member of the council that elected that city’s Priors. In 1296, he was on the Council of the Hundred, an influential political body involved in Florentine civic and financial matters. He traveled as ambassador to San Gimignano in 1300 and was elected that year to the high office of prior. Again as ambassador, he was sent by the Whites to meet with Pope Boniface at Anagni. While he was away, the Whites lost power, and the Blacks exiled Dante for two years. They charged him with conspiracy against the pope and Florence. Dante refused to appear at his hearing in 1302 or to pay his fines, since he thought doing so would be an admission of guilt. The Blacks told him
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Dante’s poem, particularly its allegorical qualities, provoked commentary almost from the moment of its completion. Indeed, Dante himself was perhaps its first critic. In a letter he wrote to his patron, Can Grande della Scala, the man to whom he dedicated the Paradise, Dante suggested his poem be read on four levels. The first level is the literal one, on which the poem is about a physical journey toward God taken by the poet himself. The other three levels are allegorical, abstractly symbolic, and ever more complex. From the beginning of the epic’s public life, commentators were driven to pull these abstract allegorical meanings out of Dante’s poem, to uncover deeper meanings in its literal level, as they did with Scripture. As Ricardo Quinones notes in Dante Alighieri, there were twelve commentaries written on the Divine Comedy between Dante’s death in 1321 to 1400. Dante, a political exile, was praised in the year of his death by his fellow Florentine, Giovanni Villani, who included a biography and praises of Dante in his chronicle of Florence. Dante’s sons Jacopo and Pietro were the first to write commentaries on the Divine Comedy, and their work, like that of other early commentators, is vital to understanding the socio-cultural references that pervade the work. (Many of these commentaries are online as of 2010 and accessible through the Dartmouth Dante Project.) The Florentine poet Boccaccio was the first real keeper of the flame, though. He wrote the first life of Dante and gave the first university lectures on the Divine Comedy in Florence during the academic year (1373–1374). His correspondence with the poet Francesco Petrarch is particularly revealing, because it provides a glimpse of the beginnings of a poetical rivalry with Dante that was to continue for years and because the correspondence reveals that Petrarch felt rather envious of his contemporary’s popularity. It was not until 1481, though, that Dante’s name was fully restored in his native Florence. That year the city produced a major edition of Dante’s poem in which Cristoforo Landino referred to him as ‘‘divino poeta’’
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(divine poet). This adjective, as Quinones reports, was used in the 1555 Venetian edition of the work and applied to the title. From then on, the poem that Dante called his Commedia became known as his Divina Commedia, the Divine Comedy. However, as Werner Friederich in Dante’s Fame Abroad points out, such veneration was not sustained in western Europe through the nineteenth century. Although Dante has been a major force of inspiration in English letters since Geoffrey Chaucer, in countries where the Enlightenment took stronger hold, such as France, his reception was less favorable. The predominance of rational thought there and a reliance on grammatical and rhetorical studies during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries meant that Dante’s poem fell from favor. German readers and critics valued Dante more during this time for his antipapal stance than as a poet, and in Spain after the fifteenth century, Friederich writes that Dante was ‘‘completely neglected.’’ Dante does not seem to have had much impact in the United States during this time, although Thomas Jefferson was interested in his poetry. There was also the occasional article on Dante in American magazines. Interest in the United States really did not begin in earnest, though, until the nineteenth century with writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The latter’s magnificent translation of the Divine Comedy, published in 1867, continued to be read into the early 2000s. In the nineteenth century, with the rise of Romanticism, scholarship changed rather dramatically regarding Dante’s epic. The literarycritical focus shifted from grammar and rhetoric to dramatic, historical, and national concerns. Romantic critics tended to focus on the poem’s drama, on the way Dante characterized the inhabitants of the three regions, and to ignore the poem’s allegorical and theological aspects. Dante’s Inferno was the inspiration for a number of compassionate character studies. Francesco DeSanctis’ famous essay on Francesca da Rimini, whom Dante placed in hell for adultery (Inferno 5), is a classic of the genre. For critics like DeSanctis, the value in the poem—particularly Inferno—derives from the pleasure the reader gets from its dramatic characterizations. This interest led to critical sympathizing with figures such as Francesca and the belief that Dante, too,
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must have felt this way. Although not surprising, given the romantics’ emphasis on feeling and emotion in their own poetry, such readings of this medieval text are misguided. Using Francesca as an example, critics like DeSanctis were seduced by her poetic monologue, just as Dante’s Pilgrim is. The latter faints out of sympathy with Francesca’s plight because he misreads her lust for the adulterous Paolo as love. In the early twentieth century, Benedetto Croce reacted to such romantic readings by separating the poem’s structure from its theology. Nonetheless, as Marguerite Mills Chiarenza states in The Divine Comedy: Tracing God’s Art, Croce found Dante at his best when he was intuitive. Ironically, then, Croce legitimized the romantics’ focus on compassion and drama. After all, Croce argued, allegory is artificial and doctrinal—anything but intuitive—and a work that relies upon such artifice is not poetry. Although such assertions meant that Croce’s theories were hard for many to accept, he did influence a large following. After Croce, two American Dante scholars greatly influenced response to the work: Charles Singleton and John Freccero. Singleton’s facingpage edition of the poem became the standard edition for American critics and offers a wealth of scholarship and interpretation. Singleton argued for an organic or holistic reading of the Divine Comedy, and Freccero went even farther in this direction. Their work garnered legions of followers. Efforts to collect critical materials for readers and scholars have resulted in several useful books. Editor Anne Paolucci’s two volumes of the lectures of Professor Dino Bigongiari, delivered to his graduate Dante course at Columbia University in the 1950s, preserve the insights of one of the great Dante scholars of the twentieth century in Backgrounds of the Divine Comedy (2005) and Readings in the Divine Comedy (2006). Readers get useful overviews in the short articles by noted Dante scholars in the updated Cambridge Companion to Dante, edited by Rachel Jacoff (2007). Critics have also responded to the burgeoning representation of Dante’s epic in the visual arts, film, and performing arts in Dante on View: The Reception of Dante in the Visual and Performing Arts, edited by Antonella Braida, Luisa Cale,` and Alex Cooper in 2007.
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CRITICISM Daniel Terkla Terkla holds a PhD in comparative literature from the University of Southern California and is professor of English and humanities coordinator at Illinois Wesleyan University. In the following essay, he traces the Pilgrim’s journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. By focusing on one primary image in each of the poem’s main sections, he demonstrates how the Pilgrim attains wisdom and argues that, ideally, the pilgrim reader also may do so. Dante’s Divine Comedy is a poetical paradox, a brilliant failure. How can one of the great works of Western literature—one of the most innovative, profound and, in many ways, unsurpassed poems of the Middle Ages—be a failure? Put simply, neither Dante nor any poet before or after him was capable of accomplishing this impossible task: to use the imperfect medium of language to represent convincingly and accurately his journey to Paradise and, even more problematic, to write God, to represent the unrepresentable. Dante himself was aware of the impossibility of his undertaking, of course, and this drove him even harder, pushed him to lead his reader to that final, stunning vision of God. Most astonishingly, he very nearly succeeded. As the Pilgrim travels toward God, the poet’s task becomes increasingly difficult. The closer Dante moved his Pilgrim to his goal, the more regularly his language failed him, until he had to admit that his descriptive ‘‘wings were not sufficient,’’ that his ‘‘power failed lofty phantasy’’ (Paradise 33, ll. 139, 142). In order to leave his reader with the essence of the moment when the Pilgrim’s ‘‘mind was smitten by a flash wherein its wish [to know the mind of God] came to it’’ (Paradise 33, ll. 141-42), Dante had to rely upon metaphor. This kind of figurative language is perhaps the most potent tool for image-making and asserts that two dissimilar objects are in some way equivalent, that, for example, a poem is equivalent to a journey. We know that Dante’s poem is not a literal journey, but it is a figurative one, a metaphorical one. Seeing it in this way allows the reader to cross from the indescribable to the describable, to consider for him- or herself how and why this poetic pilgrimage is relevant to the road of life all travel. Dante’s poem is fundamentally didactic, that is, instructive. In order to accommodate our low-level understanding of the poem’s
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UNDAUNTED BY HIS UNDERTAKING AND DRIVEN BY THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF FULFILLING IT, DANTE STROVE TO MIRROR CREATION AND TO LEAD HIS READER TO SEE THE ‘LOVE WHICH MOVES THE SUN AND THE OTHER STARS.’’’
theological, philosophical, and historical components, it guides its armchair pilgrims carefully through a plethora of unfamiliar images and mystical paradoxes. Dante managed this by constructing his world’s three spaces in a logical order. As the Pilgrim experiences Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, he really re-experiences events Dante the poet claims to have had in his life. Thus, the reader follows the Pilgrim through spaces that present the poet’s memories. As Frances A. Yates writes in his classic study, The Art of Memory: If one thinks of the poem as based on the orders of places in Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, and as a cosmic order of places in which spheres of Hell are the spheres of Heaven in reverse, it begins to appear as a summa [full collection] of similitudes and exempla, ranged in order and set out upon the universe.
Taken together, then, Dante’s remembrances, presented as striking poetic images, produce the world of the Divine Comedy and thus reproduce his supposed journey to Heaven. The Pilgrim receives these images via his sight, which functions on three levels: the ocular or physical, the spiritual, and the intellectual. These levels derive from the writings of Saint Augustine, which were a major influence on Dante’s thought and which correspond to stages of understanding and to cantiche, or what we might call books, of the Divine Comedy: ocular in Inferno, spiritual in Purgatory, and intellectual in Paradise. The lowest level, the ocular, includes sensual experiences of things terrestrial and celestial. It therefore corresponds to the physical nature of Inferno and its closing view of ‘‘the beautiful things that heaven bears’’ (34, ll. 137-38). Level two, spiritual vision and Purgatory mesh in the same way. In this second canticle, the Pilgrim’s spiritual vision makes possible
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WHAT DO I READ NEXT? Saint Augustine’s Confessions had a profound influence on Dante. An excellent translation by R. S. Pine-Coffin (Penguin Classics, 1961) makes this work accessible to students. Giovanni Boccaccio and Leonardo Bruni Aretino, authors in their own rights, wrote early biographies of Dante. Boccaccio’s came some fifty years after Dante died, and Aretino’s followed soon after. Translated by James Robinson Smith, the biographies can be found in The Earliest Lives of Dante, which reissued by Nabu Press in 2010.
of his sources, and here, the boy Diamond, like Dante’s Pilgrim, must go through a redefining spiritual journey to reach heaven. The North Wind is Beatrice, who teaches Diamond about the world and about life, death, and the afterlife.
William Buck’s 1976 retelling of the Indian epic Ramayana reads like a novel and, like Dante’s poem, gives a vision of heaven and hell. The divine prince, Rama, travels to the kingdom of the demons to rescue his wife, Sita. His triumphant return establishes the kingdom of heaven on earth. George MacDonald’s At the Back of the North Wind, published originally in 1871 and reprinted in 2009, is a children’s classic good for young adult and older adult readers. MacDonald acknowledged Dante as one
the encounters with the angels and the dreams he has. Finally, the Pilgrim’s visions of the Earthly Paradise, Christ, and God in Paradise conform to Augustine’s description of the third and highest level of vision, the intellectual. The Pilgrim and reader take in images, store them in their memories, convert them to knowledge—to what Hugh of Saint Victor called history—and graduate to the next level of understanding. As the Pilgrim (and readers following him) progresses from one spherical realm to the next, Dante’s fictional teachers materialize, test, and instruct him about what he has learned. Along with this instruction, Dante’s unique metaphors accommodate the Pilgrim’s weak understanding by converting
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John Milton’s Paradise Lost, the great Protestant epic of the seventeenth century, tells the story of Creation, the fall of Lucifer, and the Fall of Man. In some ways, the epic is also a commentary on Dante’s Catholic Comedy. Perhaps the most useful copy for new readers to use is Gordon Teskey’s Norton Critical edition, which appeared in 2004.
The bestseller mystery by Matthew Pearl, The Dante Club, which Ballantine Books published in 2006, is set in nineteenth-century Boston and includes Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who translated Dante, as well as Oliver Wendell Holmes and James Russell Lowell. Written by a Dante scholar, the novel tells how the club members are able to solve the murder based on their knowledge of Dante and his poem, details of which are packed into the story.
difficult concepts into visual images that they can be more easily deciphered and more easily stored in memory for later retrieval. These images accumulate as knowledge of sin and salvation, which the Pilgrim and Dante’s readers process into divine wisdom, all of which prepare them for the final vision of God in Paradise. After graduating from each training level, the Pilgrim is ready to see with his mind, to link to the mind of God in the most profound way possible. The fact that the Pilgrim achieves one of these levels of vision in each of the three books, suggests that Dante saw them as plottable points upon an ascending scale that moves from potential damnation to certain illumination. This upward
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itinerary demonstrates in small how wisdom is attained by focusing on one vibrant image from each canticle. There are a number of places in the poem where one could begin to chart this progression, but the appearance of Geryon in Inferno (16) is the first instance of the truly outlandish. As such, it works nicely as an example of a visual image processed by the lowest level of vision, which is then firmly imprinted on the reader’s memory. In this section, the Pilgrim and Virgil find themselves at the rim of the Great Barrier and in need of a way down to lower hell, the last of the three infernal regions, where sinners are punished for ever more serious kinds of fraud. The travelers stand at ‘‘the verge’’ (Inferno 17, l. 32) that separates these regions. Virgil, the Pilgrim’s guide and teacher, tosses his student’s belt over the edge, causing the Pilgrim to wonder: ‘‘‘Surely . . . , something strange will answer this signal that my master follows so with his eye’’’ (Inferno 17, ll. 115-16). True to form, the strangest vehicle in the Divine Comedy swims into view, Geryon. This bizarre image of fraud is a patchwork of man and painted serpent: ‘‘His face was the face of a man, so complaisant was its outward appearance, and all of the rest of his trunk serpentine; he had two paws which were hairy to his armpits; his back and chest and both sides were painted with knots and small wheels’’ (Inferno 17, ll. 10-15). Faced with this incredible apparition, the poet asks his reader to trust him, to trust this metaphorical voyage and all it represents. What better infernal example, with perhaps the exception of Lucifer, is there of Augustine’s first level of vision? This is, after all, the creature on whose back the Pilgrim swears he flies down to Hell’s depths: ‘‘I cannot be silent; and by the notes of this Comedy, reader, I swear to you, so that they may not fail of lasting favor’’ (Inferno 16, ll. 12729). There was no need for ‘‘I swear to you,’’ unless Dante knew or expected his reader to doubt his word—or unless he wanted to impress this image upon the reader’s memory. Dante knew that the strangeness of this creature would be surpassed by the vision of Lucifer frozen in the pit of hell—not engulfed in flames as people might expect—and sets the reader up for it by challenging the reader with Geryon. Dante’s Lucifer is not just a perverted version of God; he is not the Trinity, not love, not hope, not charity, neither light nor any longer the bringer of light, not order, not calm, not peace,
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not harmony. The list of negative descriptors is as infinite as God is positively indescribable. Given these considerations and Lucifer’s heavy corporeality, readers can say with Francis X. Newman that ‘‘The confrontation with Satan is the ultimate exercise of the [corporeal vision] since Satan is the ultimate center of corporeality.’’ If readers have little faith in the poet, what will they make of his final vision, of that moment when Dante writes God? Incredulous though they might be at this point, Dante schools them from his unique perspective and pulls them along as the Pilgrim climbs to Heaven. As the Pilgrim comes upon Lucifer, Dante again challenges his reader: ‘‘How frozen and faint I then became, ask not, reader, for I do not write it, because all words would fail. I was not dead nor did I remain alive: now think for yourself, if you have any wit, what I became, deprived of both the one and the other’’ (Inferno 34, ll. 2227). This address to the reader is more intense, more insistent, than the one above. Here is no mere oddity like Geryon: This is the one and only Satan (Inferno 34, l. 127), cause of all the world’s troubles. The address to the reader insures that close attention is paid to this dramatic manifestation of the ultimate corporeal vision. The sight of Satan is so horrific that the poet cannot explain his feelings. Language fails him and Dante tells the reader to ‘‘think for yourself’’; make this image and moment yours; feel something of what I felt at the moment. Here the reader and the Pilgrim have experienced the worst of the corporeal universe; here poet, Pilgrim, and reader momentarily merge in experience. After this profound encounter, readers are ready to move with the Pilgrim to Augustine’s second level of understanding, that of spiritual vision. Purgatory (17), halfway through the Divine Comedy, is an excellent location from which to view this process of growth, change, and education. In this section, Virgil lectures on the crucial doctrine of love as the driving force. This is also the point in the poem where the Pilgrim figuratively comes out of his fog to see the sun, a moment that foreshadows the poem’s final vision. This is such a monumental occurrence that Dante again challenges his reader to confront a startling image and to participate in his Pilgrim’s spiritual education: Recall, reader, if ever in the mountains a mist has caught you, through which you could not see except as moles do through the skin, how, when the moist dense vapors begin to dissipate,
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the sphere of the sun enters feebly through them, and your imagination will quickly come to see how, at first, I saw the sun again, which was now setting. So, matching mine to the trusty steps of my master, I came forth from such a fog to the rays which were already dead on the low shores. (Purgatory 17, ll. 1 9)
Dante expects the reader to match both imaginative power and figurative steps with his Pilgrim, to follow spiritually and ‘‘physically’’ as he ascends. Here he compares the Pilgrim’s mental state to that of a man in an alpine fog, a state in which imagination cannot function because the fog of physicality and faulty vision block the light of God. A glimpse of the sun, of loving enlightenment, is necessary to drive away the confusion before the Pilgrim and reader can confront fully the solar brilliance of divine wisdom. By reading through the skin, so to speak, like Dante’s mole, by seeing through the parchment of the poem, the reader perceives a glimmer of this divine light. Dante fittingly situates his foggy image here and requires his Pilgrim and the reader to ‘‘see’’ at the spiritual level. This transitional space, midway through the poem, requires readers to engage both external and internal modes of sensory perception, if they are to rise to the middle level of understanding. To paraphrase Paul, here in Purgatory things are seen darkly through a glass. This is the realm of dreams, the shadowy zone where imagination holds sway: O imagination, which at times steals us from things outside, which does not leave man aware, even though a thousand trumpets sound, what moves you if the senses offer you nothing? You are moved by the light which is formed in heaven or by the will that sends it. (Purgatory 17, ll. 13 18)
Here we read as the poet calls upon his own ‘‘imagination,’’ linking it to the reader’s before wondering about its source. But what does he mean by imagination? FollowingAristotle, ThomasAquinas explained it as an interior sense, a kind of treasure chest, into which images are received through the physical senses and within which they are stored. The ‘‘light which is formed in heaven’’ sends down instructively helpful images to engage the reader’s imagination. We store images of Geryon, Lucifer, and the mole in the treasure chest of memory. As Charles Singleton explains in his notes on Purgatory, such ‘‘images descend into the mind directly from God, whose will directs them downward’’ to helpusunderstandthingsdivine.Thisfitsnicelywith the spherical universe in which Dante situates his Divine Comedy. The Primum Mobile, the First
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Mover, drives all of the other spheres, which it contains. In turn, the First Mover is contained by the Empyrean, that heaven which exists only in the mind—in the imagination—of God. This is the source of the poet’s inspiration. After crossing from the sphere of the Primum Mobile to the Empyrean, the Pilgrim’s interior vision takes over. He ‘‘sees’’ via his intellect, while the reader is left longing to duplicate his experience and Dante strives to write what he has seen. Fully aware of the task before him, he summons all his talent to write that final moment: ‘‘And I who was coming near the end of all I desired, as I should, raised high the desire burning in me’’ (Paradise 33, ll. 46-48). Shifting to the present tense at the end of his poem, returning to his life in exile, Dante questions his memory before trying to describe his vision of God, the ‘‘infinite good’’ (Paradise 33, l. 81). Such a task not surprisingly brings with it descriptive failure, and Dante admits his shortcomings a number of times in Paradise (33). In fact, Dante tells us that his memory is obliterated by this sight and that it would be easier to remember 2500 years back to Jason’s voyage with his Argonauts, the first ever: ‘‘One moment brings greater forgetfulness than twenty-five centuries’’ (Paradise 33, ll. 94-96). But since the love of God survives even after human memory fails, Dante can—indeed, must—tell us of that instant when he achieved spiritual stasis, peace in God: Therefore my mind, completely suspended, was gazing fixed, immobile and intent, and ever desirous to see more. In that light one becomes such that it would be impossible to think of turning from it for another sight; because the good, which is the object of the will, is completely gathered in it, and outside of this everything is defective that is perfect here. (Paradise 33, ll. 97 105)
As Mark Musa has written, here the Pilgrim witnesses ‘‘the conjoining of substance and accident in God and the union of the temporal and the eternal.’’ To depict as best he can the vision of God, Dante turns to the language of mathematics, to ‘‘Geometry, [which] is whitest, in as much as it is without error.’’ This is the goal toward which his massive poetic machine has moved, and the image of squaring the circle (a feat still unaccomplished) is the perfect figure for the immensity of his task: Like the geometer who completely sets himself to measuring the circle, and in thinking cannot find the principle which he needs, so was I at that new sight. I wished to see how the image
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Comedy are informed by Aeneas’s two departures from Dido in the Aeneid.
Dante encounters Pope Adrian V in Hell (Bettmann Corbis)
came together in the circle and how it fit there; but my own wings were not sufficient for that, until my mind was smitten by a flash wherein its wish came to it. Here power failed lofty fantasy; but my desire and my will already were turned, like a wheel in balance that is moved by the love which moves the sun and the other stars. (Paradise 34, ll. 133 45).
Undaunted by his undertaking and driven by the impossibility of fulfilling it, Dante strove to mirror Creation and to lead his reader to see the ‘‘love which moves the sun and the other stars.’’ Here Pilgrim achieves that full intellectual vision, brief but total and overwhelming understanding of the Godhead, and the reader should, ideally for Dante, desire the same. If this happens, if we experience a slight ray of this burst of light and love through Dante’s seven-hundred-year-old text, we cannot but characterize the moment and the poem that led us there as brilliant. Source: Daniel Terkla, Critical Essay on Divine Comedy, in Epics for Students, 2nd ed., Gale, Cengage Learning, 2011.
Kevin Brownlee In the following essay, Brownlee explores how the two departures of Dante’s guides in the Divine
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It is a commonplace of Dante criticism to say that the Divine Comedy is, in many important ways, a first-person, Christian re-writing of Virgil’s Aeneid. Yet the full implications of this central fact of the Commedia’s structure and meaning are still being explored and extended—so dense and so rich are the Italian poet’s readings and transformations of his Latin model. One of the most complex and suggestive aspects of this master-example of intertextuality is the Divine Comedy’s presentation of its protagonist as a new Aeneas: the Christian poetic—and prophetic—vocation of Dante Alighieri is underwritten by the story of the pagan—but providentially inspired—Aeneas’s founding of Rome. The explicit initial link between the protagonist of the Commedia and the protagonist of the Aeneid occurs in a famous passage in Inferno 2: After having been informed by Virgil of his extraordinary election to the privilege of a journey to the afterlife before he has experienced death, Danteprotagonist expresses his incredulity and his sense of unworthiness, First he adduces successful past models for such a journey: while still alive ‘‘di Silvı¨o il parente’’ (If. 2.13) [the father of Silvius] visited the underworld and ‘‘lo Vas d’elezı¨one’’ (If. 2.28) [the Chosen Vessel] journeyed to Heaven in order to advance Christian providential history. Then, Dante-protagonist affirms his difference from these models: ‘‘Ma io, perche´ venirvi? o chi ’l concede? / lo non Ene¨a, io non Paulo sono’’ (If. 2.31–32) [But I, why do I come there? And who allows it? I am not Aeneas, I am not Paul]. This famous double denial has long been read as a kind of negative self-definition: Dante is in effect affirming that he is both Aeneas and Paul. That is to say, his journey will be modeled on theirs; he will be a new Aeneas and a new St. Paul. The present essay explores a particularly striking and suggestive way in which Dante functions as a new Aeneas: how the two departures of Dante’s guides in the Commedia are informed by Aeneas’s two departures from Dido in the Aeneid. First, I will consider the final exchange between Dido and Aeneas at the moment of the latter’s departure from Carthage (Aen. 4.305–96) as a subtext for the elaborate ‘‘confrontation’’ between Beatrice and Dante in Purgatorio 30 and 31, initiated by Dante’s reaction to the disappearance of Virgil. Second, I will consider the final meeting and definitive separation of Dido
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turn on me a glance? Did he yield and shed tears or pity her who loved him? (vv. 365 70) THE DANTE WHO FAINTS FROM THE RIGHT KIND OF REMORSE IN RESPONSE TO THE WORDS OF HIS LADY THUS FUNCTIONS AS A CORRECTION OF THE AENEAS WHO DID NOT RESPOND TO THE WORDS OF HIS LADY, AND WHO IS NOT OVERWHELMED BY (THE WRONG KIND OF) REMORSE.’’
and Aeneas in the underworld (Aen. 6.450–76) as a subtext for Dante’s reaction to the disappearance of Beatrice in Paradiso 31. What is at issue, I would like to suggest, is a multiple set of parallels in Dante’s alignment of these four textual loci. Of central importance to the way in which these various textual parallels function is the question of effective communication, of the power of words to move the listener. Let us start with Aeneid 4. When Dido learns that Aeneas is secretly preparing to leave Carthage and to abandon her, she confronts him in a long passage of accusation and reproach (vv. 305–330). She presents herself explicitly as weeping and as praying: ‘‘mene fugis? per ego has lacrimas dextramque tuam te . . . oro, si quis adhuc precibus locus, exue mentem’’ (vv. 314; 319) [Do you flee from me? By these tears and your right hand, I pray you . . . if yet there be any room for prayers, put away this purpose of yours]. The introduction to Aeneas’s reply clearly indicates that he has given no external signs of having been moved by Dido’s words: ‘‘Dixerat. ille lovis monitis immota tenebat / lumina et obnixus curam sub corde premebat’’ (vv. 331–32) [She finished: he by Jove’s command held his eyes steadfast and with a struggle smothered the pain deep within his heart]. It is this lack of responsiveness that Dido emphasizes at the opening of her reaction to Aeneas’s attempt at self-justification (vv. 333–61): ...
Even after Dido’s second prayer speech (vv. 365–87), then, Aeneas shows no signs of being moved and continues in his original intention, i.e., to leave Carthage for Italy. In Purgatorio 30, a complex recasting of this first departure from Dido by Aeneas is at issue. The program is set in motion at the extraordinarily important moment that introduces Beatrice’s first direct appearance in the Commedia. For the advent of Beatrice is heralded by the disappearance of Virgil. When Dante-protagonist sees Beatrice for the first time, his intense affective reaction is so powerfully mediated by a key subtext from the Aeneid that the scene is presented as a recasting of that moment in Aeneid 4 when Dido begins to realize that she has fallen in love with the Trojan hero. Having just seen Beatrice, Dante turns to Virgil with the intention of saying to him ‘‘conosco i segni de l’antica fiamma’’ (Pg. 30.48) [I recognize the signs of the ancient flame], thus echoing the words of Dido’s initial confession to her sister Anna: ‘‘adgnosco veteris vestigia flammae’’ (Aen. 4.234) [I recognize the traces of the old flame]. This initial evocation of the Virgilian subtext, as many commentators have pointed out, thus presents the Commedia’s Virgilio as Anna to Dante’s Dido and Beatrice’s Aeneas. The striking gender reversal in this construct is both modified and exploited in the following narrative sequence—arguably the most dramatic in the entire Divine Comedy—as Dante-protagonist, confidently turning toward his beloved guide, discovers that Virgil has disappeared. The tears that Dante sheds over this event constitute, I submit, a transitional moment in terms of the Virgilian subtext, as Dante-protagonist—still playing the role of Dido—weeps over the sudden and inevitable (i.e., providential) departure of Virgil who now plays the role not of Anna, but of Aeneas. A second shift (in terms of the Virgilian model text) occurs as Beatrice, in her first direct discourse in the Commedia (and in the poem’s only naming of its author), simultaneously reproaches Dante for his tears on Virgil’s behalf, and exhorts him to cry in a different—and better—way: ...
False one! no goddess was your mother, nor was Dardanus founder of your line, but rugged Cau casus on his flinty rocks begat you, and Hyrca nian tigresses suckled you. For why hide my feelings? or for what greater wrongs do I hold myself back? Did he sigh while I wept? Did he
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Dante, because Virgil leaves you, do not weep yet, do not weep yet, for you must weep for another sword! (Pg. 30.55 57)
It is worth noting that the last words of the two speeches which flank Dante’s discovery of
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Virgil’s disappearance in the context of an Aenean/Didonian subtext are fiamma (48) and spada (57), thus evoking the fire that first metaphorically then literally burns Dido in Aeneid 4, and the sword which transforms her metaphorical wound of love at the opening into the literal wound which kills her at the close of Aeneid 4. In terms of the progressive transformation of the Virgilian model effected by the unfolding plot line of Purgatorio 30, Beatrice—at the moment of her initial reproach to Dante—figures the Dido of Aeneid 4 in bono, while Dante, as we shall see, figures the Aeneas of Aeneid 4 in bono. First of all, Beatrice here is presented as speaking regalmente [royally] (v. 70): she is a queen, like Dido. Second, her words to her former lover are a reproach for faithlessness, as Dido’s were to Aeneas in Aeneid 4. Third, Beatrice’s insistence that her interlocutor look at her is one of the strongest parts of her rebuke (Pg. 30.73). Finally, Dante—unlike his negative Aenean model—does respond to the reproaches of his Beatrice-Dido: In a passage that dramatically ‘‘corrects’’ Aeneas’s response to Dido’s reproaches in Aeneid 4 in a Christian context, Dante reacts to Beatrice’s condemnation of his behavior by crying and sighing: ... The ice that was bound tight around my heart became breath and water, and with my anguish poured from my breast through my mouth and eyes. Pg 30.97 99
Within the plot line of the Commedia, this response of Dante as a corrected Christian Aeneas to Beatrice as a corrected Christian Dido, leads directly to the protagonist’s salvation: contrition leads to confession which leads to penance. It is also significant to note here that the most important of Beatrice’s reproaches to the repentant Dante are strikingly reminiscent of Dido’s proleptic reproaches to Aeneas in Aeneid 4. Dido accuses Aeneas of being on the verge of leaving her, of planning to be unfaithful; Beatrice accuses Dante of having already been unfaithful to her, of having forgotten/ abandoned her after her death (Pg. 30.106–45; Pg. 31.43–63). A final significant recall of the Virgilian subtext occurs at the moment when Beatrice, having obtained Dante’s confession and fully explained his fault to him, commands him to raise his head and look at her with the striking phrase: ‘‘alza la barba, / e prenderai piu` doglia riguardando’’ (Pg. 31.68) [lift up your beard and you will. receive more grief through seeing]. The simile used to
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describe Dante’s reluctance to respond to Beatrice is quite significant: ... With less resistance is the sturdy oak uprooted, whether by wind of ours or by that which blows from Iarbas’s land, than at her command I raised my chin (Pg. 31.70 73)
The use of the phrase ‘‘la terra di Iarba’’ as a periphrasis for North Africa is the only mention in the Commedia of the name of Dido’s unsuccessful suitor, king of the Gaetulians in Numidia. What is evoked is both Dido’s love affair with Aeneas, and her abandonment by him. For it is Iarbas who, moved by the fama of Aeneas’s affair with Dido (Aen. 4.196–97), prays to Jupiter (Aen. 4.198–218), and thus causes Mercury to order Aeneas to leave Dido and sail for Italy (Aen. 4.219–78). The reference to Iarbas in Purgatorio 31.72 serves to recall the destructive Virgilian erotic passion of Aeneid 4, at the very moment that it is being dominated, corrected—even ‘‘sublimated’’—by the Christian poetics of Dante-protagonist’s successful conversion by and to Beatrice. In this context, it is worth enumerating each of the three moments when Iarbas is mentioned in the course of Aeneid 4. The first time involves Anna (4.35–43), who invokes both Dido’s rejection of Iarbas as an undesirable suitor and the possible military danger such a rejection might pose to Carthage as reasons for Dido to yield to her new love for (and potential resulting military alliance with) Aeneas. The Carthaginian queen’s initial fidelity to Sychaeus in rejecting Iarbas and her subsequent breach of that fidelity with the newly arrived Trojan prince are thus evoked simultaneously. Aeneid 4’s third and final reference to Iarbas comes in Dido’s first speech of reproach to Aeneas for his plans to abandon her: she desperately invokes the possibility of her future capture by Iarbas as a consequence of Aeneas’s leaving her alone, dishonored and unprotected (Aen. 4.326). Aeneid 4’s central and most elaborate reference to Iarbas, his prayer to Jupiter (4.206–18)—a resentful complaint about Aeneas’s amorous success with Dido—serves as the diegetic cause for the divine intervention that ends the lovers’ idyll, as I mentioned above. The reference to Iarbas in Purgatorio 31 thus evokes— in a variety of inter-related ways—the failure of erotic love associated with Dido. At the same time, the comparison between Dante-protagonist and the uprooted oak in Purgatorio 31 evokes and dramatically reverses the
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culminating moment of Aeneas’s first departure from Dido in Aeneid 4. The Virgilian subtext occurs at the point where the frantic Dido, after having failed herself to convince Aeneas to stay with her, sends her sister Anna to attempt to move her former lover, to persuade him to postpone his departure from Carthage (Aen. 4.416– 36). Anna’s repeated pleading does not succeed: ‘‘sed nullius ille movetur / fletibus, aut voces ullas tractabilis audit’’ Aen. 4.438–39) [but by no tearful pleas is he moved, nor in yielding mood pays he heed to any words]. Aeneas’s definitive resistance to Dido’s final (indirect) plea is articulated by means of an extended simile: ... Even as when northern Alpine winds, blowing now hence, now thence, emulously strive to uproot an oak strong with the strength of years, there comes a roar, the stem quivers and the high leafage thickly strews the ground, but the oak clings to the crag, and as far as it lifts its top to the airs of heavens, so far it strikes its roots down towards hell even so with ceaseless appeals, from this side and from that, the hero is buffeted, and in his mighty heart feels the thrill of grief: steadfast stands his will; the tears fall in vain. (Aen. 4.441 49)
Aeneas’s successful resistance to Dido’s words is required by the poetics of the Aeneid, and the figure of the annoso valida cum robore quercus which remains upright is thus positive. The Christian poetics of the Commedia require on the contrary that Dante-protagonist yield to the power of Beatrice’s words: the positive figure is here the uprooted robusto cerro. What results is a striking instance of what Robert Ball has termed the difference between Virgilian pietas and Dantean pieta` At the same time, this corrective inversion by Dante of his Aenean model carries the larger Christian implication of ‘‘weakness as strength,’’ of ‘‘dying into life.’’ At the level of plot, the ensuing vision of Beatrice will lead to the culmination of Dante’s contrition, as he faints from the intensity of his remorse (Pg. 32.85–90). What follows is his absolution in Lethe, and his full entrance into the Earthly Paradise, i.e., the successful continuation of Dante’s ‘‘divine mission’’ as a new Aeneas (which involves his own personal salvation). In this connection, I would like to consider an additional textual model for Dante’s contrition. In the Aenean/Didonian context set up for Purgatorio 31 (most explicitly) by the Iarbas reference, I suggest that the wind (vento, v. 71) which uproots the sturdy oak in the simile recalls
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the venti punishing the Lustful in Inferno 5. Vento is used four times in the canto of Paolo and Francesca, the greatest number in a single canto in the entire Commedia: vv. 30, 75, 79, 96. This recall of Inferno 5 helps to introduce the moment of Dante’s contrition in Purgatorio 31. A key contrast is suggested: the right tears and sighs [‘‘lagrime e sospiri’’] of Dante in Purgatorio 31.20 recall and reverse the incorrect lagrimar (of Dante) and the incorrect dolci sospiri (of Francesca) in Inferno 5.117–18. This ‘‘redeemed’’ (and ‘‘redemptive’’) instance of passion leads to contrition and, ultimately, to salvation. Dante’s faint in Purgatorio 31.89 plays a crucial role in this network of intra- and inter-textual references: He faints from the intensity of his remorse (penter, 85; riconoscenza, 88): ‘‘io caddi vinto’’ (Purg. 31.89) [I fell overcome]—conquered by/into spiritual life. In Inferno 5, Dante-protagonist was still susceptible to the wrong kind of passion, and fainted from the intensity of pity (pietade, 140), i.e., fellow feeling with ‘‘dead’’ sinners, complicity in Francesca’s lust (and her ‘‘lustful’’ language). There his faint involved the risk of spiritual death: ‘‘io venni men cosı` com’io morisse. / E caddi come corpo morto cade’’ (Inf. 5.14142) [I swooned as if I were dead, and fell as a dead body falls]. Thus Dante’s faint caused by Beatrice in Purgatorio 31 recalls and corrects his faint caused by Francesca in Inferno 5. The Iarbas reference in Purgatorio 31.72 figures simultaneously the powerful threat of Didonian passion, and Dante-protagonist’s distance from it at this point in the poem. It thus contrastively places Dante’s immanent swoon (in Purg. 31) in the context of Dido’s fatal passion, as, in a ‘‘complicitous’’ manner, Dido’s presence in the Second Circle had done vis-a`-vis Dante’s swoon at the end of Inferno 5. In this connection it is interesting to recall Dido’s repeated swooning after she has stabbed herself at the end of Aeneid 4, in particular, lines 688–89: ‘‘illa gravis oculos conata attollere rursus / deficit’’ [She, trying to lift her heavy eyes, swoons again] (cf. also Aen. 4.690–91). At the same time, Dante-protagonist’s faint in Purgatorio 31.88–90 can be seen, I think, as prefigured by the simile of the ‘‘uprooted oak’’ in Purgatorio 31.70–71, which correctively inverts Aeneas’s nonreaction (expressed in the simile of the ‘‘sturdy oak which is not uprooted’’ in Aen. 4.441–49 to Dido’s final appeal as transmitted by Anna. The Dante who faints from the right kind of remorse in response to the words of his lady thus functions as a correction of the Aeneas who did
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not respond to the words of his lady, and who is not overwhelmed by (the wrong kind of) remorse. All of this directly relevant to the Commedia’s intertextual usage of Aeneas’s second departure from Dido, in Aeneid 6. In this Virgilian scene, all of the terms of Aeneas’s first departure from Dido in Aeneid 4 are reversed. Here, Aeneas encounters the shade of Dido during the course of his visit to the underworld, guided by the Sibyl. While in the earlier departure, Dido wept while pleading in vain with the dry-eyed Aeneas not to leave her, here when the Trojan hero first spies the Carthaginian queen: ‘‘demisit lacrimas dulcique adfatus amore est’’ (v. 455) [he shed tears and spoke to her in tender love]. Having caused Dido’s death by abandoning her, Aeneas now attempts to excuse his behavior to the shade of this victim, and it is now he who begs her not to leave him: ‘‘siste gradum teque aspectu ne subtrahe nostro. / quem fugis? extremum fato, quod te adloquor, hoc est’’ (Aen. 6.465–66) [Stay your step and do not withdraw from our view. Whom do you flee? The last word Fate suffers me to say to you is this!’’]. The ‘‘quem fugis?’’ [whom do you flee?] spoken by Aeneas to Dido in 6.466 recalls and symmetrically reverses the ‘‘mene fugis?’’ [do you flee from me?] spoken by Dido to Aeneas in 4.314, as Austin notes. The precise inversion of the speech situation in the Aeneid 4 encounter is emphasized here at the conclusion of Aeneas’s plea to Dido (Aen. 6.456–66). He now attempts to move her as she had attempted to move him earlier; she is now as unresponsive as he had been earlier: ... With such speech amid springing tears Aeneas would soothe the wrath of the fiery, fierce eyed queen. She, turning away, kept her looks fixed on the ground and no more changes her coun tenance as he essays to speak than if she were set in hard flint or Marpesian rock. At length she flung herself away and, still his foe, fled back to the shady grove . . . (vv. 467 73)
The earlier comparison of Aeneas to stone [cautes, Aen. 4.366), as he is unmoved by Dido’s words, is here echoed by a comparison of Dido to stone (cautes, Aen. 6.471), as she is unmoved by Aeneas’s words. The sequence ends with Aeneas, impotent and tearful, watching Dido leave him in the underworld as he had left her on earth: ‘‘nec minus Aeneas, casu concussus iniquo, / prosequitur lacrimis longe et miseratur euntem’’ (vv. 475–76) [Yet none
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the less, dazed by her unjust doom, Aeneas attends her with tears afar and pities her as she goes.] In Paradiso 31, Beatrice, after having conducted Dante from the Earthly Paradise to True Paradise (the Empyrean, the 10th—the spiritual— Heaven), disappears from her charge in a way reminiscent of Virgil’s disappearance in Purgatorio 30. The parallels between the two scenes require that they be read together, superimposed one on the other. Part of what results from this important intra-textual moment is a measure of the progress made by Dante-pilgrim under Beatrice’s tutelage. At the same time, an important contrast is suggested—in terms of Dante-protagonist’s diametrically opposed reactions—between, on the one hand, the tragedy of Virgil the character (sent back to the First Circle of Hell) linked to the tragic history of the Aeneid, and, on the other hand, the comedy of Beatrice the character (translated to her position in eternal glory) linked to the comic Christian history of the Divine Comedy, which is also the comic autobiography of Dante Alighieri, whose ultimate happy ending at the level of plot contrasts dramatically with the diegetic conclusion to Aeneas’s biography at the end of Aeneid 12. In this context, Dante’s joyful prayer of Beatrice after her disappearance in Paradiso 31 is a corrective rewriting of his tearful lament to Virgil after his disappearance in Purgatorio 30. Significantly, the first speech refers to ‘‘Virgilio a cui per mia salute die’mi’’ (Pg. 30.51) [Virgil to whom I gave myself for my salvation], while the second speech addresses the donna who ‘‘soffristi per la mia salute / in inferno lasciar le tue vestige’’ (Pg. 31.80–81) [suffered to leave your footprints in Hell for my salvation] (emphasis mine . . . ), as Scancarelli Seem notes. When Beatrice disappears in Paradiso 31, Dante does not weep as he had at the moment of Virgil’s disappearance in Purgatorio 30. Let us consider the narrative context of Dante’s discovery that Beatrice is no longer standing beside him. Having feasted his eyes on the ranks of the inhabitants of the Celestial Rose, Dante desires further explanation from his guide: ... and I turned with rekindled will to ask my lady about things as to which my mind was in sus pense. One thing I proposed and another answered me: I thought to see Beatrice, and I saw an elder (Pr. 31.55 59).
The discovery that Beatrice has gone away provokes a simple question which is immediately answered. In response to Dante’s query ‘‘Ov’ e`
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ella?’’ (v. 64) [where is she?], St Bernard replies that Beatrice is still visible, now in her proper position in the celestial hierarchy of the Rose. On the one hand this is a corrective recall of Purgatorio 30: Beatrice the fully Christian guide has not disappeared as Virgil did. On the other hand, this scene is also, I would like to suggest, a corrective recall of Aeneid 6.450–76. Dante’s final sight of his Lady in her permanent position in the afterworld, is parallel to Aeneas’s final sight of Dido in hers. The key difference is not simply that Beatrice in the Empyrean is—among other things—a correction of Dido in the underworld. The most important part of this program involves Dante’s famous farewell speech of thanksgiving to his lady (Pr. 31.79–90). For Beatrice, unlike Dido with the repentant Aeneas, shows herself to be responsive to Dante’s prayer: ... So did I pray; and she, so distant as she seemed, smiled and looked on me, then turned again to the eternal fountain. (Pr. 31.91 93)
By way of conclusion, I would like to make two general points about the ways in which Aeneas’s two departures from Dido in the Aeneid inform the departures of Dante’s two guides in the Commedia. First, there is the question of the power of words to move the listener. At both moments of departure in the Virgilian subtext, verbal communication is ineffective. In Aeneid 4, Aeneas is unmoved by Dido’s accusations and by her plea. In Aeneid 6, the roles are reversed and it is Dido who is unmoved by Aeneas’s tearful plea. By contrast, the two parallel scenes in the Commedia involve effective—‘‘successful’’—verbal communication. Dante responds to Beatrice’s reproaches in Purgatorio 30–31 with contrition, confession and repentance. In Paradiso 31 Beatrice (in a final corrective Christian rewriting of Dido in the afterlife) responds favorably to Dante’s words—his prayer—with her last smile in the poem. The futile sermones of Aeneas (Aen. 6.470) are made good by Dante’s act of prayer (orai; Pr. 31.91). At the same time, the physical sign of comprehension and response in the addressee also has a spiritual dimension in the Commedia. Dante’s tears of contrition in Purgatorio 30 and 31 signify the successful completion of a speech act whose direct result is a change in the interlocutor’s soul, an essential step forward on the road to personal salvation. Beatrice’s smile in Paradiso 31 signifies the salvific quality both of Dante-protagonist’s specific prayer, and of Dantepoet’s larger vocation and discourse.
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My final point has to do with a basic difference between the Aeneid and the Commedia that enables verbal communication to be effective at these key textual moments: Dante’s Christian ‘‘sublimation’’—his making good—of erotic love. In the political poetics of the Aeneid, the figure of the Lady is eccentric. Erotic love as figured by Dido is a danger, a temptation, an obstacle to the protagonist’s task of (collective) political destiny. In the Divine Comedy, the figure of the Lady is, by contrast, central. The sublimation of erotic love as figured by Beatrice is the essential instrument of the protagonist’s (individual) salvation. In this sense, as in so many others, Dante’s Commedia is a fusion of (or, perhaps better, a dialectic between) first-person lyric and epic narrative, which relentlessly maintains and exploits the tensions between these two modes. Source: Kevin Brownlee, ‘‘Dante, Beatrice, and the Two Departures from Dido,’’ in MLN, Vol. 108, No. 1, January 1993, pp. 1 14.
Dorothy L. Sayers In the following excerpt from an introduction written in 1948 and first published in 1949, Sayers mentions some of the factors that can make understanding the Divine Comedy difficult for a modern reader and offers some pointers for understanding the work. The ideal way of reading The Divine Comedy would be to start at the first line and go straight through to the end, surrendering to the vigour of the story-telling and the swift movement of the verse, and not bothering about any historical allusions or theological explanations which do not occur in the text itself. That is how Dante himself tackles his subject. His opening words plunge us abruptly into the middle of a situation: Midway this way of life we’re bound upon I woke to find myself in a dark wood, Where the right road was wholly lost and gone.
From that moment the pace of the narrative never slackens. Down the twenty-four great circles of Hell we go, through the world and out again under the Southern stars; up the two terraces and the seven cornices of Mount Purgatory, high over the sea, high over the clouds to the Earthly Paradise at its summit; up again, whirled from sphere to sphere of the singing Heavens, beyond the planets, beyond the stars, beyond the Primum Mobile, into the Empyrean, there to behold God as He is—the ultimate, the ineffable, yet, in a manner beyond all understanding, ‘‘marked with our image’’—until, in that final ecstasy,
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Power failed high fantasy here; yet, swift to move Even as a wheel moves equal, free from jars, Already my heart and will were wheeled by love, The Love that moves the sun and the other stars.
Yet the twentieth-century reader who starts out on this tremendous journey without any critical apparatus to assist him is liable to get bogged half-way unless he knows something of Dante’s theological, political, and personal background. For not only is the poem a religious and political allegory—it is an allegory of a rather special kind. If we know how to read it, we shall find that it has an enormous relevance both to us as individuals and to the world situation of to-day. Dante’s Europe—remote and strange as it seemed to the Liberals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries -had much in common with our own distracted times, and his vivid awareness of the deeps and heights within the soul comes home poignantly to us who have so recently rediscovered the problem of evil, the problem of power, and the ease with which our most God-like imaginings are ‘‘betrayed by what is false within’’. Moreover, Dante is a poet after our own hearts, possessed of a vivid personality, which flows into and steeps the whole texture of his work. Every line he ever wrote is the record of an intimate personal experience; few men have ever displayed their own strength and weakness so unreservedly, or interpreted the universe so consistently in terms of their own self-exploring. Nor, I suppose, have passionate flesh and passionate intellect ever been fused together in such a furnace of the passionate spirit. . . . But if Dante is to ‘‘speak to our condition’’, as the Quakers so charmingly put it, we must take him seriously and ourselves seriously. We must forget a great deal of the nonsense that is talked about Dante—all the legends about his sourness, arrogance, and ‘‘obscurity’’, and especially that libel . . . that he was a peevish political exile who indulged his petty spites and prejudices by putting his enemies in Hell and his friends in Paradise. We need not forget that Dante is sublime, intellectual and, on occasion, grim; but we must also be prepared to find him simple, homely, humorous, tender, and bubbling over with ecstasy. Nor must we look to find in him only a poet of ‘‘period’’ interest; he is a universal poet, speaking prophetically of God and the Soul and the Society of Men in their universal relations. We must also be prepared, while we are reading Dante, to accept the Christian and Catholic
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view of ourselves as responsible rational beings. We must abandon any idea that we are the slaves of chance, or environment, or our subconscious; any vague notion that good and evil are merely relative terms, or that conduct and opinion do not really matter; any comfortable persuasion that, however shiftlessly we muddle through life, it will somehow or other all come right on the night. We must try to believe that man’s will is free, that he can consciously exercise choice, and that his choice can be decisive to all eternity. For The Divine Comedy is precisely the drama of the soul’s choice. It is not a fairy-story, but a great Christian allegory, deriving its power from the terror and splendour of the Christian revelation. Clear, hard thought went to its making: its beauty is of that solid and indestructible sort that is built upon a framework of nobly proportioned bones. If we ignore the theological structure, and merely browse about in it for detached purple passages and poetic bits and pieces we shall be disappointed, and never see the architectural grandeur of the poem as a whole. People who tackle Dante in this superficial way seldom get beyond the picturesque squalors of the Inferno. This is as though we were to judge a great city after a few days spent underground among the cellars and sewers; it would not be surprising if we were to report only an impression of sordidness, suffocation, rats, fetor, and gloom. But the grim substructure is only there for the sake of the city whose walls and spires stand up and take the morning; it is for the vision of God in the Paradiso that all the rest of the allegory exists. Allegory is the interpretation of experience by means of images. In its simplest form it is a kind of extended metaphor. Supposing we say: ‘‘John very much wanted to do so-and-so, but hesitated for fear of the consequences’’; that is a plain statement. If we say: ‘‘In John’s mind desire and fear contended for the mastery’’ we are already beginning to speak allegorically: John’s mind has become a field of battle in which two personified emotions are carrying on a conflict. From this we can easily proceed to build up a full-blown allegory. We can represent the object of John’s ambition as a lady imprisoned in a castle, which is attacked by a knight called Desire and defended by a giant called Fear, and we can put in as much description of the place and people as will serve to make the story exciting. We can show Desire so badly battered by Fear that he is discouraged and ready to give up, until rebuked by his squire, called Shame, who
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takes him to have his wounds dressed by a cheerful lady named Hope. Later, he is accosted by a plausible stranger called Suspicion, who says that the lady is much less virtuous and goodlooking than she is made out to be. . . . And so forth, introducing as many personifications of this kind as may be needed to express John’s successive changes of mind. In this way we can work out quite a complicated psychological pattern, and at the same time entertain the reader with an exciting and colourful tale of adventure. In this purest kind of allegory, John himself never appears: his psyche is merely the landscape in which his personified feelings carry out their manœuvres. But there is also a form in which John himself—or what we may perhaps call John’s conscious self, or super-self—figures among the personages of the allegory, as a pilgrim or knight-errant, exploring the wildernesses of his own soul and fighting against opposition both from within and without. The earlier part of The Romance of the Rose is an example of the first kind of allegory and The Pilgrim’s Progress of the second. In neither kind does the actual story pretend to be a relation of fact; in its literal meaning, the whole tale is fiction; the allegorical meaning is the true story. Dante’s allegory is more complex. It differs from the standard type in two ways: (1) in its literal meaning, the story is—up to a certain point and with a great many important qualifications— intended to be a true story; (2) the figures of the allegory, instead of being personified abstractions, are symbolic personages. To take the second point first: In dealing with the vexed subject of symbolism, we shall save ourselves much bewilderment of mind by realising that there are two kinds of symbols. A conventional symbol is a sign, arbitrarily chosen to represent, or ‘‘stand for’’, something with which it has no integral connection: thus the scrawl X may, by common agreement, stand, in mathematics, for an unknown quantity; in the alphabet, for a sound composed of a cluck and a hiss; at the end of a letter, for a fond embrace. The figure X is not, in itself, any of these things and tells us nothing about them. Any other sign would serve the same purpose if we agreed to accept it so, nor is there any reason why the same sign should not stand, if we agreed that it should, for quite different things: infinity, or a murmuring sound, or a threat. With this kind of symbol we need not now concern ourselves, except to distinguish it from the other.
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A natural symbol is not an arbitrary sign, but a thing really existing which, by its very nature, stands for and images forth a greater reality of which it is itself an instance. Thus an arch, maintaining itself as it does by a balance of opposing strains, is a natural symbol of that stability in tension by which the whole universe maintains itself. Its significance is the same in all languages and in all circumstances, and may be applied indifferently to physical, psychical, or spiritual experience. Dante’s symbolism is of this kind. To avoid confusion with the conventional or arbitrary symbol I shall follow the example of Charles Williams and others and refer to Dante’s natural symbols as his ‘‘images’’. We are now in a position to distinguish between a simple allegorical figure and a symbolic image. The allegorical figure is a personified abstraction. Thus, in an allegorical masque, Tyranny might be represented as a demon with a club in one hand and a set of fetters in the other, riding in a juggernaut chariot drawn by tigers over the bodies of Youth, Innocence, Happiness, and what-not, and declaiming sentiments appropriate to tyrannical passions. In a play using symbolic imagery, the dramatist might bring in the figure of Nero or Hitler, wearing his ordinary clothes and simply talking like Nero or Hitler, and every one would understand that this personage was meant for the image of Tyranny. In the Comedy, Dante uses the allegorical figure only occasionally; by far the greater number of his figures are symbolic images. Thus, he is accompanied through Hell, not by a personified abstraction called Reason, or Wisdom, or Science, or Art, or Statecraft, but by Virgil the Poet, a real person, who is, by his own nature, qualified to symbolize all these abstractions. The characters encountered in the circles of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise are similarly not personifications of Sin and Virtue, but the souls of real people, represented as remaining in, or purging off, their sins or experiencing the fruition of their virtues. Being thus real personages, the images of the Divine Comedy are set in a real environment: Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven are not a fiction invented to carry the allegory, but a true picture of the three states of the life after death. I do not, of course, mean by this that Dante’s description of them is meant to be physically accurate. He did not really suppose that Hell was a pit extending from a little way below the foundations of Jerusalem to the centre of the earth, or that Purgatory was a mountainous island in the Antipodes, or that a person could go from one to the other in his
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mortal body in the space of two and a half days; nor did he really imagine that Heaven was located among the celestial spheres. He takes the utmost pains to make his geographical details plausible and scientifically correct; but that is just the novelist’s method of giving verisimilitude to the story. Dante knew better, and from time to time he warns his readers against mistaking a work of the imagination for a bald statement of material fact. He did, however, share the belief of all Catholic Christians that every living soul in the world has to make the choice between accepting or rejecting God, and that at the moment of death it will discover what it has chosen: whether to remain in the outer darkness of the alien self, knowing God only as terror and judgment and pain, or to pass joyfully through the strenuous purgation which fits it to endure and enjoy eternally the unveiled presence of God. But although the literal story of the Comedy is (with the qualification and within the limits I have mentioned) a true one, and the characters in it are real people, the poem is nevertheless an allegory. The literal meaning is the least important part of it: the story with its images is only there for the sake of the truth which it symbolizes, and the real environment within which all the events take place is the human soul. . . . We are apt to be astonished at first, in reading (say) the Inferno, to find how little is actually said about the particular sin of which Dante and we are witnessing the retribution. Sometimes the souls relate their histories (as do Francesca da Rimini, for instance, and Guido da Montefeltro), but even then there is little or no moralizing on the subject. More often there is merely a description of the conditions in which the sinners find themselves, after which a character is introduced and talks with Dante upon some apparently extraneous matter which is closely related, indeed, to the subject of the Comedy taken as a whole, but has no special relevancy to the immediate circumstances. In showing us his images, Dante has already told us all we need to know about the sin. He has introduced us, for example, to Ciacco—a rich and amiable Florentine gentleman, well known and much ridiculed by his contemporaries for his monstrous self-indulgence: the familiar name is enough to remind contemporary readers of what Gluttony looks like to the world; he has also shown us the conditions of Ciacco’s part of Hell—a cold wallowing in mud under the fangs and claws of Cerberus: that, stripped of all glamour, is what Gluttony is, seen
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in its true and eternal nature. Why waste more words upon it? Let Ciacco and Dante converse upon the state of Florence. We now begin to see the necessity for all the notes and explanations with which editors feel obliged to encumber the pages of Dante. To the fourteenth-century Italian, the personages of the Comedy were familiar. To identify them, and to appreciate the positions they occupy in the Three Kingdoms of the After-world, was to combine an understanding of the allegorical significance with the excitement of a chronique scandaleuse and the intellectual entertainment of solving one of the more enigmatical varieties of cross-word puzzle. For us it is different. We do not know these people; nor indeed are we to-day quite so familiar with our classical authors, or even with our Bible, as a medieval poet might reasonably expect his public to be. . . . We need to know what Dante’s characters stood for in his eyes, and therefore we need to know who they were. But that is as much as we need. The purely historical approach to a work of art can easily be overdone by the general reader. Just because it puts the thing away into a ‘‘period’’, it tends to limit its relevance to that period. . . . The poem is an allegory of the Way to God— to that union of our wills with the Universal Will in which every creature finds its true self and its true being. But, as Dante himself has shown, it may be interpreted at various levels. It may be seen, for example, as the way of the artist, or as the way of the lover—both these ways are specifically included in the imagery. . . . For many of us it may be easier to understand Hell as the picture of a corrupt society than as that of a corrupt self. Whichever we start with, it is likely to lead to the other; and it does not much matter by which road we come to Dante so long as we get to him in the end. We cannot, of course, do without the historical approach altogether, for the poem is largely concerned with historical events. Neither can we do altogether without the biographical approach, since the poem is so closely concerned with the poet’s personal experience. The allegory is universal, but it is so precisely because it is a man’s answer to a situation—a particular man and a particular situation in time and place. The man is Dante; the time is the beginning of the fourteenth century; the place is Florence. All Heaven and Earth and Hell are, in a sense, included within that narrow compass.
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Source: Dorothy L. Sayers, ‘‘Introduction,’’ Dante: The Divine Comedy, by Dante Alighieri, translated by Dorothy L. Sayers, Penguin Books, 1949, pp. 9 66.
SOURCES Alighieri, Dante, The Divine Comedy, Oxford World’s Classics, translated by C. H. Sisson and edited by David H. Higgins, Oxford University Press, 2008. Bigongiari, Dino, Backgrounds of the ‘‘Divine Comedy’’: A Series of Lectures by Dino Bigongiari, edited by Anne Paolucci, Griffon House, 2005. Braida, Antonella, and Luisa Cale,` eds., Dante on View, Ashgate, 2007. Chiarenza, Marguerite Mills, The ‘‘Divine Comedy’’: Tracing God’s Art, Twayne, 1989, p. 3. Davis, Charles T., ‘‘Dante’s Italy,’’ in Dante’s Italy and Other Essays, by Charles T. Davis, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984, pp. 1 22. Friederich, Werner P., Dante’s Fame Abroad: 1350 1850, University of North Carolina Press, 1966. Hollister, C. Warren, Medieval Europe: A Short History, 2nd ed., Wiley, 1968, pp. 205, 206, 208. Jacoff, Rachel, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Dante, Cambridge University Press, 2007. Musa, Mark, trans., The Divine Comedy, Vol. III: Para dise, with notes by Mark Musa, Penguin Classics, 1984, p. 397, n. 91 93. Newman, Francis X., ‘‘St. Augustine’s Three Visions and the Structure of the Comedy,’’ in Modern Language Notes, Vol. 72, No. 1, January 1967, p. 65. Quinones, Ricardo, Dante Alighieri, Twayne, 1998. Singleton, Charles S., trans., The Divine Comedy, with notes and commentary by Charles S. Singleton, Prince ton University Press, 1991. Yates, Frances A., The Art of Memory, University of Chicago Press, 1966, p. 95.
provides a summary of each canto at its start, along with explanatory notes, illustrations, and bibliography. Raffa, Guy P., The Complete Danteworlds: A Reader’s Guide to the ‘‘Divine Comedy’’, University of Chicago Press, 2009. This has been described as the best available gen eral guide for students, teachers, and even schol ars in the field. It contains meticulous scholarship and insight that helps readers overcome the chal lenge of Dante’s work. Rubin, Harriet, Dante in Love: The World’s Greatest Poem and How It Made History, Simon & Schuster, 2004. Rubin puts scholarly information into a fast paced narrative covering Dante’s life, his times, and his poem, making his work relevant to twenty first century readers, without oversim plifying. She quotes from many different trans lations of the Divine Comedy. Terkla, Daniel, ‘‘Impassioned Failure: Memory, Metaphor, and the Drive toward Intellection,’’ in Imagining Heaven in the Middle Ages: A Book of Essays, edited by Jan Swango Emerson and Hugh Feiss, Garland, 2000, pp. 245 316. In this study, Terkla examines Abbot Suger’s basilica of St. Denis, the Hereford Mappa Mundi (world map) and Dante’s Divine Comedy to show the ways in which these three so called brilliant failures utilize accommodative and anagogical metaphor in their attempts to over come the necessary failure that results when an artist sets out to depict the ineffable, the inex plicable, regardless of medium. Toynbee, Paget Jackson, Dante Alighieri: His Life and Works, General Books LLC, 2010. Toynbee’s work, originally published in 1901, was long the standard biographical and historical study of Dante. It contains a wealth of useful back ground information for readers in the early 2000s. Toynbee, Paget Jackson, A Dictionary of Proper Names and Notable Matters in the Works of Dante, rev. ed., edited by Charles S. Singleton, Bibliobazaar, 2009. Toynbee’s title gives but a general indication of the scope of this work. Although the dictionary was first published in 1889, it remains one the most valuable aids for studying Dante’s works.
FURTHER READING Brieger, Peter H., Illuminated Manuscripts of the ‘‘Divine Comedy’’, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970. This book includes commentaries by the emi nent Dante scholar Charles S. Singleton, along with a wealth of manuscript illuminations. Musa, Mark, trans., The Divine Comedy, Vol. I: Inferno; Vol. II: Purgatory; Vol. III: Paradise, with notes by Mark Musa, Penguin Classics, 1984. Musa’s unrhymed verse translation comes close to representing the meter and sense of Dante’s difficult terza rima. This eminent Dante scholar
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SUGGESTED SEARCH TERMS Dante Alighieri Divine Comedy Dante AND Inferno Dante AND Purgatory Dante AND Paradise Dante AND Christian theology Dante AND medieval epic
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Epic of Gilgamesh Although more than four thousand years old and written originally on tablets of clay, the Epic of Gilgamesh continues to fascinate contemporary readers with its account of Gilgamesh, ruler of Uruk; his companion, the ‘‘wild man’’ Enkidu; and their exploits together. Generally recognized as the earliest epic cycle yet known—prior to even the Iliad or the Odyssey—the Epic of Gilgamesh was discovered and translated by British Assyrologist George Smith in the late nineteenth century. The Epic of Gilgamesh initially caught the attention of Biblical critics for its episode of the ‘‘Mesopotamian Noah,’’ that is, the character Utnapishtim, who, like his later Biblical counterpart, was advised by the gods to build a great boat to avoid an imminent, disastrous flood. Equally fascinating for the window this epic opens to the ancient and far-removed Sumerian and Babylonian cultures, Gilgamesh’s conflict with the gods, struggles against the forces of nature, and recognition of his own mortality mirrors the always contemporary endeavor to find one’s place both in society and in the cosmos.
ANONYMOUS 2000 BC
At the same time the Epic of Gilgamesh addresses these important metaphysical themes, it is also a story of two friends, Gilgamesh and Enkidu, and their devotion to one another even after death. All in all, the Epic of Gilgamesh contains everything readers have come to expect from great epic literature: fantastic geographies, exotic characters, exhausting quests, difficult journeys, heroic battles, and supernatural beings. It is, above all,
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the gripping story of an epic hero who is driven to meet his destiny and who rises to every challenge with high courage and fierce determination.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY The Epic of Gilgamesh is not the product of a single author in the modern sense but was the progressive creation of several ancient Near Eastern cultures, specifically the cultures of Mesopotamia, the land between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. Originally an oral composition recited by communal storytellers, perhaps priests, to a listening audience, portions of the Epic of Gilgamesh were likely recited for many generations before being recorded by scribes in an archaic form of writing called cuneiform. Scribes wrote the ancient oral stories onto clay tablets with a sharply pointed, triangular stick, and the tablets telling the Gilgamesh story were kept in royal libraries. The most famous royal library was that of Ashurbanipal, king of Babylon during the seventh century BCE , but portions of the Epic of Gilgamesh, from very different time periods, have also been found. The individual stories of the Gilgamesh cycle were first written in cuneiform by ancient Sumerian scribes about four thousand years ago. The story passed from the Sumerians through succeeding civilizations to the Babylonians, who added to or otherwise adapted the Gilgamesh stories to their own culture until a socalled Standard Version of the Epic of Gilgamesh coalesced about 1500 BCE . The Epic of Gilgamesh was then lost for thousands of years beneath the sand and rubble of the ancient Near East until archaeologists began to excavate and discover the ancient tablets during the nineteenth century. English translation of the Epic of Gilgamesh, which began in the 1880s with George Smith, is the product of many scholars’ work and many years of archaeological investigation, historical inquiry, and linguistic research. Even with all of this academic reconstruction, Assyrologists cannot be completely sure of all the details of the Epic of Gilgamesh. Some portions of the story are missing, lost in the broken off sections of cuneiform tablets. Aspects of the ancient languages involved are so obscure and foreign that scholars cannot be sure of an exact translation. At many points, the extant work is at best a reconstruction of what the story said originally, but as new tablets are discovered, knowledge of the Epic of Gilgamesh increases.
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Originally, the Epic of Gilgamesh was written as poetry, but not in the kind of rhyming verse that typifies English verse. The style was closer to the alliterative tradition of a poem such as Beowulf. One available and easily read translation of the Epic of Gilgamesh is the 1972 Penguin Classic paperback version by N. K. Sandars, but many other editions are also available. Sandars’ translation has turned the poetic form of the so-called Standard, or Babylonian, Version of the Epic of Gilgamesh into a narrative form. Moreover, the Epic of Gilgamesh probably appeared originally as five or six separate Sumerian stories that were adapted by later cultures, especially the Babylonians. The current translation has divided the original story found in twelve tablets into eight sections: seven chapters and a prologue. Therefore, the Epic of Gilgamesh has been transformed once again in language, style, and structure for contemporary readers.
PLOT SUMMARY Prologue The Prologue to the Epic of Gilgamesh establishes Gilgamesh’s stature as the special creation of the gods: He is two-thirds divine and one-third human. The strongest and wisest of all humans, he is also the renowned builder and king of the great city of Uruk. The Prologue sets the story in the distant past, in ‘‘the days before the flood,’’ when Gilgamesh himself etched the whole story in stone.
1. The Coming of Enkidu Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, is the strongest of all men, but he is not a kind ruler. He takes advantage of his people. So the people of Uruk describe his abuses to Anu, god of Uruk, who asks Aruru, goddess of creation, to create an equal, ‘‘his second self’’ to oppose Gilgamesh and leave them at peace. Aruru creates Enkidu out of the raw stuff of nature. Enkidu is a fearfully strong, uncultured ‘‘wild man’’ with long hair and coarse features who runs with the beasts and eats grass. A trapper sees Enkidu at a watering hole for three straight days, and the trapper, amazed and dumbfounded, tells his father about the wild man who disrupts his snares. The father advises the son to find Gilgamesh, who gives him a ‘‘harlot’’ or temple courtesan to tame the wild man. The woman embraces Enkidu, cleans and clothes him, and teaches him civilized behavior. As a result, Enkidu becomes a
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who has challenged him, in the street. They fight, and after Gilgamesh throws Enkidu, they embrace and become friends.
2. The Forest Journey
MEDIA ADAPTATIONS
Czech musician Bohuslav Martinu composed the choral piece Epic of Gilgamesh, which was first performed in 1955. Martinu’s work is often performed and widely available in recorder formats. A 2009 reissue of a 1989 performance of his Epic of Gilgamesh, conducted by Zdenek Kosler and performed by the Slovak Philharmonic Orchestra, is available on compact disc from Marco-Polo.
The opera Gilgamesh was written by Serbian director and librettist Arsenije Milosevic and composed by Croatian-Italian musician Rudolf Brucci. It premiered November 2, 1986, at the Serbian National Theatre in Novi Sad.
Shotaro Ishinomori penned the story that inspired the anime series Gilgamesh, directed by Masahiko Murata. Set in the present, rather than the past, the series is influenced by the original epic. It first aired on television in 2003 and 2004 and is available on DVD from ADV Films.
An e-book of the Old Babylonian version of the Epic of Gilgamesh is available online from the Project Gutenberg. An unabridged audio book adaptation of Stephen Mitchell’s Gilgamesh: A New English Version is available on compact disc or download from Recorded Books. Produced in 2004, it is narrated by George Guidall. Adapa Films created a dramatization titled Epic of Gilgamesh: Tablet XI. Following the events of the eleventh tablet, Utnapishtim regales Gilgamesh with the story of the flood that he alone survived. Filmed in Akkadian with English subtitles, this movie is available online on DVD from the Adapa Films. NO production date was available at the online source, http://offlinenetworks.com/adapa.
man. When Enkidu is brought to Uruk, Gilgamesh aborts his impending marriage to Ishtar, the goddess of love and war, and meets Enkidu,
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Enlil, father of the gods, establishes Gilgamesh’s destiny to be king and achieve great feats, but Enkidu is ‘‘oppressed by [the] idleness’’ of living in Uruk. In order to establish his eternal reputation, to ‘‘leave behind me a name that endures,’’ Gilgamesh proposes to travel with Enkidu to the Land of the Cedars and kill its guardian, the fearsome giant Humbaba. Gilgamesh prepares for the journey both by making a sacrifice to Shamash, who gives him the natural elements as allies; by forging a set of formidable weapons, including an axe, bow, and shield; and by seeking the intervention of his mother Ninsun, who adopts Enkidu as her own. Now brothers as well as companions, Gilgamesh and Enkidu begin their journey. On the way, Gilgamesh has three dreams, which though frightening portend a successful end to his quest. Humbaba, the guardian of the cedars, can hear an animal stir from many miles away, and he has seven fearsome ‘‘splendors’’ as weapons. After they arrive at the grove, Gilgamesh and Enkidu send Humbaba into a rage by cutting down one of the sacred trees. After a fierce battle, Gilgamesh defeats Humbaba, who begs for his life. Gilgamesh nearly relents, saving Humbaba momentarily, but acting on Enkidu’s strong warning, Gilgamesh cuts off the giant’s head. They present Humbaba’s head to Enlil, who rages at them for their actions and disburses Humbaba’s seven auras across creation.
3. Ishtar and Gilgamesh, and the Death of Enkidu After Gilgamesh slays Humbaba, Ishtar calls Gilgamesh back to be her groom by promising him many expensive gifts. Gilgamesh now flatly refuses her offer because of her ‘‘abominable behaviour,’’ for he knows how badly Ishtar has treated her previous lovers, turning many of them from men into animals. Ishtar bristles at Gilgamesh’s charges and urges her parents Anu and Antum to set loose the Bull of Heaven upon the city of Uruk and its ruler, Gilgamesh. Ishtar unleashes the great bull against Gilgamesh, but Gilgamesh and Enkidu together slay the bull, proving again their great prowess. Afterward, Enkidu has a dream in which a council of the gods has decreed that Enkidu must die for their
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deeds. Enkidu falls ill and curses the trapper and courtesan who brought him to Uruk, but Shamash reminds him how much good came from the trapper’s and harlot’s action. Enkidu has a second dream about the underworld and its inhabitants, which Gilgamesh interprets as an omen of death. Enkidu languishes ill for days before he dies, and Gilgamesh, who mourns for seven days, offers a moving lament and builds a noble statue in tribute to his friend.
4. The Search for Everlasting Life In his despair, Gilgamesh begins a lengthy quest to find the answer to life’s mysteries, especially the mystery of eternal life. He decides to seek out Utnapishtim ‘‘the Faraway,’’ his ancient ancestor who ‘‘has entered the assembly of the gods’’ and received everlasting life. Sick at heart for the death of Enkidu and realizing more acutely his own mortality, Gilgamesh pushes on through the great mountains of Mashu, gate to the afterlife where the sun sets, where he defeats a band of lions. He then encounters the frightful ScorpionDemon and his mate who guard Mashu and persuades them to let him enter. Gilgamesh travels through twelve leagues of darkness (twentyfour hours) until he enters the garden of the gods. There, in turn, he meets Shamash, the sun god, who discourages his quest; Siduri, goddess of wine and the vines, who encourages him to ‘‘dance and be merry, feast and rejoice’’; and finally Urshanabi, the ferryman of Utnapishtim, who at first tells him his quest is futile but then takes him across the sea of death to Utnapishtim. On the other side of the sea, Gilgamesh recounts to Utnapishtim his journey, Enkidu’s death, and his quest for eternal life. In response to Gilgamesh’s questioning about his search for eternal life, Utnapishtim replies flatly, ‘‘There is no permanence.’’ Disheartened, Gilgamesh persists until Utnapishtim agrees to tell Gilgamesh ‘‘a mystery,’’ the story of how he gained immortality.
5. The Story of the Flood In the ancient city of Shurrupak on the Euphrates River, according to the Utnapishtim’s tale, the clamor of humanity rises up to the gods and disturbs their peace. Enlil calls for the gods ‘‘to exterminate mankind.’’ The council of the gods agrees, but Ea warns Utnapishtim secretly in a dream that a flood is coming. To protect her favorite, Ea tells
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Utnapishtim to build a boat and ‘‘take up into the boat the seed of all living creatures.’’ It takes Utnapishtim seven days to build a boat of seven decks, and after loading it full of his family, wealth, kin, and craftsmen, he rides out a seven-day storm. On the seventh day, the boat runs aground and Utnapishtim releases three birds in succession: the dove and swallow return, but the raven does not, indicating the presence of dry land. After Utnapishtim makes a sacrifice, over which the gods ‘‘gathered like flies,’’ Ishtar presents her opulent necklace as a remembrance of the disaster, and Enlil makes restitution for his rash act by giving Utnapishtim and his wife immortality.
6. The Return Utnapishtim puts Gilgamesh’s desire for eternal life to the test: ‘‘only prevail against sleep for six days and seven nights.’’ Gilgamesh, however, quickly falls asleep as the result of his exertions. To prove that Gilgamesh has slept, Utnapishtim has his wife bake a loaf of bread for each of the seven days Gilgamesh sleeps. After Utnapishtim wakes Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh sees the proof and despairs, realizing more clearly than ever that ‘‘death inhabits my room.’’ Utnapishtim then curses Urshanabi for bringing Gilgamesh to him and commands Urshanabi to bathe and dress Gilgamesh, who is covered in grime and clothed in skins. Utnapishtim’s wife asks Utnapishtim not to send Gilgamesh away empty handed. In response, Utnapishtim reveals the location to a secret underwater plant that will ‘‘restore his lost youth to a man.’’ Gilgamesh harvests the plant and proposes to take it back to Uruk with him, but when Gilgamesh stops at an oasis to bathe, a serpent from the well steals and eats the plant, sloughs off its skin, and disappears again. Gilgamesh bewails the loss—his last chance for immortality— and returns to Uruk. At Uruk, Gilgamesh engraves his exploits in stone to testify to his greatness.
7. Death of Gilgamesh Gilgamesh has fulfilled his destiny to be king, but his dream of eternal life eludes him. The narration concludes with a lament on Gilgamesh’s mortality, a description of the funerary ritual, and a paean of praise to Gilgamesh; his family, his servants, the city of Uruk, and the pantheon of gods all mourn his loss.
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Endukagga
CHARACTERS Adad
Endukagga is a god who governs in the underworld, along with Nindukugga.
Adad is a storm god who endows Gilgamesh with courage at his birth.
Enki See Ea
Antum Antum is the wife of Anu, the sky god or god of the heavens, and mother of Ishtar. Ishtar complains to her parents Anu and Antum when Gilgamesh refuses her offer of marriage and describes how she has abused her previous lovers.
Anu Anu is god of the firmament, the patron god of Uruk, husband of Antum, and father of Ishtar. The Epic of Gilgamesh opens with a description of ‘‘the temple of blessed Eanna for the god of the firmament Anu.’’ Gilgamesh dreams of a falling meteor, which portends Enkidu’s arrival and calls it ‘‘the stuff of Anu.’’
Anunnaki The Anunnaki are gods of the underworld, also known as the seven judges of hell. Their sacred dwellings are in the Forest of Cedars, guarded by Humbaba. They also appear in Utnapishtim’s account of the great flood as forerunners of the storm.
Aruru Aruru is the goddess of creation, or Mother Goddess, who fashions Enkidu from clay.
Aya Aya is the goddess of the dawn and wife of the sun god Shamash.
Belit-Sheri Belit-Sheri is the ‘‘recorder of the gods’’ and scribe of the underworld who ‘‘keeps the book of death.’’ She appears in Enkidu’s dream of the afterlife.
Dumuzi
Ennugi Ennugi is the ‘‘watcher over canals’’ and god of irrigation.
Ereshkigal Ereshkigal is the queen of the underworld, who appears in Enkidu’s dream of the afterlife. She is the wife of Nergal. Ereshkigal was also known as Irkalla, another name for the underworld.
Gilgamesh Gilgamesh is the protagonist or main character of the Epic of Gilgamesh. An historical figure who ruled Uruk around 2700 BCE , Gilgamesh is the child of Lugulbanda, a divine king, and Ninsun. Gilgamesh is the semi-divine king of Uruk; the special charge of Shamash, the sun god; sometime consort of Ishtar, goddess of love and war; and builder of the mighty city of Uruk and its great temple Eanna. Originally the subject of at least five Sumerian myths, Gilgamesh becomes the main character in a Babylonian revision of those earlier stories. In later myths he is a judge of the underworld and is sometimes called its king. The epic narrates the transformation of Gilgamesh from a selfish and thoughtless young ruler into a wise and well-loved king and reveals Gilgamesh’s gradual understanding of his own mortality.
Hanish is the herald of storms and bad weather. He appears with Shullat at the beginning of the storm in Utnapishtim’s story of the flood.
Ea Ea, called ‘‘the wise,’’ is god of the sweet waters and of the arts. He breaks rank with the council of the gods and warns Utnapishtim of the impending flood. Ea is the Akkadian version of the older, Sumerian god Enki.
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Enkidu is Gilgamesh’s ‘‘second self’’ and faithful companion. Aruru fashions Enkidu from clay in the image of Anu. Enkidu is a ‘‘wild,’’ primitive, uncivilized man who has both the hardened physique and virtue of Ninurta, the god of war; the long hair of Ninursa, goddess of corn; and the hairy body of Samuqan, god of cattle.
Hanish
See Tammuz
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Harlot The harlot is a temple courtesan in the cult of Ishtar at the great temple Eanna. The harlot is the woman Gilgamesh sends back with the trapper to
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pacify Enkidu. She initiates Enkidu into the ways of sex and culture, teaching him to eat, drink, and clothe himself. After her ministrations, Enkidu is unable to return to the wilderness. She then takes Enkidu to Uruk where he challenges Gilgamesh.
Nergal Nergal is an underworld god and husband of Ereshkigal. During Utnapishtim’s flood, ‘‘Nergal pulled out the dams of the nether waters.’’
Neti Humbaba Humbaba is a fearsome monster appointed by Enlil to protect the Forest of Cedars. In a fierce battle, Gilgamesh and Enkidu ultimately kill Humbaba and cut down the sacred cedars.
Neti is gatekeeper of the underworld and servant of Ereshkigal.
Nindukugga Nindukugga is a god who governs the underworld with Endukagga.
Irkalla See Ereshkigal
Ningal
Ishtar
Ningal is mother of the sun god, Shamash, and wife of the moon god Sin.
Ishtar is the goddess of love and war and daughter of Anu and Antum. She is the patroness of Uruk, Gilgamesh’s home city. She is fickle and at times spiteful, as demonstrated in her treatment of her former lovers and her wrath at Uruk after Gilgamesh spurns her advances. She inhabits Eanna, Uruk’s fabulous temple, or ziggurat.
Ningizzida Ningizzida is the god of the serpent and lord of the tree of life.
Ningursu See Ninurta
Ninhursag
Ishullana Ishullana is Anu’s gardener, whom Ishtar loved and then turned into a blind mole after he rejected her.
Ki
Ninhursag is the goddess of growth and vegetation, and mother of Enlil. She is known by many other names, including Ki, Ninki, and Ninmah.
Ninki
See Ninhursag
See Ninhursag
Lugulbanda Lugulbanda is one of the ancient kings of Uruk and Gilgamesh’s guardian god and progenitor. Lugulbanda is the subject of his own epic cycle.
Ninlil Ninlil is the wife of Enlil and goddess of heaven, earth, and air or spirit.
Ninsun
Mammetum Mammetum is the ‘‘mother of destinies.’’ Utnapishtim reveals that Mammetum, with the Anunnaki, ‘‘together . . . decree the fates of men. Life and death they allot but the day of death they do not disclose.’’
The goddess Ninsun, called ‘‘the well-beloved and wise,’’ is mother of Gilgamesh and wife of Lugulbanda. Prior to Gilgamesh and Enkidu’s trip to kill Humbaba, Ninsun adopts Enkidu as her own, gives him a sacred necklace, and entrusts Gilgamesh’s safety to him.
Man-Scorpion
Ninurta
Described as ‘‘half man and half dragon,’’ the ManScorpion and his mate are guardians of Mashu, the mountains of the rising and setting sun. They let Gilgamesh pass through to the garden of the gods.
Ninurta is a warrior god and god of wells and canals. In the story of Utnapishtim, Ninurta is one of those who caused the flood with Nergal. He is also known as Ningursu.
Namtar
Nisaba
Namtar, the god of death, is the servant of Ereshkigal, queen of the underworld.
Nisaba is the goddess of corn. She gives Enkidu his long, flowing hair.
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Puzur-Amurri
Urshanabi
Puzur-Amurri is the steersman and navigator of Utnapishtim’s great boat during the flood.
Samuqan is the god of cattle and of herds. He gives Enkidu his rough, hair-covered hide.
Urshanabi is the boatman who takes Gilgamesh over the waters of death to Utnapishtim. Utnapishtim curses Urshanabi for bringing a mortal to him across the sea of death. After he helps Gilgamesh back to health and vigor, Urshanabi returns with Gilgamesh to Uruk.
Scorpion-Demon
Utnapishtim
See Man-Scorpion
Favored by the god Ea, Utnapishtim is warned of Enlil’s plan to destroy humanity through a flood. Utnapishtim, at Ea’s command, builds a huge square boat, seven decks high and one-hundred twenty cubits per side, in seven days. He seals it with pitch, stores away supplies, and rides out the seven-day storm in it.
Samuqan
Shamash One of the chief gods, Shamash is the sun god, law-giver, and judge who is evoked in blessing and protection throughout the Epic of Gilgamesh.
Shullat Shullat is a minor god under Shamash who works with Hanish to herald bad weather, as happened at the beginning of the great flood.
Vampire-Demon The vampire-demon is a supernatural being who appears in Enkidu’s dream of the underworld. In the dream, he attacks and smothers Enkidu.
Shulpae Shulpae is god of the feast. Sacrifices are made to Shulpae at funerals.
THEMES
Siduri Siduri is goddess of the vine, who at first bars Gilgamesh from passage through the garden of the gods, but then tells him, ‘‘When the gods created man they allotted to him death, but they retained life in their own keeping.’’
Sillah Sillah is the mother of one of Ishtar’s lovers.
Sin Sin is the moon god, to whom Gilgamesh prays as he travels through dark mountain passes populated by lions on his way to Mashu.
Tammuz Tammuz is the god of shepherds, sheepfolds, and vegetation. He is one of Ishtar’s consorts. In older, Sumerian times, he was known as Dumuzi.
Trapper The trapper is the first person to encounter Enkidu, who had sabotaged his traps. Enkidu later curses the trapper for introducing him to civilization and its difficulties.
Ubara-Tutu Ubara-Tutu is the ancient king of Shurrupak and Utnapishtim’s father.
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Heroism Heroes are courageous and often act selflessly or for the greater good; however, mythologist Joseph Campbell defines a hero not by valor but by the steps of a hero’s journey. This journey is described in Campbell’s book The Hero With a Thousand Faces. The Epic of Gilgamesh is a hero’s journey, beginning with Gilgamesh’s reluctance to act, as seen in his boredom, his abuse of his people, and the need for the divine to intercede. Enkidu not only aids Gilgamesh throughout his journey but also functionally completes him as a person. Despite Gilgamesh’s growth as a hero by Campbell’s definition, he is still selfish throughout, as shown in the adventure to the Forest of the Cedars, a sacred place that Gilgamesh nonetheless pillages for wood and self-aggrandizement. Enkidu’s death deeply affects Gilgamesh. Wracked with grief, Gilgamesh travels to the underworld in search of immortality for himself. He fails to achieve his goal but is told repeatedly by characters such as the goddess Siduri and by Utnapishtim that mortality has its own virtues, which he should appreciate. Whether Gilgamesh is able to enjoy the remainder of his mortal days is not recorded in this epic, but the completion of his journey, by Campbell’s definition, occurs when he returns to Uruk and has his adventures carved
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TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY Compare and contrast an episode in N. K. Sandars’ narrative version of the Epic of Gilgamesh with David Ferry’s poetic version or one of the versions that follow the original twelve-tablet structure of the story. How do the versions differ in their use of language and their organization on the page? Do they differ in their symbolic or thematic emphases? Write a comparative essay explaining the similarities and differences. Locate the five independent myths of the Sumerian song- cycle featuring Gilgamesh (‘‘Gilgamesh and Agga of Kish’’; ‘‘Gilgamesh and the Land of the Living’’; ‘‘Gilgamesh and the Bull of Heaven’’; ‘‘Gilgamesh, Enkidu, and the Netherworld’’; and ‘‘The Death of Gilgamesh’’) in James Pritchard’s, Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament. Choose one, read it carefully, and see if you can identify which portion(s) or details of the Sumerian myth have been incorporated into the Babylonian Standard Version and which have been excluded. Compose an electronic presentation to share with your class that details the transformation of this story. Many contemporary movies feature a hero and a counterpart or buddy. Often these two characters are as different as Gilgamesh and Enkidu, but together they make a complete team. Select a current ‘‘buddy movie’’ and, using the Epic of Gilgamesh as a guide, analyze
the epic qualities of that movie. Consider how the buddies are alike or different, how they react to the opposite sex, what quest they set out to achieve, and what great enemy or evil they face. With a partner, prepare a dramatic presentation that gives your findings from this examination.
upon a stone, therefore bringing this appreciation of the human experience back to the people.
Culture and Nature The internal balance between physical and spiritual journeys in the Epic of Gilgamesh is matched by the contrast in the two main characters, Gilgamesh and Enkidu. As the epic opens, Gilgamesh embodies both the arrogance and the cultivation of high Sumerian culture. He is the king and
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Drawing on other subjects of study such as biology, geography, art, archaeology, and history, create a collage showing the elements of ancient Mesopotamian life depicted in the Epic of Gilgamesh or a diorama (picture box) of an ancient ziggurat or temple. Reconstruct the architecture of the time; the different people who inhabited the cities; the jobs they performed; the crops they grew; the crafts they made; and clothing they wore.
Research the hero’s journey as described by mythologist Joseph Campbell in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Campbell’s hero’s journey was a strong influence on the 1977 film Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope but has its roots in myths about heroes such as the Epic of Gilgamesh. How many elements of the hero’s journey are present in the film? How many elements are present in the epic? Which do you think is a better story and why, based on the hero’s journey? Give a five-minute presentation to your class, with examples and visual aids.
epitomizes power, he is physically gifted and beautiful, but he is also haughty and abusive: He deflowers the maidens of his kingdom for his own pleasure and he presses the young men into his service. By contrast, when he enters the story, Enkidu personifies the coarse physicality and vitality of the natural world: He is immensely strong, he lives and runs with the wild beasts, and he destroys the traps set by hunters. At a crucial early juncture in
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the epic, Gilgamesh, having heard about this ‘‘wild man,’’ sends a courtesan to Enkidu. She transforms Enkidu’s wildness through her sexual charms, and she teaches him table manners and correct behavior. Afterwards, the wild animals run away from Enkidu. The courtesan thereby brings Enkidu into the civilized world. Together, Gilgamesh, the cultivated ruler, and Enkidu, the civilized wild man, bond as complementary friends, and they begin a series of exploits to conquer Humbaba, that other forest creature, and the Bull of Heaven, the embodiment of natural disaster.
Identity and Relationship As the semi-divine creation of Shamash, the sun god, who gives him physical beauty, and Adad, the storm god, who gives him great courage, Gilgamesh is at the top of the social hierarchy. As king of Uruk, Gilgamesh has access to all the riches and pleasures his society can provide. In his lofty station, Gilgamesh has no need or desire for a relationship with others, for he seems to be complete in himself. However, Gilgamesh is also unsettled and ‘‘a man of many moods,’’ an arrogant ruler who mistreats his people. He is, in other words, incomplete, lacking an ingredient essential to being fully human. The people of Uruk complain to Anu, god of Uruk, to intervene on their behalf, and Aruru, the goddess of creation, responds by creating Enkidu. Enkidu requires the moderating influences of civilization to become fully human. Incomplete when separated, but together and fulfilled in close relationship, Gilgamesh and Enkidu establish their true identities. Their identities are fulfilled through their relationship. Enkidu perishes before the end of the tale, and Gilgamesh is haunted by the death of his friend. This death is the catalyst for Gilgamesh’s search for immortality. Thus, Gilgamesh carries the legacy of his friend back to Uruk, where he dies a well-loved king.
Humanity and Divinity Human interaction with the gods, and the gods’ intervention in human events, is a standard hallmark of epic literature, and the Epic of Gilgamesh is no exception. From beginning to end of the tale, the supernatural world intersects the physical plane. Persons, places, and all manner of things are closely associated with patron deities. The interplay of humanity and divinity is closely allied to the question of identity and relationship throughout the epic. Characters take on the attributes of deities associated with them. Gilgamesh is a mixture of
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Drawing of a carved image of Gilgamesh (Ó Mary Evans Picture Library / Alamy)
both human and divine, but emphasizing the divine. Enkidu incarnates precisely the opposite proportions, favoring the human. At the same time that the epic invokes the gods throughout the narrative, they seem distant from the action, interfering only when pressed or perturbed. The gods are also clearly anthropomorphic, quite human in their petty jealousy, bickering, and irritation with irascible humans.
Mortality and Immortality During the course of the epic, Gilgamesh, as king of Uruk, progresses from the highest social station to the lowest example of a human being—pale, starved, and clothed in skins during his encounter with Utnapishtim. The crux of this journey is the death of Gilgamesh’s beloved comrade, Enkidu. During the first half of the tale, Gilgamesh and Enkidu bring death to all enemies in their quest to establish their eternal reputations; during the second half, Gilgamesh lives with the haunting memory of Enkidu’s death. As Gilgamesh tells Utnapishtim: ‘‘Because of my brother I am afraid of death; because of my brother I stray through the wilderness. His fate lies heavy upon me. How can I be silent, how can I rest? He is dust and I
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shall die also and be laid in the earth forever.’’ Having turned to great exploits, huge building projects, and epic journeys to secure his fame, Gilgamesh must die, but his memory lives on in the story of his life. The gods do not give Gilgamesh immortality, but the legends of his life are preserved on the stone tablets of his epic adventure.
STYLE Epic Literature In A Glossary of Literary Terms, literary scholar M. H. Abrams lists five essential characteristics of epic literature: (1) a hero of national and/or cosmic importance; (2) an expansive setting, perhaps even worldwide; (3) superhuman deeds; (4) supernatural forces and deities take part in events; and (5) the language of a ceremonial performance, much elevated over ordinary speech. The Epic of Gilgamesh has each of these characteristics. First, Gilgamesh, as ruler of Uruk and son of a goddess, is a figure of national importance. It is interesting that he is, nonetheless, incomplete without his friend Enkidu, who seems to be of no cosmic or national significance except as Gilgamesh’s friend. Their relationship may have had meaning to the Sumerian, Assyrian, and Babylonian audiences that modern readers cannot grasp. Second, the scope of this story begins and ends at the great city of Uruk in Mesopotamia, the land between two rivers and traditionally known as the cradle of civilization. Uruk was the first city built by humankind. Gilgamesh and Enkidu also travel to the Forest of the Cedars, a holy place, and later Gilgamesh journeys to the land of the dead. The setting of this epic is grand, sweeping, and aweinspiring to listeners. Third, Gilgamesh and Enkidu, his adopted brother, are the strongest of men. When they fight, walls shake. Only they are capable of taking on the terrible monster Humbaba, who guards the Forest of the Cedars, but their success requires both wits and strength. They also kill the Bull of Heaven to prevent drought, and Gilgamesh conquers many wild animals in the lands at the end of the world, where he begins his journey to the underworld realm. Through these feats, Gilgamesh is shown to be the most powerful man. Fourth, the gods are involved throughout this tale. Gilgamesh’s mother is the goddess Ninlil, whom he goes to for dream interpretations and
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to ask her to name his friend Enkidu as her son so that they may be brothers. Enkidu is fashioned from clay by the goddess Aruru to be Gilgamesh’s match and distract him from tormenting the people of Uruk. Gilgamesh’s patron deity is the sun god Shamash, whom he appeals to for help. Enlil, a major deity in the Babylonian pantheon, intervenes after Gilgamesh and Enkidu kill Humbaba, dispersing Humbaba’s auras to the rest of creation. Fifth, the Epic of Gilgamesh is structured in a formal way that betrays its origins as a oral performance piece. The elevated, formal language and repeated formulaic phrases are characteristic of epic literature. In fact, the dialogue sounds stilted and rehearsed, as if read for a formal occasion. During chapter 2, ‘‘The Forest Journey,’’ Gilgamesh calls out for assistance: ‘‘By the life of my mother Ninsun who gave me birth, and by the life of my father, divine Lugulbanda, let me live to be the wonder of my mother, as when she nursed me on her lap.’’ These formal invocations of deity give the task an elevated stature and a sense of being a holy mission that Gilgamesh undertakes for his city and his divine heritage. In a later example, as he faces Humbaba in battle, Gilgamesh beseeches his patron god: ‘‘O glorious Shamash, I have followed the road you commanded but now if you send no succor how shall I escape?’’ The use of ‘‘apostrophe,’’ a figure of speech denoted by ‘‘O,’’ indicates a formal invocation of a person or personification who is not present. Another important element of the elevated style of the Epic of Gilgamesh is its inclusion of ‘‘laments,’’ the formal poems of praise and songs of grief that the living give on behalf of the dead. The finest example in the poem is Gilgamesh’s lament for Enkidu, which begins: Hear me, great ones of Uruk, I weep for Enkidu, my friend. Bitterly moaning like a woman mourning I weep for my brother. You were the axe at my side, My hand’s strength, the sword in my belt, the shield before me, A glorious robe, my fairest ornament, an evil Fate has robbed me.
Gilgamesh’s heart-felt lament concludes with the mournful lines, ‘‘What is this sleep which holds you now? / You are lost in the dark and cannot hear me.’’ Nearly all of these formal speeches also serve to summarize or rehearse the characters’ attitudes or even the action in the story up to that point in the narrative.
Orality and Performance One of the key attributes of the Epic of Gilgamesh is the sense of breathless immediacy of the
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story. The epic achieves this effect by placing the story in a setting that simulates the oral performance in which the story was originally performed. The opening lines provide a sense that this is not an ancient story, but one just occurring. The narrative first-person speaker of the Prologue places the reader at Uruk’s city walls and erases the distance between that ancient time and the present time of telling the story, inviting the hearer (and reader) to feel present to the action. These walls, the narrative voice proclaims, are those of the great Gilgamesh and now I will tell you his story. This sense of immediacy continues throughout the epic.
In medias res Traditionally, epics begin in medias res or ‘‘in the middle of things.’’ Although this characteristic was originally applied to Greek and Roman epics such as the Odyssey and the Iliad, it is equally true of the Epic of Gilgamesh. The story begins not at the beginning of Gilgamesh’s life, but somewhere in the middle. He is initially portrayed as a young, hot-headed king, heedless of the effect of actions and desires on the wellbeing of his people. One of the effects of this technique is to allow the reader to gauge the extent of Gilgamesh’s development as a character.
Epithet Another feature of the epic style is the use of epithets, usually adjectives or adjective phrases that reveal the attributes or personality of people, places, and things in the story: ‘‘strong-walled Uruk,’’ ‘‘Humbaba whose name is ‘Hugeness,’’’ ‘‘Shamash the Protector,’’ and Utnapishtim ‘‘the Faraway.’’ Epic epithets provide tags the assist the memory of the listener or reader. They also assist in recitation during a performance, serving as tags designed to move the speaker along easily.
Repetition A characteristic of the epic that is closely related to its often formal, even stilted language, is its strategic use of repetition at various levels. There is hardly a moment, event, or speech that does not have a counterpart somewhere else in the tale. Commonly called parallelism and antitheses, these contrasting and equivalent elements highlight comparison and/or contrast between paired elements. The repetitious elements can be examined in terms of structure, events, speeches, and numbers. First, the epic has two parts, balanced structurally. The pivot of the story is Enkidu’s death.
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In the first half, Gilgamesh travels out into the Forest of the Cedars to slay Humbaba; in the second half he journeys into the realm of the gods to find Utnapishtim. Gilgamesh’s early successes and personal glory contrast with his subsequent frustrations and hardships. Enkidu’s physical presence if the first half contrasts with his palpable absence in the second half. Repetition of events is seen in the first section: Gilgamesh and Enkidu are mirror images of one another; they slay two semi-divine monsters, Humbaba and the Bull of Heaven; and Gilgamesh has a series of dreams, matched by Enkidu’s dreams later in the section. Events in the second half of the epic are often repetitions of earlier affairs, as when Gilgamesh’s twelve-league journey through the Mashu’s darkness pales in comparison to his one-hundred and twenty pole voyage across the waters of death. Finally, events in the second half mirror those in the first: Enkidu’s funeral and Gilgamesh’s lament for his dead friend are matched by Gilgamesh’s funeral and Uruk’s praise for its dead king, and Gilgamesh’s voyage to find Utnapishtim parallels the earlier journey to the Cedar Forest. Parts of a speech may be repeated from one character to the next or more tellingly, the entire speech may be repeated several times throughout a portion of the epic. The most significant instance of this technique occurs in chapter 4, ‘‘The Search for Everlasting Life.’’ In his journey from the Country of the Living to the abode of the gods, Gilgamesh encounters Siduri, goddess of the vine and of wine; Urshanabi, ‘‘the ferryman of Utnapishtim’’ who takes him across the waters of death; and finally Utnapishtim himself, the immortal human. Each encounter has the same structure. Repetition of numbers come in patterns of two (two halves to the story or two carefully balanced main characters) or three (Gilgamesh’s series of three dreams or the three quests of the tale) are well-known characteristics of epics. Seven is a symbolic number, sometimes in combination with two and three. Generally considered to be a perfect number or number of completion or wholeness, seven appears throughout the tale: the ‘‘seven sages’’ laid the foundations of Uruk; Enlil gives Humbaba ‘‘sevenfold terrors,’’ or auras, with which to guard the forest; the gate of Uruk has seven bolts; and during the climactic battle with Humbaba, the giant unleashes the ‘‘seven splendors’’ against the pair of warriors; they fell ‘‘seven cedars’’ to provoke Humbaba’s wrath, and they
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kill the giant with three blows to the neck, severing his head. This symbolic numerology continues especially in the story of the flood.
HISTORICAL CONTEXT Development of the Epic The Epic of Gilgamesh is the product of several civilizations of ancient Mesopotamia, those citystates of the Tigris-Euphrates river valley, in present-day Iraq. These cultures are, in turn, the Sumerians, the Akkadians or Babylonians, and the Assyrians. Scholars of the ancient Near East have determined that the Epic of Gilgamesh probably began as five separate Sumerian Gilgamesh stories (called ‘‘Gilgamesh and Agga of Kish;’’ ‘‘Gilgamesh and the Land of the Living;’’ ‘‘Gilgamesh and the Bull of Heaven;’’ ‘‘Gilgamesh, Enkidu, and the Netherworld;’’ and ‘‘The Death of Gilgamesh.’’). According to Jeffrey H. Tigay, who has written about the historical development of the epic in his The Evolution of the Gilgamesh Epic, estimates that the ancient oral tales about Gilgamesh probably were first written down, in cuneiform, about 2500 BCE by Sumerian scribes, although the earliest copies date from about 2100 BCE or about five hundred years after the historical Gilgamesh ruled Uruk. These separate Sumerian tales were drawn together by a later Akkadian author (or authors) who adapted elements of the early stories into a more unified and complete epic. By this time the Epic of Gilgamesh had been widely circulated throughout the ancient Near East, with copies being found as far away as modern-day Palestine and Turkey. The Epic of Gilgamesh underwent other minor changes until it became formalized in a Standard Version, according to tradition, by the scribe Sinleqqiunninni around 1300 BCE . This is the most completely preserved version of the Epic of Gilgamesh, which archaeologists discovered in Ashurbanipal’s library in Nineveh (685– 27 BCE ). This Standard Version is the basis for the translation by N. K. Sandars. However, the text will continue to evolve as archaeological discoveries are made and as scholars understand more fully the language, culture, and history of these ancient cultures and documents.
Events Historical and Mythological The Epic of Gilgamesh is marked by both by the threat and the promise of its historical and physical setting. According to the famous Sumerian
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king list, Gilgamesh was an historical figure who reigned around 2700 BCE . He is called ‘‘the divine Gilgamesh . . . [who] ruled 126 years,’’ according to the ‘‘Sumerian King-List,’’ translated by A. Leo Oppenheimer and published in Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament. Although it is impossible to know exactly, events like Gilgamesh’s journey to the Forest of Cedars to defeat Humbaba may reflect the historical Uruk’s trade relations, need for natural resources, and later struggles with neighboring city-states over vital resources such as wood. Other details of daily life emerge from the story of Enkidu’s gradual humanization at the hands of the temple harlot: ‘‘This transformation is achieved by eating bread, drinking beer, anointing oneself, and clothing oneself. . . . Bread, beer, oil, and clothing are the staples which were distributed as daily rations by the central institutions, such as the temple or palace, to a large segment of the population; these rations were their only means of subsistence,’’ writes Johannes Renger in his essay ‘‘Mesopotamian Epic Literature,’’ published in Heroic Epic and Saga. Furthermore, the cultures of the Tigris-Euphrates river valley depended upon the rivers for the rich soil that sustained local agriculture; at the same time the rivers brought life, frequent floods also wrecked havoc upon their cities and people. The Epic of Gilgamesh reveals these horrors, for Gilgamesh himself remarks that he looked over the wall and saw bodies floating in the river. Even the gods are affected, for Ishtar cries out like a woman in labor when she sees her people floating in the ocean ‘‘like the spawn of fish’’ during Utnapishtim’s flood. Likewise, Ishtar’s Bull of Heaven represents another of the ancient world’s great fears: drought, famine, and natural disaster. Anu reminds Ishtar, ‘‘If I do what you desire there will be seven years of drought throughout Uruk when corn will be seedless husks.’’ Thus, the ancient Mesopotamians were caught between the bounty of their river valley and the misery caused by its floods and droughts. Finally, the Epic of Gilgamesh does not encompass all the stories recorded about Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh himself is placed in the pantheons of gods as ‘‘an underworld deity, a judge there and sometimes called its king. His statues or figurines appear in burial rites for the dead, and his cult [official worship] was especially important in the month of Ab (July–August), when nature itself, as it were, expired,’’ writes William L. Moran in the introduction to David Ferry’s Gilgamesh: A New Rendering in English Verse.
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COMPARE & CONTRAST
2000 BCE : People of ancient Mesopotamia invent a writing system (cuneiform), use the wheel for transportation, and are skilled metalworkers. They produce crops in irrigated fields. They construct monumental buildings whose remains are visible after four thousand or more years.
advancement or education. Warfare is limited in scope and localized in space.
Today: Modern society, sometimes referred to as the Information Age, is characterized by rapid technological change, creating a global village, in which travel to or communication with any part of the world (or even beyond Earth) is possible within hours or even minutes. Increased human intervention in natural processes solves problems and creates them. Agribusiness greatly increases food production and wreaks havoc with ecosystems. Genetic engineering creates new organisms, and extinction rates soar among various species because of global climate change.
Today: Developed countries in the West have international power and wealth and consume most of the world’s resources. Populations in developing countries in the East and in Africa struggle with extreme poverty and lower life expectancy. Most power is wielded by men, and church and state are separate in many western countries. 2000 BCE : The economy of ancient Mesopotamia is agrarian, based on domesticated livestock and on the yearly cycles of flood and soil replenishment. Food supply is highly susceptible to ecological disruptions, such as drought or salinization of the soil. Industry includes traditional crafts, textiles, and large-scale building projects of lumber and baked brick. During this time, the first large-scale urban centers develop, such as Uruk, with populations near 50,000.
2000 BCE : The society of ancient Mesopotamia, is highly stratified and dominated mostly by men. The priestly caste and ruling elite control power and wealth. Power is concentrated in individual city-states rather than larger administrative units and wielded by a divinely instituted monarchy. Status is determined by birth, with little chance for
Today: Modern economy is industrial and commercial. Even agriculture is big business. Risk of famine is curbed by chemical and genetic interventions, although longterm health concerns are voiced. The biggest metropolitan areas, such as Shanghai, New York City, and Mexico City exceed 20 million people.
The World’s First City Uruk, the world’s first city, grew out of two small, agricultural settlements founded during the fifth millennium BCE that merged during the fourth millennium BCE and was able to exert military and political influence on the surrounding countryside and its settlements. This urbanization was a catalyst for stratified society and the comparable growth of other settlements into urban centers. The world’s first cities were characterized by centralized distribution of goods; specialized production;
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large-scale architecture, such as the protective wall around Uruk, which required labor organization to achieve; and social stratification, which by the time of Gilgamesh’s rule circa 2700 BCE was firmly inherited rather than achieved. Occupation of Uruk peaked around 2900 BCE , then fell off until it was abandoned in the mid-seventh century CE . The prevailing theory surrounding Uruk’s decline is that the Euphrates River shifted its course from northeast to southwest of the city, perhaps flooding it for a period of time.
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Ishtar seeks to seduce Gilgamesh, but he rejects her, knowing the evil fate which befell her previous lovers. (Ó Mary Evans Picture Library / Alamy)
Sumerian tales of Gilgamesh; the Akkadian and Babylonian epics; and the Standard Version.
CRITICAL OVERVIEW History and Recovery of the Epic of Gilgamesh The critical reception of the Epic of Gilgamesh parallels the history of ancient Near Eastern archaeology between 1850 and the early 2000s. The Epic of Gilgamesh first came to light in tablets from the palace library of Ashurbanipal, king of Assyria (685–27 BCE ), in Nineveh. The Epic of Gilgamesh is comprised of twelve fragmented clay tablets inscribed in cuneiform. Since that initial discovery, portions of the tale have surfaced throughout the region, from different time periods and in several different languages. By comparing the differences among the tablets and between various versions of the story, scholars have been able to reconstruct the history of the epic’s composition. This history is complex and may not ever be fully known; however, it seems to have four main phases: the period of oral composition and circulation; the
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First, the historical Gilgamesh ruled Uruk, in southern Mesopotamia, around 2700 BCE , and a variety of historical artifacts confirm his existence. As is the custom of traditional cultures, stories of the king’s exploits circulated among the populace and were repeated orally before being written down, probably about 2500 BCE . Second, the Sumerians inscribed into clay tablets at least five separate Gilgamesh stories, the earliest of which among those known tablets dates from around 2100 BCE . These stories are known as ‘‘Gilgamesh and Agga of Kish’’; ‘‘Gilgamesh and the Land of the Living’’; ‘‘Gilgamesh and the Bull of Heaven’’; ‘‘Gilgamesh, Enkidu, and the Netherworld’’; and ‘‘The Death of Gilgamesh.’’ It is important to note that these stories have little in common with each other except for having the same main character. They were not joined as a whole, nor did they share an overriding theme.
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Third, these separate Sumerian stories became the raw material for the Babylonian (or Akkadian) Epic of Gilgamesh, composed about 1700 BCE . The Babylonian transcribers combined aspects of the earlier Sumerian stories to create the unified story of Gilgamesh’s search for the meaning of life and his struggle against death. This Babylonian version also introduced several important changes, including transforming Enkidu from Gilgamesh’s servant, as he is in the Sumerian tales, to an equal and companion; adding the hymn-like Prologue and conclusion and increasing the use of formulaic sayings and set-pieces; and incorporating the ancient legend of Utnapishtim and the great flood. The Babylonian version became known throughout the ancient Near East in a variety of languages. Finally, the Epic of Gilgamesh became fixed in the so-called Standard Version, attributed to the author Sinleqqiunninni, who lived about 1300 BCE . This Standard Version is the one that was found in Ashurbanipal’s library.
Utnapishtim: The Mesopotamian Noah Although at its discovery the Epic of Gilgamesh was immediately recognized for its literary and historical value, it gained widespread attention for its account of Utnapishtim and the flood. The story of the flood is found in Tablet XI of the Epic of Gilgamesh and is itself derived from an earlier story, ‘‘The Myth of Atrahasis.’’ What most intrigued readers were the parallels between Utnapishtim and the Old Testament story of Noah and the Flood, found in Genesis 6:1–9:18. What shocked them even more is that the Utnapishtim episode predates, or is earlier than, the biblical account of Noah and the ark. Alexander Heidel, in The Gilgamesh Epic and Old Testament Parallels, explores the correlations between Noah’s story and that of Utnapishtim. For example, Heidel points out that an assembly of gods directs Utnapishtim to build his boat, but only a single deity directs Noah to build his. Also according to the Old Testament, Noah is selected because he is righteous, unlike all other wicked people, by the judgmental god of monotheistic Judaism. Another difference is that the boat built by Utnapishtim is square with seven decks, which mirrors the design of the Mesopotamian ziggurat (step-temple). Whereas Noah’s boat is more realistically boatshaped (long and narrow) and has three decks and a door. In the Utnapishtim version the storm lasts seven days; in the Noah story the storm lasts forty days.
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New Interpretations In 2004, Stephen Mitchell published Gilgamesh: A New English Version to critical favor and some controversy. Mitchell, an acclaimed translator specializing in epics, crafted a version of this ancient tale (using extant English translations) that brings it to life for the general reader. He compared the different accounts of the Epic of Gilgamesh to synthesize his own and used his imagination to fill in where clay tablets left the story incomplete. In a similar vein but with a different result, British poet Derrek Hines wrote a postmodern version of the epic in his book Gilgamesh, also published in 2004. Hines takes even more liberties with the narrative, introducing modern elements in an effort to make the ancient story feel as alive for twenty-first century readers as it once did for third millennium BCE listeners.
CRITICISM Daniel T. Kline Kline holds a PhD in Middle English literature from Indiana University and is an associate professor of English at University of Alaska Anchorage. In the following essay, he traces the action of the epic and the development of Gilgamesh as a character. In essence, the Epic of Gilgamesh is a story about Gilgamesh’s search for identity and meaning, and readers of his story—both ancient and modern—have seen in Gilgamesh something of their own experience. These issues of identity and meaning are both personal and intimately related: If I know who I am, I can make better sense of the world in which I live; and if I can make better sense of my world, perhaps I can live a better, more satisfying life. Through its characters, themes, events, and structure, the story itself serves as a lens through which the reader may carefully examine his or her own experience. Although the specific historical, cultural, and social circumstances of the modern world differ vastly from the time of the epic, Gilgamesh’s quest to know himself and his world remains current to twenty-first century readers. Gilgamesh’s journey into self-knowledge and the meaning of life can be viewed as a progression through a series of relationships, specifically his relationship to himself (the individual realm), to others (the social realm), to his kingdom (the political realm), and to the gods (the supernatural realm). Gilgamesh’s experiences in
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WHAT DO I READ NEXT?
IN THE FIRST HALF OF THE STORY, GILGAMESH BEGINS AS A RUTHLESS PRINCE AND ENDS AS GRIEVING FRIEND. THE SECOND HALF REVERSES THE FIRST. GILGAMESH BEGINS AS A HAGGARD,
Samuel Noah Kramer’s History Begins at Sumer: Thirty-Nine Firsts in Man’s Recorded History (1981) discusses a variety of Sumerian innovations—common cultural, historical, scientific, and social trends or events that were first recorded in Sumer, including schools, pharmaceuticals, lullabies, and aquariums.
Gilgamesh the King (1984), a novel by Robert Silverberg, brings to life the semi-legendary figure of Gilgamesh and ancient Mesopotamia. Silverberg takes a realistic approach in his depiction of events from the Epic of Gilgamesh.
City of Thieves (2008) by David Benioff, like the Epic of Gilgamesh, is a coming-of-age buddy story about two teenage Russian boys who use their wits to survive in Leningrad during the World War II Nazi occupation.
Kathleen Benner Duble’s 2008 novel Quest for readers is grade seven and higher tells the story of Henry Hudson’s final and fatal attempt to find the Northwest Passage. Duble uses four voices to tell this story: Hudson’s seventeenyear-old son John, who went along on his father’s ship Discovery; eight-year-old son Richard, left behind with his mother in London; Isabella Digges, who is secretly in love with John and keeps a journal while he is away; and Seth Syms, who also takes the voyage. The narrative viewpoints weave together, bringing to life a fascinating historical quest, which ended tragically.
each of these realms accumulate throughout the epic and shape his development as a character. THE INDIVIDUAL REALM: GILGAMESH’S RELATIONSHIP TO HIMSELF
Gilgamesh’s self-understanding develops gradually. As the epic opens, the Prologue outlines all of the hero’s extraordinary qualities. He is all-
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WILD WANDERER AND RETURNS WITH A NEW COMPANION.’’
knowing, wise, and experienced; he is beautiful, courageous, and powerful; and he is a noble king and extraordinary builder. As testimony to Gilgamesh’s greatness, the narrator points to the great temple Eanna and the walls surrounding Uruk itself. No ‘‘man alive can equal’’ Gilgamesh’s great ziggurat (or temple). Nearly 5,000 years later, the narrator’s verse is still true. The remains of the Uruk’s great wall and temple still stand in present-day Warka (the biblical Erech) in the Iraqi desert as the confirmation of Gilgamesh’s political ambition and devotion to Anu and Ishtar. After the Prologue, the epic recounts Gilgamesh’s heroic deeds, but the hero we find at first does not measure up to these lofty ideals. The most significant detail the Prologue gives is that Gilgamesh is semi-divine: ‘‘Two thirds they [the gods] made him god and one third man.’’ Rather than giving Gilgamesh a higher sense of purpose or calling as a king, his partial divinity seems to have unsettled him and given him the hallmark quality of an epic hero: pride or hubris. Thus, the reader is faced with a contradiction at the very outset of the epic: In contrast to the glowing testimony of the Prologue, the young ruler of Uruk is arrogant, cruel, and heedless of the consequences of his actions. The reader is left with the tantalizing problem that motivates the rest of the action: What happens to transform this cruel young ruler into a wise and celebrated king? The opening moments of the epic make clear that Gilgamesh’s self-understanding affects his relationships to others; that is, his pride in his semi-divine status elevates him above everyone else, convinces him that he needs no one else, and leads him to think only of himself and his selfish needs. Because he is so full of hubris and
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his abuses are so great, Gilgamesh even destroys the social and familial bonds of his subjects, isolating them from one another: ‘‘No son is left with his father, . . . His lust leaves no virgin to her lover, neither the warrior’s daughter nor the wife of the noble.’’ Gilgamesh is not ‘‘a shepherd to his people,’’ as he should be. Sheep were an important commodity in the ancient world, and the shepherd occupied an important place in the society, for the shepherd not only cared for the sheep, he or she kept the sheep together in a flock, kept headstrong sheep from going astray, and protected them for dangerous predators. In short, the shepherd and sheep formed a close-knit social bond. Gilgamesh, however, has become the predator rather than the protector. THE SOCIAL REALM: GILGAMESH’S RELATIONSHIP TO OTHERS
Gilgamesh’s pride and isolation threaten to rip his city apart, and as a last resort, his people cry out to the gods for help: ‘‘You made him, O Aruru, now create his equal; let it be as like him as his own reflection, his second self, stormy heart for stormy heart. Let them contend together and leave Uruk in quiet.’’ Notice that their solution to Gilgamesh’s abuse is to ask the gods to give him a companion and an equal—someone with whom he can have a relationship. By giving Gilgamesh a shadow self, someone to match his strength and passions, Gilgamesh can then leave the city and its families in peace. Although Gilgamesh’s contact with the social world begins with just one other person, its effect changes Gilgamesh permanently and the rest of his story. Gilgamesh’s mirror image is, of course, Enkidu. Gilgamesh and Enkidu are antithetical in many ways. On one hand, Gilgamesh is the highest product of civilized society. He is a semi-divine king who lives in a palace and indulges himself in fine food and sensuality. On the other, Enkidu represents the basic attributes of the natural world. He is fashioned from clay, is enormously strong, and has never encountered the opposite sex; he runs with the wild animals, frees them from the hunter’s snare, and eats wild grasses. The Epic of Gilgamesh says simply that Enkidu ‘‘was innocent of mankind; he knew nothing of the cultivated land.’’ While Enkidu lives off the land and what it provides naturally, Gilgamesh and the archaic Sumerian civilization thrives because of its ability to control nature—or at least harness it—by domesticating herd animals, by cultivating crops in the rich soil, by directing the river through irrigation and channels. Enkidu, who
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needs the cultivating influence of civilization, represents natural man or pre-civilized humanity, while Gilgamesh embodies his civilization’s highest cultural attainments. In addition, the companion’s relationships to women are also different but strangely parallel. After Gilgamesh dreams of Enkidu’s arrival and hears from the trapper about the wild man who runs with the animals, Gilgamesh sends a temple harlot to initiate Enkidu into civilized society. The harlot ‘‘taught him the woman’s art,’’ and in addition to her sexual lessons, the harlot instructs Enkidu in the proper way to eat bread, drink wine, clothe himself, and bathe and anoint himself with oil and perfume. After Enkidu embraces the harlot and her civilization, he is forever changed, and when he attempted to return to the mountains, ‘‘when the wild creatures saw him they fled. Enkidu would have followed, but his body was bound as though with cord, his knees gave way when he started to run.’’ Enkidu’s wildness literally has been harnessed by the bonds of civilization. At the same time Enkidu joins with the harlot, Gilgamesh carries out his sacred duty as king to unite with Uruk’s ruling goddess. The Epic of Gilgamesh here likely reflects an early stage of Sumerian development when the king embodied both the priestly and political functions. Representing the lowest scale of human development, Enkidu enters the human community through the ministrations of a temple prostitute in Ishtar’s sacred service. Representing the highest pinnacle of human attainment, Gilgamesh joins with Uruk’s divine patroness, Ishtar. It is important to recognize that when Gilgamesh and Enkidu meet, fight, and become bound companions, their relationships to women in the story—whether divine or common women— virtually disappear. In his dreams of the meteor and the axe, Gilgamesh repeatedly emphasizes that he is drawn to these objects ‘‘and to me its attraction was like the love of a woman.’’ Each time Ninsun interprets the dreams for her son Gilgamesh, she also repeats that ‘‘you will love him as a woman and he will never forsake you.’’ Contemporary readers are often uncomfortable with erotic language that is applied to samesex relationships, and too often they see the strong bonds between men only in stereotypical terms such as homosexual. However, social scientists and literary critics use the term homosocial to denote the intense personal bonds between men. Homosocial also indicates the kind of behavior,
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social codes, and activities that unite groups of men, and this heroic code often arises in the context of athletic competition, warfare, or survival. Gilgamesh and Enkidu are united in this kind of homosocial bond, for they are faithful to one another, they are united in their dangerous quests and battles, and their relationships to others pale in comparison to their connection to each other. After their fierce struggle in the streets of Uruk, ‘‘where they grappled, holding each other like bulls,’’ shattering the door posts and shaking the temple walls,’’ Gilgamesh abandons Ishtar, and Enkidu leaves the temple harlot. Gilgamesh, once united to the divine goddess, and Enkidu, once coupled to the lowly temple courtesan, ‘‘embraced and their friendship was sealed.’’ Gilgamesh’s relationship to Enkidu frees Uruk from the abuse of its king, and together, Gilgamesh and Enkidu make a complete package. Ninsun completes their union by adopting Enkidu as her own child, thus making him Gilgamesh’s brother. THE POLITICAL REALM: GILGAMESH’S RELATIONSHIP TO HIS KINGDOM
After Gilgamesh finds a companion, someone whom he can accept as an equal, his attitude toward the people of Uruk changes. He must then face two superhuman threats to his kingdom: Humbaba and the Bull of Heaven. Gilgamesh’s campaign against Humbaba, the giant who protects the Cedar Forest, activates Gilgamesh’s renewed sense of self and his new relationship to Enkidu and also reinvigorates his sense of kingship. Until their journey into the forest, Gilgamesh and Enkidu had grown complacent in Uruk. Once active and vital, Enkidu became weak and was ‘‘oppressed by idleness.’’ Gilgamesh also seeks new adventure, for he says, ‘‘I have not established my name stamped on bricks as my destiny decreed.’’ In terms of the heroic code, only a battle in a distant and threatening place against a formidable and evil foe can secure Gilgamesh’s lasting reputation and quench his thirst for esteem. However, Gilgamesh’s personal quest for everlasting fame is at the same time a royal mission to free the land of evil: ‘‘Because of the evil that is in the land, we will go to the forest and destroy the evil; for in the forest lives Humbaba whose name is ‘Hugeness,’ a ferocious giant.’’ Humbaba represents wild and destructive nature apart from any civilizing tendencies, for as Humbaba says as he begs for his life, ‘‘I have never known a mother, no, nor a father who reared me. I was born of the mountain.’’
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Now, Gilgamesh’s desires are no longer at odds with Uruk’s needs. In contrast to his earlier abuse of his people, Gilgamesh, now a true shepherd to his people, seeks to protect Uruk from Humbaba’s evil and secure the vital natural resources Uruk needs to thrive. Some scholars see in Gilgamesh’s journey to the Cedar Forest the historical echo of the cities of southern Mesopotamia infiltrating the more mountainous north and west for the lumber and minerals necessary to support their thriving economies. In fact, the cedar timbers are used to create one of Uruk’s monumental city gates, ‘‘Seventy-two cubits high and twenty-four wide, the pivot and the ferrule and the jamb are perfect. A master craftsman from Nippur has made you.’’ The gates of ancient cities served a dual purpose: In their size and strength they offered the city protection from invaders, and in their craft and beauty they advertised their city’s wealth much in the same way a modern corporate tower might celebrate a company’s affluence and status. The forest he protects thus provides the raw materials for Uruk’s protection. Ancient cities such as Uruk needed to harness both forest and flood in order to survive, and Humbaba’s defeat marks both Gilgamesh’s prowess and Uruk’s prosperity. Although Gilgamesh and Enkidu defeat Humbaba, the fearsome giant of the forest, their success triggers another fateful test: the Bull of Heaven. Gilgamesh and Enkidu return to Uruk, and Ishtar wants Gilgamesh as her lover. However, much in the same way Enkidu could not return to the embrace of the wild, so Gilgamesh cannot return the embrace of the goddess. Gilgamesh recognizes that Ishtar uses and discards her human lovers much in the same way he used and dishonored the women of Uruk, and he pointedly asks Ishtar, ‘‘And if you and I should be lovers, should not I be served in the same fashion as all these others whom you loved once?’’ In other words, his renewed sense of relationship with others has shaped his view of himself, and he is no longer willing to treat others badly or be abused himself. In her rage at being turned down by a lesser being, Ishtar persuades Anu and Antum, her parents, to unleash the Bull of Heaven upon Uruk. Much in the same way that Humbaba embodied both the promise of mountain riches and the danger lurking in the deep forest, the Bull of Heaven personifies the threat of prolonged drought and famine or natural disaster. Anu reminds Ishtar that ‘‘If I do what you desire there will be seven years of drought throughout Uruk when corn will be seedless husks.’’ Ishtar intends the Bull of Heaven to punish both
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Gilgamesh and Enkidu, but it is let loose upon Uruk. The Bull goes first to the river, where ‘‘with his first snorts cracks opened in the earth and a hundred young men fell down to earth.’’ With the Bull’s second snort, two hundred fall to their deaths, and with his third, Enkidu is struck a blow. It is difficult not to see in the Bull of Heaven’s snorts the rumbling destruction of an earthquake, which would devastate Uruk’s mud-brick walls and open up crevasses in the earth. But Gilgamesh and Enkidu work together to defeat this threat and this latest venture becomes their greatest glory. Thus Gilgamesh’s great victories yield the double benefit of bringing him glory and his city peace and prosperity. DEATH AND THE SUPERNATURAL REALM: GILGAMESH’S RELATIONSHIP TO THE GODS
Unfortunately, Gilgamesh’s remarkable triumph against Humbaba and the Bull of Heaven also enrage some members of the heavenly pantheon, and Enkidu has a dream that a council of the gods has decreed that ‘‘Because they have killed the Bull of Heaven, and because they have killed Humbaba who guarded the Cedar Mountain one of the two must die.’’ The gods choose Enkidu to die, and his last words to Gilgamesh reflect the heroic code around which their relationship has revolved: ‘‘My friend, the great goddess cursed me and I must die in shame. I shall not die like a man fallen in battle; I feared to fall, but happy is the man who falls in the battle, for I must die in shame.’’ The true warrior dies with his comrades in battle, not in bed, but Enkidu’s death brings Gilgamesh face-toface with his most difficult challenge: the fact of his own mortality. Together, Gilgamesh and Enkidu have done everything in their power to establish their reputations, their ‘‘names,’’ but at Enkidu’s death Gilgamesh realizes that even their heroic exploits do not hold the key to happiness, eternal life, or even ultimate meaning. In Enkidu’s death, Gilgamesh faces his own destiny, for as Gilgamesh dreamed and Enkidu interpreted, ‘‘The father of the gods has given you kingship, such is your destiny [but] everlasting life is not your destiny.’’ In his rage and grief, Gilgamesh laments the passing of his friend and faces life again alone. Although Gilgamesh is isolated after Enkidu’s death, he is not the same person he was at the beginning of the epic. His relationship to Enkidu has changed him irreversibly, for although death separates Gilgamesh and Enkidu physically, it seems that Gilgamesh carries Enkidu’s memory with him throughout the rest of the tale. Often,
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when critics talk about the central theme of the Epic of Gilgamesh, they describe it in abstract terms: the theme of mortality or the awareness of death. Yet Gilgamesh’s understanding of his mortality emerges from a concrete and personal loss. His best friend has died and left the great hero fearful and that life-changing event sends him into an even more desperate quest for the answer to life’s ultimate question: what will become of me? Gilgamesh recognizes his own fate in his friend’s death, and this awareness spurs him on to the ends of the earth to find Utnapishtim: ‘‘Despair 0 is in my heart. What my brother is b, that shall I be when I am dead. Because I am afraid of death I will go as best I can to find Utnapishtim whom they call the faraway, for he has entered the assembly of the gods.’’ During Gilgamesh’s search for Utnapishtim, the hero changes both emotionally and physically in ways that contrast with his earlier elevated status. First, the great hero who defeated Humbaba and the Bull of Heaven is truly fearful for the first time in the tale. He is just as tentative and unsure after Enkidu’s death as he was arrogant and abusive before Enkidu’s coming. Second, he changes physically to the point that he appears to be a wild man just like Enkidu had been previously. He roams the wilderness dressed in skins, just a haggard shadow of his former self. Furthermore, Gilgamesh’s journey into the supernatural to find Utnapishtim and conquer death parallels his earlier quest into the natural world of the Cedar Forest to locate Humbaba and conquer evil. The earlier quest tested his divinity; this final quest tests his humanity. After passing through a great darkness into the garden of the gods, Gilgamesh encounters three supernatural beings in succession before reaching Utnapishtim. Shamash, appalled at Gilgamesh’s appearance, tells him, ‘‘You will never find the life for which you are searching.’’ Alongside the great sea of death, Siduri, goddess of wine, tells him to abandon his search and advises him instead to eat, drink, and be merry while he can. Urshanabi, Utnapishtim’s boatman, at first refuses to take Gilgamesh to Utnapishtim, but after Gilgamesh destroys Urshanabi’s sailing gear, the boatman relents. Finally, Gilgamesh confronts Utnapishtim with a single question: ‘‘how shall I find the life for which I am searching?’’ At this moment of completion when Gilgamesh has reached the end of his final quest, Utnapishtim replies: ‘‘There is no permanence.’’ Utnapishtim goes on to explain
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that death is humanity’s great equalizer, for everything human will fall eventually and masters as well as servants face the grave. Each of these four encounters is marked both by repetition and increasing complexity. It is as if the closer Gilgamesh gets to his goal, the more difficult his encounter. First, Shamash simply comments that Gilgamesh will not find what he is looking for. Next, Siduri supports her contention with illustrations from everyday life. Third, Urshanabi has to contend with the angry hero and give him the means to cross the waters of death to Utnapishtim. Finally, Utnapishtim answers Gilgamesh’s query and goes on to tell the story of the great flood and how he became immortal. At the same time, Gilgamesh’s journey into the supernatural follows a numbing repetition. Each deity wonders how Gilgamesh came this way and why he is in a deteriorated state; Gilgamesh responds each time that he is haggard and drawn because of his grief for his companion Enkidu, with whom he conquered Humbaba and the Bull of Heaven; that he fears death; and that he seeks Utnapishtim. These repetitions summarize the action up to this point; psychologically, they recreate the haunting questions that persistently assail someone in grief. In fact, Gilgamesh’s description—his ‘‘face like the face of one who has made a long journey’’— captures the poignant weight of grief and its effects. Thus, readers might view Gilgamesh’s journey into the supernatural to find Utnapishtim as a psychological journey through grief toward understanding of and acceptance of mortality and a reconciliation with personal limitations. Utnapishtim gives Gilgamesh a rather simple test to see if he is worthy of immortality: remain awake for seven days. However, sleep quickly overcomes the hero, and Utnapishtim’s wife bakes a loaf of bread for each day Gilgamesh sleeps. In a fascinating sequence, the story describes how the loaves of bread age and decay over seven days, paralleling Enkidu’s seven-day spiral of decay ‘‘until the worm fastened on him’’ after his death. The symbolic nature of the decaying bread is not lost on Gilgamesh, for it confirms that ‘‘death inhabits my room.’’ After Gilgamesh fails the test, the epic presents two strangely parallel scenes. In the first, Utnapishtim gives Urshanabi the charge to ‘‘take him to the washing place.’’ There Urshanabi helps Gilgamesh clean himself up, literally sloughing-off ‘‘his skins, which the sea carried away, and showed [again] the beauty of his body.’’ Despite Gilgamesh’s apparent failure, the king of Uruk is once again transformed,
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and this physical metamorphosis hints toward his awareness of human limitation. Utnapishtim banishes Urshanabi and at the urging of his wife, reveals to Gilgamesh the whereabouts of an underwater plant whose bloom can renew old people to their lost youth. Gilgamesh finds the plant and wants to share its benefits with the people of Uruk, but a snake hiding at the bottom of a well eats the bloom, sheds its skin, and returns to the well, leaving Gilgamesh bereft once again. Many critics believe that the story ends on a note of loss, for Gilgamesh loses the life-giving plant and returns to Uruk empty-handed. However, the tale provides two more positive images. First, although Gilgamesh does not earn everlasting life, he is physically renewed like the snake that sloughs off its skin. The clothes Utnapishtim gives him ‘‘would show no sign of age, but would wear like a new garment till he reached his own city, and his journey was accomplished.’’ Physical change and decay, like the loaves of bread, is inevitable, but change is not necessarily to be equated with death. Second, Gilgamesh actually does not return empty-handed. Urshanabi returns to Uruk with him. Here is the beauty of the Epic of Gilgamesh’s consistently parallel but antithetical structure. In the first half of the story, Gilgamesh begins as a ruthless prince and ends as grieving friend. The second half reverses the first. Gilgamesh begins as a haggard, wild wanderer and returns with a new companion. Gilgamesh may not have eternal life, the ultimate object of his quest, but he does have understanding and relationships with others, which he lacked at the beginning. The final chapter, ‘‘The Death of Gilgamesh,’’ completes Gilgamesh’s cycle from haughty young king to beloved old ruler. The opening of the tale presents Gilgamesh as selfish and arrogant, using the women of Uruk for his own pleasure and the men for his ambitions. He lives outside meaningful human relationships, and he is completely without companionship except for those he dominates. Gilgamesh is restless and ‘‘a man of many moods’’ until he finds an equal and a companion. Indeed, he is no shepherd to his people. The story’s conclusion presents just the opposite. Gilgamesh has fulfilled the destiny that Enlil decreed, and he has achieved great victories. But instead of dying alone on his bed, Gilgamesh is surrounded by love of his family; by his extended household, servants, courtiers, and friends; by the people of Uruk ‘‘great and small’’; and even by a host of gods, including
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SEEING THE OTHER EVOKES AWARENESS OF ONESELF, AND ESPECIALLY OF ONESELF AS ISOLATED, FINITE, AND IMPERMANENT. SEEING THE OTHER MAKES ONE SEE ONESELF AS MORTAL. THIS IS OF COURSE PRECISELY THE AWARENESS TO WHICH THE HERO GILGAMESH COMES AFTER THE DEATH OF ENKIDU.’’
Map of Ancient Mesopotamia (University of Oklahoma Press. Reproduced by permission.)
Dumuzi the god of shepherds and sheepfolds. All of creation is united in lamentation for Gilgamesh when he dies, and although he does not find eternal life, his story endures, etched in stone and on the page, in the memory of his people and his readers alike. Source: Daniel T. Klein, Critical Essay on Epic of Gilgamesh, in Epics for Students, 2nd ed., Gale, Cengage Learning, 2011.
Keith Dickson In the following essay, Dickson discusses the narrative device of switching from the point of view of an observer to that of one of the characters in the Epic of Gilgamesh. THE TRAPPER’S GAZE
One day, across a water-hole, in a wilderness three days’ trek from the city, a trapper sees what has not been seen before: a wild man, like a beast—like a god—fallen from heaven, naked, his body rough with matted hair, down on all fours, crouching to lap up the water. This happens for a second day, and also for a third, but in the way in which this story gets told, these three distinct occasions are fused into a single encounter, as if each were identical to the others, as if each happened at one and the same time, or else all were stuck somehow in a kind of recursive and possibly nightmarish loop. The trapper looks, and his gaze for that brief moment could
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be ours, but what we see most clearly is not what he saw, but how what he saw gives his face in our eyes a different and yet still recognizable look: It is the look of ‘‘one who has travelled distant roads’’ (Gilgamesh I 113–21): A hunter, a trapper man, came face to face with him by the water hole. One day, a second and a third, he came face to face with him by the water hole. The hunter saw him and his expression froze, [he <Enkidu>] and his herds he went back to his lair. [He
was] troubled, he grew still, he grew silent, his mood [was unhappy,] his face clouded over. There [was] sorrow in his heart, his face was like [one who has travelled] distant [roads].
An odd shift thus occurs, a kind of narrative bait-and-switch. The fact that the verbs in this passage are all preterit and that the narrated action has already taken place does not change the fact that in the narration of the story—whether we are reading it, or else hearing it told—we are implicitly invited to look at Enkidu with or through the trapper’s eyes. This is encouraged by the formulaic looping of the action (‘‘one day, a second, and a third . . . ’’) that sets up the scene (I 115) by heightening suspense. The narrative leads us twice to the same brink of direct encounter, only to draw back on each occasion and then return to that brink a third time, thereby generating expectation of something that will happen or be seen. What we are shown, however, is not the face of the wild man—which we have already seen ‘‘for ourselves,’’ after all (I 105–12)—but instead the face of the one through whose eyes we expected to look, with the
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result that the reputed viewer now becomes the object of the view. We see the trapper when he has seen Enkidu ‘‘face to face’’ (I 114, 115). What is the significance of this shift? At least two questions are involved here, which the present essay aims to explore. One is perhaps existential, and the other has to do with what narratologists generally call ‘‘discourse’’—‘‘the narrating as opposed to the narrative’’ (Prince 1987: 21)—or more simply, how the story (whatever its content may be) gets told. Specifically, it is an issue that concerns shifts in ‘‘focalization,’’ namely in the ‘‘perspective’’ or ‘‘viewpoint’’ or ‘‘angle of vision’’ that orients a story’s telling. In the passage quoted above, the narrator of the enframing tale makes the trapper the ‘‘focalizer’’ in his encounter with the wild man, and the wild man takes the part of the ‘‘focalized,’’ one the subject of the gaze, and the other its object. Or at least that initially seems to be the case. As we have noted, it is the trapper himself who becomes focalized through his encounter with Enkidu; the seer becomes the seen. Why do we see his face? I propose to address this question first narratologically, in the expectation that the answer will also bear on its existential import. What can it mean that our view of the wild man in this passage is a refracted one, and this also in two senses of the word? It is refracted first because it represents a different focalization from that of the story’s narrator, with whose point of view ours is identical through much of the narrative. This too involves a shift, since in the lines (I 105–12) immediately preceding the passage at issue, we in fact glimpse the beast from the narrator’s detached and, for all intents and purposes, omniscient vantage point. From the all-encompassing distance of that view, ranging (in the course of barely 40 lines) from the temples of Uruk to the court of Anu and then down to the wilderness, we are given the sight of an utterly natural being; thick hair on his body, long tresses like those of a woman, the strength of Ninurta within him as he eats grass along with the gazelle and jostles with other beasts at the water-hole. But having seen him thus once, why are we invited to see him twice, so to speak, and from a different perspective? What difference does it make that after the ‘‘objective,’’ narrated vision of the wild man we are manipulated into expecting to look at him again from another point of view? The switch from seeing through the eyes of the external narrator (‘‘extradiegetically’’) to seeing through the eyes of a character embedded in the
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story (‘‘intradiegetically’’) is a narrative device that aims chiefly at generating affect. It does this first by reducing the distance between the viewer and the viewed. Here in the wilderness, the trapper’s implicitly far more limited perspective allows us in turn to share in a more naı¨ ve and thus more direct vision of what he sees, or at least in the semblance of such a vision. It offers a sight that is apparently less mediated by the narrator’s extradiegetic view and also less filtered, perhaps, by the experience of what might even at this early date be conventional representations of wild men. To the extent to which we and the original audience are invited to crouch down and look across the water-hole, we are also encouraged to see as it were directly what it is that crouches on the other side, over there, just opposite us. Rather than maintaining separation, then, the trapper’s viewpoint would bring us into dangerous proximity to the beast. This close encounter tends to cancel out the distance of our initial perspective from the safety of the omniscient narrator’s viewpoint. As a corollary, the wild man himself would therefore seem less a fictional type—something encountered in stories told by narrators—than an individual in his own right. For Enkidu to be seen intradiegetically gives him greater authenticity, as it were. Proximity in turn supplies the encounter with the emotional content it initially lacked. To be sure, our embedded gaze is an interrupted one, a kind of narrative feint, a blind alley, in that it never actually reaches its target. We see Enkidu only once, after all, not twice; we never see the beast as the trapper really saw him. Instead, our gaze is deflected onto the trapper’s face, where we see not what he saw but instead his own response to the sight. This is a loss, perhaps, but at the same time also a gain. The response in its emotional and existential density is in fact something we could not have seen extradiegetically, from a remote position outside the narrative. Seeing the trapper after he has seen Enkidu lends us a different kind of vision, namely a vision with greater affective depth. Even in the case of an embedded as opposed to an external point of view, vision still remains the most distancing of the senses; it keeps its object at arm’s length, and to that extent perhaps controls it better, but at the same time also precludes direct involvement. Note that in the run of lines preceding this encounter (I 105–12), where the perspective is that of the detached narrator, the description is dominated by the sense of sight: body, matted hair, long tresses, coat of hair, grazing, jostling. Only twice is what is narrated an inner state—interestingly, the
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beast’s ignorance (I 108) and satisfaction (I 112)— rather than some outward, visible feature. By contrast, the description of the trapper dwells mostly on inward feelings. All but two of the adjectives attributed to him in lines I 117–21 refer to affective and thus not directly observable states: ‘‘troubled, he grew still, he grew silent, | his mood [was unhappy,] . . . | There [was] sorrow in his heart.’’ Even the reference to his actual features (‘‘his face clouded over’’ [I 119]) addresses his appearance as an index of mood. The encounter ‘‘face to face’’ (I 114, 115) exposes the trapper’s own face (I 116, 119, 121) not as surface but instead as transparency, allowing us a glimpse into the depth of his heart. Unlike the distancing of sight, emotions are markers of proximity—to the trapper himself, perhaps, as much as to the beast across the water-hole. Through them, we are brought perilously closer to experiencing less Enkidu himself than the significance of an encounter with him. Through the literary device of embedded (and interrupted) focalization, we gain a kind of affective vision, or better, the vision of an effect. What we see on the surface, the rigidity of the expression, the clouding of the face, reveals what lies within. This device in turn reflexively turns on us too, since by its means we are also implicitly led to reassess our own initial response to our first view of Enkidu just a few lines earlier (I 105–12). How likely is it, after all, that upon that first sight of the wild man our own expressions ‘‘froze,’’ that we ‘‘grew still . . . grew silent,’’ and that our faces seemed to others like the faces of those who have ‘‘travelled distant roads’’? The description of the trapper’s response, the fact that right after having seen Enkidu we are now directed to look at another who has also just seen him, prescribes specific affective content in response to that sight. It fills in a blind spot in our extradiegetic view of Enkidu. What was missing or indefinite and unspecified in our own experience when we looked from the narrator’s viewpoint is now supplied to us when we are asked to look from the viewpoint of the trapper. His response, in a sense, is offered as a template for ours, and possibly even as a mirror. Seeing the trapper after he has seen Enkidu forces us to take a look at ourselves as well. We see the trapper’s expression, then, and not the wild man’s face a second time because more than any direct view of Enkidu it measures the magnitude of the latter’s strangeness. The trapper’s shock reflects the beast’s alterity, and we too are encouraged to experience that otherness as shocking. At the same time, we are not brought too close
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for comfort; the distance is never really collapsed, but on the contrary only preserved by interposing the trapper’s face between us and the face of Enkidu. Not only does it preserve that distance, moreover, but the device of deflected focalization at the same time also implicitly augments the danger of encountering Enkidu by protecting us from ‘‘directly’’ experiencing it ourselves. What seems like an impediment may in this respect actually be more like a shield. The trapper is a foil. In his face we see the result of unmediated confrontation with the wild man, confrontation unlike the one enjoyed at the safe and affectless distance of the narrator’s gaze. If nothing else, this lets the storyteller maximize the impact of the encounter without having to undertake the task of describing it again, and in such a way (if it were possible) that the audience might react just as the trapper did. More than just a narrative trick, however, the tactic also helps to thematize the issue of the effects, both physical and existential, of confrontations with others, which is one of the abiding themes of Gilgamesh. There is perhaps even a sense in which Enkidu before his ‘‘fall’’ into culture resembles the Medusa of Greek myth, the sight of whose face turns the viewer to stone. The trapper’s frozen expression would serve in this case as a kind of reflection that lets us see what ours would have been if we had had the misfortune to look at the creature with our very own eyes. The passage closes with the formula that strikingly combines outward appearance with inner state to register the full extent of the trapper’s reaction (I 121): ‘‘his face was like [one who has travelled] distant [roads].’’ His experience of the wild man transforms him; it alters how he feels (troubled, despondent, sorrowful), and therefore even alters the very look of his face. The simile in the formula is of course partly a simple reference to the physical travails of travel for the Mesopotamians, as for many in the ancient world, always a perilous and exhausting enterprise. Along the ‘‘distant path’’ (III 25) to the Cedar Forest, for instance, Gilgamesh and Enkidu need to dig wells for their water every night (IV 5f., 38f., 83f., 125f., 166f.), at the end of each day’s long fifty leagues. On his second journey, the hero must kill lions, both to survive and for his food (IX 15–18), and his passage along the path of the sun, ‘‘pitch dark and seemingly interminable’’ (George 2003: 494), is a grueling and nightmarish race over the course of an entire day. The theme of the journey and its toll is in fact raised in the opening lines of the poem (I 9): Gilgamesh ‘‘came a distant road and was weary
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but granted rest.’’ Here travel figures as a kind of heroic labor in itself, and the journey itself as a narrative structuring device. This is in keeping with what Campbell styles the heroic ‘‘monomyth,’’ in whose terms the hero’s story always follows a circular track of Departure and later Return, travel outward to the ends of the known world and then back home again to rest or die. More than just this, however, the simile also registers the inward effect of travelling ‘‘distant roads.’’ What the trapper feels in Tablet I is less physical weariness than existential fatigue; the sight of the wild man somehow makes him sorrowful and despondent. In a narrative that has much to do with mapping the changes wrought through encounters with others I—of the trapper with Enkidu, Enkidu with Shamhat, Gilgamesh with Enkidu, both heroes with Huwawa, Gilgamesh with Siduri and Utnapishtim—this first encounter in the story is in fact richly prefigurative of others later on. Seeing the other is transformative; it always brings with it a risk of oneself no longer being the same. Inner changes in Gilgamesh mostly take place precisely in the context of confrontation and distant travel, whether literal—from Uruk to the wilderness, from Uruk to the ends of the earth—or else figurative, as in the case of Enkidu’s own passage from nature to culture. In that case too, as in the trapper’s face, the change is reflected in how Enkidu appears afterwards, as he sheds the look of the beast and becomes instead groomed and anointed with oil like a man, ‘‘like a warrior’’ (II P 105–11), ‘‘like a god’’ (II P 54). The beginning of his own journey, in the act of sexual initiation by Shamhat, may not cover much physical space, but the ontological distance he traverses is considerable. In turn, the face of Gilgamesh will likewise undergo transformation in the course of his painful quest after Enkidu’s death, though there the change takes the form of a kind of disfigurement (X 40–45 47–52 113–18 119–25). The traveller who leaves his familiar walls to venture into the wild that stretches between one town or city and the next, and especially the traveller who is gone for long and whose journey takes him far afield, returns home to his kin a changed man because of the labor of travel and also because of what he has seen along the way. According to the use of the formula in Tablet I to illuminate the effects of the trapper’s encounter with Enkidu, seeing what is other somehow causes a change in
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the heart that is reflected in the face, thus permanently altering one’s outward look. This alteration is presumably commensurate with the strangeness of what gets seen. By analogy, the greater and longer the trek—how much farther one has wandered, amidst how many more dangers, through how many more strange sights, and with what deeper suffering—the more it transfigures the traveller. Perhaps even more significant is the fact that the inner change wrought by travel and encounter with others consistently seems to be that of grief, not joy. Seeing the other causes anguish. Contrast the statement ‘‘there [was] sorrow in his heart’’ (I 120) applied to the trapper after he catches first sight of Enkidu, his gaze traversing the gulf between man of culture and wild man, mortal human and godlike beast, with the reference a few lines earlier (112 177; cf. 173) to Enkidu’s heart ‘‘growing pleased with the water’’ alongside the beasts. Sorrow will of course inevitably follow Enkidu’s transformation, too, though only after a lengthy detour through a failed heroic career (cf. VII 263–67). After the delight he experiences in Shamhat’s embrace (I 189–95, 300; P II 135), which even brings on forgetfulness of the wild where he was born (II P 46–50), in the food and drink of his acculturation (II P 100–105), and perhaps also in the quasi-erotic company of Gilgamesh, Enkidu suffers despondency and regret on his deathbed in Tablet VII. What this suggests is that the sorrow that results from the sight of otherness is a sorrow closely linked to self-consciousness and to awareness of death. Seeing the other evokes awareness of oneself, and especially of oneself as isolated, finite, and impermanent. Seeing the other makes one see oneself as mortal. This is of course precisely the awareness to which the hero Gilgamesh comes after the death of Enkidu. That knowledge impels him on a journey whose transformative effects can also be read in his face. To appreciate the change he undergoes, it will help to see it through yet another focalization. SIDURI’S GAZE
Through veils, she raises her eyes (IX 196) to see a wild creature approach from the garden of jewelled trees. His aspect is frightening; afraid for her life, she quickly withdraws inside her house, bars the door, and goes up to the safety of the roof. Her concern is not baseless, since the creature is violent. He in fact confronts her from outside and threatens to shatter the bolts and smash her gate (X 15–22). Most striking about his appearance is
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its fundamentally dual nature: this is a creature divided against itself (X 5–9): Gilgamesh came wandering, and [ . . . :] he was clothed in a pelt, [he was imbued with] menace. He had the flesh of the gods in [his body.] but there was sorrow in [his heart.] His face was like one who had travelled a distant road.
A man dressed like a lion, outwardly a beast since covered by its pelt, he is also a grieving (human) heart covered by the flesh of the gods. This makes for an unsettling combination, and also suggests his own liminal status, his position midway between animal and deity, though this time not as a source of heroic strength but instead an occasion for grief. Mirroring Enkidu’s earlier passage, he has exchanged Culture for Nature: His animal skins (cf. XI 250ff.) stand in contrast—as uncouth to refined, savage to civilized—with the hoods and veils in which Siduri is wrapped (X 4). A similar contrast presumably holds between his face and hers, since it is implicitly to that difference that her attention is immediately drawn (X 40–45): ‘‘[why are your] cheeks [hollow.] your face sunken, [your mood wretched,] your features wasted? [(Why) is there sorrow] in your heart, your face like one [who has travelled a distant road?] [(Why is it)] your face is burnt [by frost and sunshine,] [and] you roam the wild [got up like a lion?]’’
Before looking more closely at the details of this description, whose fourth line echoes and is therefore confirmed by the narrator’s extradiegetic use of the same formula at X 9, it will be useful to remember how great a switch in focalization has taken place with respect to the hero’s character. Throughout much of Tablets X and XI of Gilgamesh, it is Gilgamesh himself who is the object of the gaze of others rather than its subject. How he appears to Siduri, Urshanabi, and Utnapishtim receives the greatest emphasis in these episodes, as each of the inhabitants of this realm sees and comments on his troubled looks and desperate, impulsive behavior. Gilgamesh as the object of sight—namely, as focalized—instead of the prime focalizer strongly contrasts with his position at the opening of the narrative, which celebrates more than anything his role as subject, as the master of heroic vision (I 1–7):
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[He who saw the Deep, the] foundation of the country, [who knew . . . ,] was wise in everything! [Gilgamesh, who] saw the Deep, the foundation of the county, [who] knew [ . . . ,] was wise in everything! [ . . . ] . . . equally [ . . . ,] he [learnt] the totality of wisdom about everything. He saw the secret and uncovered the hidden.
The One Who Saw has now become the One Who is Seen and, even more tellingly, the one seen not as the acme of heroism or the standard of masculine beauty, but rather the one who is radically and even repellently other, both alien and alienating. It is chiefly his alterity, the degree to which he obviously has no place beside Siduri and in the company of Utnapishtim, despite the strength of his desire to be rid of his mortality, that is the focus of his adventures in these final scenes. No longer the confident hero and arrogant king, the builder of walls and tamer of wastelands, Gilgamesh is now an intruder in a strange world, just as Enkidu too once was: Both of them ‘‘savage,’’ potentially violent, ignorant, and vulnerable. The threat of battery he utters against Siduri (X 15–22) he soon afterwards carries out against the Stone Ones, whoever or whatever they are, smashing them in fury and thereby stupidly depriving himself of the safest means of passage across the Waters of Death (X 92–108). Once arrived on the opposite shore, he fails the simple test of vigilance he is given the very moment it begins (XI 210f.), like a folktale buffoon, and the plant of rejuvenation too will later elude his grasp (XI 303–7), leaving him only with tears and useless lament (XI 308–14). Gilgamesh is clearly an interloper in this world; he is a clumsy and even pitiful beast. The homology between Gilgamesh among the immortals and prelapsarian Enkidu on the threshold of human culture is a strong one in the narrative. A simple but compelling analogy holds: As was wild man to trapper, so is Gilgamesh to deity: the ontological distance between the terms in each pair is measured by the shock and revulsion caused when beast and hero are the focalized objects of another’s view. The representation of Gilgamesh as a desperate, dangerous creature is thus the effect of a tactic of focalization; it is conditioned mainly by the narrative construction of a series of gazes that make him their object. These are gazes diametrically unlike the ones that earlier construed him as a
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paragon of kingship (I 29–62), as an alpha-male conspicuous in strength, grace, and beauty (I 234–39), and as the embodiment of the deeply erotic appeal or kuzbu that drew down Ishtar’s longing eye on him (VI 1–9). Here instead he is seen, by Siduri, Urshanabi, Utnapishtim, Utnapishtim’s wife, as much if not more than he actively sees others, and the repetition of the formulaic litany of questions (X 40–45 115–18 213–18) adverting to his face and comportment by each who beholds him, as well as to the disfigurement of his body by matted hair (cf. I 105) and dirty hides (XI 250–58 263–70), only emphasizes his alterity. He is not quite the same species, and inspires in them a mixture of piety, fear, and disgust. In the eyes of Siduri and Utnapishtim, this strange intruder, a jarring bricolage of pelt, divine flesh, and human despair, even verges on the monstrous. His narcissistic grief has disfigured him far more than the travails of his long journey, the sleeplessness, hunger, and the burning by sun and frost. ‘‘His face was like [one who has travelled] distant [roads]’’ (X 9 I 121). Like the trapper before him, Gilgamesh has seen something that transfigures him into an emblem of grief, an icon or planned likeness, and also a cautionary sight for all others to see. Similarly, for Gilgamesh too the face is a transparent medium to what lies beneath; it is at one and the same time un visage me´duse´, frozen expression (I 117; Botte´ro 1992: 70), and also a kind of mirror of the heart. The hollow cheeks and sunken countenance, the wasted features are outward signs of the sorrow within, indices of the foreknowledge of death, that ‘‘woe in the vitals’’ (Foster 2001: 74), that sits uneasily within his godlike flesh and underneath the lion’s filthy hide. Death is what he has seen—Enkidu’s death, and hence his own—and his malaise over that sight is precisely what marks him as an unwelcome alien among the serene population at the ends of the earth. In the trapper’s case, the trajectory of his gaze was first promised but then withdrawn and replaced instead by the sight of his estranged look in response to what he saw across the water-hole that day. This reflexive movement (as I have suggested) might be understood as a kind of prophylaxis, namely as a narrative device disguised as a way of protecting us from the naked sight of primal man, as if it were somehow possible to see him immediately and unfiltered by literary tropes, as the trapper presumably did. What Gilgamesh has seen, on the other hand, though now likewise reflected in his
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looks, nonetheless stays fully within narrative sight during the final episodes of the story. There is little if any disguise here. Everyone—Siduri, Urshanabi, Utnapishtim, the audience, and most of all Gilgamesh—can see it very clearly: It is death. The death of Enkidu, it is worth recalling, was initially recounted in small part from the detached and extradiegetic standpoint of the narrator (cf. VII 254–67), but for the most part in the form of an intricate web of embedded focalizations by Enkidu and Gilgamesh, alternately, all weaving almost liturgically in and out of dreams, wakefulness, delusion, and epiphany. On several occasions in Tablet X, that death is retold and therefore also refocalized by Gilgamesh himself, in the formula that constructs his reply to those equally formulaic questions about the devastation others see in his face. Gilgamesh, here both focalizer and narrator, openly tells what he himself has seen (X 57–60 134–37 234–37: ‘‘[the doom of mankind overtook <Enkidu>,] [for six days and seven nights I wept over him.] [I did not give him up for burial,] [until a maggot fell from his nostril.]’’
The sight of that body infested with maggots, the flesh of Enkidu turned into worms’ meat and clay (X 68f. 145f. 245f.), has become a fixation for Gilgamesh, a nightmare image as it were etched permanently on his retina. This points to another shift in the interplay of seeing and being seen. Here Gilgamesh as The One Who Sees (cf. I 1f.) has not only become instead The One Who Is Seen—the object exposed to the superior and coolly sympathetic gaze of Siduri and Utnapishtim—but also and more critically The One Who Is Bound By What He Has Seen. His focus is fixated. At one time long ago the masterful subject of vision, he is now controlled by his object; the focalizer has come to be dominated by the focalized. Death fills the entire field of his sight, afflicting him with a kind of existential blindness, just as it fills his heart the inconsolable grief that initially makes him deaf to Siduri’s measured counsel. The expression on his face, ‘‘like [one who has travelled] distant [roads],’’ is that of despair and desolation in the sight of his own death. There is perhaps even a subtle switch to be noted here in the sense of the analogy that underlies that formula. In the trapper’s case, I have suggested that the reference of the simile ‘‘his face was like [one who has travelled] distant [roads]’’ was more than likely to the traveller come home
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physically altered by what he has seen abroad, as well as by the vastness of space and the exhausting length of the journey undertaken there and back. The mere sight of the natural monster Enkidu—once, twice, three times at the waterhole—transfigures a previously familiar face into an image of despondency. When the same formula is predicated of Gilgamesh in Tablet X, however, the different setting and situation of the episode evoke for it a perceptibly different connotation. What in the trapper’s case was figurative is in his instead quite literal: Gilgamesh the distraught hero and roving savage has indeed ‘‘[travelled] distant [roads]’’ to arrive now at the very edge of the known world, the threshold between human and divine space on earth. Thanks to the shift in focalization, the traveller himself is now the one who is foreign, not the returning son but on the contrary the one who arrives for the first time in a remote and possibly inhospitable new land. There, in the penetrating gaze of all who see him, his appearance is rather an index of the fact that he is indeed a stranger, displaced and disturbing and ‘‘[imbued with] menace’’ (X 6). Unlike the trapper from the wilderness, the hero Gilgamesh has not returned to his own kin, as he himself perhaps would hope, shocked and tired and visibly estranged by his long trek through this world, but rather (and much more like Enkidu) he is himself the strange one stumbling into a land that can never really be his home. Source: Keith Dickson, ‘‘Looking at the Other in Gilga mesh,’’ in Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 127, No. 2, April June 2007, pp. 171 82.
Thorkild Jacobson In the following excerpt, Jacobson traces the course of Gilgamesh’s quest for immortality. As the story [of Gilgamesh] begins Gilgamesh shares the heroic values of his times, and his aspirations to immortality take the form of a quest for immortal fame. Death is not yet truly the enemy; it is unavoidable of course but somehow part of the game: a glorious death against a worthy opponent will cause one’s name to live forever. In his pursuit of this goal Gilgamesh is extraordinarily successful and scores one gain after another. He fights Enkidu and gains a friend and helper. Together they are strong enough to overcome the famed Huwawa and to treat with disdain the city goddess of Uruk, Ishtar. At that point they have undoubtedly reached the pinnacle of human fame. And at that point their luck changes. In ruthlessly asserting themselves and
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seeking ever new ways to prove their prowess they have grievously offended the gods, paying no heed to them whatever. Huwawa was the servant of Enlil, appointed by him to guard the cedar forest; their treatment of Ishtar was the height of arrogance. Now the gods’ displeasure catches up with them, and Enkidu dies. When he loses his friend, Gilgamesh for the first time comprehends death in all its stark reality. And with that new comprehension comes the realization that eventually he himself will die. With that all his previous values collapse: an enduring name and immortal fame suddenly mean nothing to him any more. Dread, inconquerable fear of death holds him in its grip; he is obsessed with its terror and the desirability, nay, the necessity of living forever. Real immortality— an impossible goal—is the only thing Gilgamesh can now see. Here, then, begins a new quest: not for immortality in fame, but for immortality, literally, in the flesh. As with his former quest for fame Gilgamesh’s heroic stature and indomitable purpose take him from one success to another. Setting out to find his ancestor, Utnapishtim, in order to learn how to achieve, like him, eternal life, he gains the help of the scorpion man and his wife, Siduˆri, the alewife, and Urshanabi. When after great travail he stands before Utnapishtim it is only to have the whole basis for his hopes collapse. The story of the flood shows that the case of Utnapishtim was unique and can never happen again and—to make his point— Utnapishtim’s challenging him to resist sleep, proves how utterly impossible is his hope for vigor strong enough to overcome death. However, at the point of the seemingly total and irreversible failure of his quest, new hope is unexpectedly held out to Gilgamesh. Moved by pity, Utnapishtim’s wife asks her husband to give Gilgamesh a parting gift for his journey home, and Utnapishtim reveals a secret. Down in the fresh watery deep grows a plant that will make an oldster into a child again. Gilgamesh dives down and plucks the plant. He has his wish. He holds life in his hand. Any time he grows old he can again return to childhood and begin life anew. Then on the way back there is the inviting pool and the serpent who snatches the plant when he carelessly leaves it on the bank. Gilgamesh’s first quest for immortality in fame defied the gods and brought their retribution on him; this quest for actual immortality is even more deeply defiant; it defies human nature itself, the very condition of being human, finite, mortal. And in the
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end it is Gilgamesh’s own human nature that reasserts itself; it is a basic human weakness, a moment of carelessness, that defeats him. He has nobody to blame but himself; he has ingloriously blundered. And it is perhaps this very lack of heroic stature in his failure that brings him to his senses. The panic leaves him, he sees himself as pitiful and weeps; then as the irony of the situation strikes him, he can smile at himself. His superhuman efforts have produced an almost comical result. This smile, this saving sense of humor, is the sign that he has, at last, come through. He is finally able to accept reality and with it a new possible scale of value: the immortality he now seeks, in which he now takes pride, is the relative immortality of lasting achievement, as symbolized by the walls of Uruk. The movement from heroic idealism to the everyday courage of realism illustrated by [the hero of] the Gilgamesh story gains further in depth if one analyzes it not only positively as a quest, but also negatively as a flight, an avoidance. A flight from death rather than a quest for life— but a flight in what terms? Throughout the epic Gilgamesh appears as young, a mere boy, and he holds on to that status, refusing to exchange it for adulthood as represented by marriage and parenthood. Like Barrie’s Peter Pan he will not grow up. His first meeting with Enkidu is a rejection of marriage for a boyhood friendship, and in the episode of the bull of heaven he refuses—almost unnecessarily violently—Ishtar’s proposal of marriage. She spells disaster and death to him. So when Enkidu dies, he does not move forward seeking a new companionship in marriage, but backward in an imaginary flight toward the security of childhood. At the gate of the scorpion man he leaves reality; he passes literally ‘‘out of this world.’’ In the encounter with the alewife he again firmly rejects marriage and children as an acceptable goal, and eventually, safely navigating the waters of death, he reaches the ancestors, the father and mother figures of Utnapishtim and his wife, on their island where, as in childhood, age and death do not exist. True to his images, Utnapishtim sternly attempts to make Gilgamesh grow up to responsibility; he proposes an object lesson, the contest with sleep, and is ready to let Gilgamesh face the consequences. The wife of Utnapishtim, as mother, is more indulgent, willing for Gilgamesh to remain a child, and she eventually makes it possible for him to reach his goal with the plant ‘‘As Oldster Man Becomes Child.’’ Gilgamesh is fleeing death by fleeing old age, even
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TO EAT, TO DRINK, TO BE WELL CLOTHED, AND HAVE LASTING COMPANIONSHIP WERE AMONG THE GIFTS THAT THE GODS GAVE TO MANKIND. BEYOND THAT NOTHING MORE CAN BE OBTAINED. HOW FOOLISH OF GILGAMESH TO WANT MORE.’’
maturity; he is reaching back to security in childhood. The loss of the plant stands thus for the loss of the illusion that one can go back to being a child. It brings home the necessity for growing up, for facing and accepting reality. And in the loss Gilgamesh for the first time can take himself less seriously, even smile ruefully at himself; he has at last become mature. For whose sake, Urshanabi, did my arms tire? For whose sake has my heart’s blood been spent? I brought no blessing on myself, I did the serpent underground good service!
The Gilgamesh epic is a story about growing up. Source: Thorkild Jacobson, ‘‘Second Millennium Meta phors: ‘And Death the Journey’s End,’ The Gilgamesh Epic,’’ in The Treasures of Darkness: A History of Mesopo tamian Religion, Yale University Press, 1976, pp. 193 219.
Jack M. Sasson In the following excerpt, Sasson discusses the five separate, original Sumerian legends that were eventually combined into the unified Gilgamesh epic. As it is still preserved for us, the material in Sumerian dealing with Gilgamesh consists of five legends, each complete within itself. ‘‘Gilgamesh and King Agga of Kish’’ is probably the most ‘‘historical’’ text. It speaks of Gilgamesh’s stout-hearted refusal to submit to the mighty king of a neighboring kingdom and of his eventual triumph over the forces which threatened Uruk. ‘‘Gilgamesh and the Land of Living’’ is by far the masterpiece among the fragments in existence. Its mood is somber throughout, for it treats a poignant theme. These are the words of Gilgamesh to Utu the sun-god: Utu, a word I would speak to you, to my word your ear! I would have it reach you, give ear to it! In my city man dies, oppressed is the heart,
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Man perishes, heavy is the heart, I peered over the wall, Saw the dead bodies floating in the river’s water. As for me, I too will be served thus, verily it is so! Man, the tallest, cannot reach to heaven, Man, the widest, cannot cover the earth. Brick and stamp have not yet brought forth the fated end, I would enter the ‘‘land,’’ would set up my name; In its places where the names have been raised up, I would raise up my name. In its places where the names have not been raised up, I would raise up the names of the Gods.
In order to accomplish this task, Gilgamesh and his servant Enkidu travel to the Cedar-forest, the land of the Living. There they attack and kill Humbaba, its monstrous guardian. But not before some of the most felicitous imageries in cuneiform literature were preserved on clay. ‘‘Gilgamesh, Enkidu and the Nether World,’’ sometimes called ‘‘Gilgamesh and the Hulupputree,’’ begins with an act of creation. This is not especially remarkable, for to the Mesopotamian, as well as to the Hebrew, almost every existing element, be it animate or inanimate, resulted from a genesis that was tailor-made to fit its special nature. This, incidentally, helps to explain the many acts of creation, often clashingly different, that have been preserved in almost every Ancient Near Eastern civilization. To return to our story, a huluppu-tree, some sort of willow, had been nurtured by the goddess Inanna. Sadly enough it soon became the, haunt of repulsive creatures. Gilgamesh is called upon to banish these intruders and is rewarded with same symbols of kingship produced from the huluppu’s wood. When these objects accidentally fall into the Netherworld, heroic Gilgamesh sends his companion Enkidu to regain them. The latter’s descent into Hades offers the Sumerian poet a chance to describe life among the dead. ‘‘The Death of Gilgamesh’’ and ‘‘Gilgamesh and the Bull of Heaven’’ are two additional tales from the Sumerian which exist in an extremely poor state of preservation. Because of the episodic nature of the Sumerian material at our disposal, we are faced with yet another difficulty. Did the Sumerian poets know of a cycle of tales whose protagonist was Gilgamesh, or were they content just to chant his praises in a series of single, complete adventures? In other words, was there as early as Sumerian times a unified epic with a major theme woven within the
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succession of encounters? With the possibility that future discoveries may force drastic revision in current opinions, the answer will have to be ‘‘No!’’ A meticulous reading of the Sumerian fragments summarized above will show very little internal evidence to suggest that even the humblest idea was followed or elaborated. As a matter of fact, one suspects an ulterior motive to have influenced the forging of some of these songs. This is best noted in ‘‘Gilgamesh, Enkidu and the Netherworld,’’ where the act of creating the hulupputree and the subsequent conversion of some of its wood into symbols of kingship requires as many lines as the visit of Enkidu to the underworld. It is nearly inescapable, one is forced to conclude, that man’s first written epic was wrought by a Semitic genius who probably lived during the time of Hammurapi. To be sure, our poet must have been acquainted with some important emendations brought about by an Assyrian predecessor some generations earlier. The following will be no more than an educated guess, but it is ventured that some of the more bombastic episodes of far-away conquest, such as the expedition to the Cedar-forest to destroy Humbaba, may have been patterned after historical events which occurred around 2350 B.C. Then Sargon of Agade, a Semitic dynast, deeply penetrated the Amanus ranges and Anatolia. His exploits were remembered with special relish by the Assyrians, one of whose famous kings took the same name. The intensely nationalistic Babylonians, on the other hand, never quite forgave Sargon for having rejected Babylon as a capital city in favor of Agade. For this reason, they would be loath to devise exploits for their Gilgamesh based upon the career of Sargon. It would be another matter, of course, to accept a ready-made adventure and to incorporate it within existing collections. A question might be raised at this point. If the adventure of Gilgamesh in the Cedar mountain is of Assyrian origin, how does one explain its presence in ‘‘Gilgamesh and the Land of the Living,’’ a Sumerian text? It should brought to attention that despite its preservation in Sumerian, a language which became obsolete as a mode of oral communication in the late third millennium, ‘‘Gilgamesh and the Land of the Living’’ dates from the era of Hammurapi, By then, Sumerian was employed by priests and scribes much as Latin is used today in the Catholic church. I would like to hazard a guess which might be realized through stylistic evidence
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that ‘‘Gilgamesh and the Land of the Living’’ was a translation from the Semitic Akkadian into an ornate Sumerian. To return to the old Babylonian poet. He seems to have introduced two elements into the collection which he inherited both from Sumer and Assyria. One of these, the transformation of Enkidu from the status of a passive servant to that of an active and often competitive companion, is probably the most inspired literary achievement in the annals of Mesopotamian creative thinking. In the Sumerian rendition Enkidu was conceived as a static servant whose every move depended upon the whim of his master. In the Babylonian version, however, Enkidu stands, at least at the outset, as Gilgamesh’s opponent. . . . The other theme introduced by the Semitic bard is the quest for immortality, or more precisely, for rejuvenation. This theme has been encountered tangentially in the Sumerian version, but this occurs precisely in the text which is suspected of being a rendering from the Semitic. No doubt, the important role which Shamash, the Sun-god, plays in the Babylonian renditions has something to do with inspiring this theme. As the god of Justice, a notion which included the apportioning of life, Shamash came to prominence among the Semites. His cult was particularly strong during the Old Babylonian era of ca. 1750 B.C. The development of these two motifs, reinforcing each other, necessitated rearrangement of the available material and permitted the forging of a new pattern, that of a unified epic. Such a statement should, of course, be taken with a liberal dash of salt, for it treads upon tortuous territory: the origins of literary creativity. We can, however, stand on firmer ground when we consider the techniques employed by the poet to translate inspiration into the written word. In this paper, I would like to concentrate on one literary device, irony, and will attempt to demonstrate a subtlety on the part of the Semitic poet which might rank him with Homer, with slight exaggeration of course. (pp. 263–65) Of irony’s many qualities, I shall describe the Semitic poet’s employment of two devices which have commonly been called ‘‘dramatic irony’’ and ‘‘irony in the use of character.’’ In some sense, dramatic irony is almost always playful, intellectual, and esoteric. Passages containing the ironic elements operate on two seemingly independent
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levels. On the one hand, the characters are shown by their utterances or deeds to be unaware of having fallen victims to a rush of events beyond their control. On the other hand, the audience, forewarned of subsequent developments by an omniscient author, evaluates differently the same passage. This discrepancy between the ultimate reality, as it is known to the audience, and the immediate situation, as it is understood by the characters, constitutes dramatic irony, wellknown to us from the works of the Greek dramatists, of Shakespeare, and of Ibsen, among many others. The Gilgamesh epic actually opens by offering a capsule summary, a sort of Miltonian argument, of the complete drama that is to unfold: Let me proclaim to the land (the feats) of him who has seen the deep Of him who knows the seas, let me inform it fully He has (seen/visited) the. . . . The wise (one) who knows everything. Secret things he has seen, what is hidden to man (he knows) And he brought ings from before the Flood He also took the Long Journey, wearisome and under difficulties All his experiences, he engraved in a stone stela.
The poet thus assures his listeners that he will be telling a ‘‘true’’ tale since its essence is derived from Gilgamesh’s own inscription. He also reminds them that his hero will come back from a long journey, weary and worn, and lightly suggests it to have been an unsuccessful enterprise. Lest the audience be caught in a despairing mood, one which could inhibit its response to his story-telling, the Mesopotamian bard quickly adds praises of Gilgamesh’s earthly, tangible achievements. Of ramparted Uruk, the wall he built Of hollowed Eanna, the pure sanctuary. Behold its outer wall, whose cornice is like copper Peer at its inner wall, which none can equal Seize upon the threshold, which is from old Draw near to Eanna, the dwelling of Ishtar, Which no future king, no man can equal. Go up and walk on the walls of Uruk, Inspect the substructure, examine the brickwork: Is not its core of baked brick? Did not the Seven (Sages) lay its foundations?
The above passage can be considered as the poet’s editorial comment upon Gilgamesh’s search for immortality. It is futile, he seems to argue, to be content with more than earthly accomplishments. When this notion is alluded to again, it comes at the end of the epic, after the long and fruitless
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odyssey is over. One cannot but admire the poet’s cleverness in choosing a resigned Gilgamesh to utter the following: Go up, Urshanabi, walk up on the ramparts of Uruk. Inspect the base terrace, examine its brickwork. (See) if its core is not of baked brick, And if the Seven Wise Ones laid not its foundation!
Nor is the audience allowed a lapse of memory, for the poet repeatedly calls attention to Gilgamesh’s eventual failure. Before every new venture, the hero is made to hear the truth about the success of his forthcoming enterprise. But the blinded and tragic protagonist fails to perceive it. In the first cluster of episodes, it is Enkidu who ironically is chosen to deliver the poet’s messages. In two instances before the warriors’ meeting with Humbaba, an encounter which could be considered as the prolegomenon to Enkidu’s death, this brave companion has a series of premonitions. The first occurs immediately after Enkidu and Gilgamesh, appreciating each other’s vigor: ‘‘kissed each other and formed a friendship.’’ ‘‘My friend,’’ says Gilgamesh, ‘‘why do your eyes fill with tears? (Why) is your heart ill, as bitterly you sigh?’’ ‘‘A cry, my friend,’’ replies Enkidu, ‘‘chokes my throat. My arms are limp, and my strength has turned to weakness.’’ As the two approach the lair of Humbaba, Enkidu has a presentiment once more: ‘‘Let us not go down into the heart of the forest,’’ he implores Gilgamesh. ‘‘In opening the gate, my hand becomes limp.’’ But fate is not to be cheated, and the poet digs deeper into his bag of literary tricks, producing a fresh and sharper collection of ironical episodes. As the fateful confrontation with Humbaba draws even nearer, it is Gilgamesh’s turn to be forewarned. In one remarkable statement intended to give courage to Enkidu, he is made to say: ‘‘Who, my friend, can scale heaven? Only the gods dwell forever with the Sun-god. As for mankind, numbered are its days; whatever they achieve is but wind. Even here you are afraid of death.’’ It becomes Gilgamesh’s tragedy that having enunciated the facts of mortal life, he did not perceive and learn from them. Moreover, Gilgamesh fails to heed significant warnings. Nocturnal messages were valued by all ancient civilizations as vehicles in which the gods counseled their creations. For this reason, Gilgamesh requested and was granted a series of three dreams. As it is conjectured by Oppenheim [in The Interpretation of Dreams in the Ancient
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Near East], the first contains an admonition to leave the mountainous area of the Cedar-forest. In the second, a mountain collapses upon our hero, but miraculously he manages to escape injuries. In the third, the catastrophe is complete. With almost cynical irony, however, the poet assigns Enkidu the task of favorably interpreting these visions of obviously calamitous portent. Thus, an encounter with Humbaba which will bring great unhappiness to both the heroes is inexorably encouraged. Finally, when the monster evokes a response of mercy in the heart of Gilgamesh, the audience, by then thoroughly prepared, watches helplessly as Enkidu seals his own fate by counseling: ‘‘To the word which Huwawa (has spoken), hark not. Let not Huwawa (live).’’ The examples offered above have all been chosen from one single, albeit major, episode. It can be demonstrated, however, that the Mesopotamian lyricist was able to invoke irony as one of many devices intended to bind his many tales into a single integrated cycle. This is done by carefully choosing the secondary characters and assigning each a task which heightens the contrast between reality and aspiration. Except for Utnapishtim’s wife, who originally may have played a larger role than the one she is assigned in Tablet Eleven, four females are prominent in the epic: two divinities, Ishtar and Ninsun, and two attendants of the gods, the hierodule and the divinized Siduri, barmaid to the immortals. Before we enter this topic, however, it might be of interest to say a few words concerning the characterization of Gilgamesh and Enkidu. Departing radically from his Sumerian counterpart, the Semitic poet seems to have consciously attempted to fashion one personality who would combine the idiosyncrasies of his two major protagonists. At the outset, Gilgamesh is described as a king of unequaled potential and of boundless, though undirected, energy. He is haughty, spoiled, and egocentric. Once Enkidu is given what Oppenheim calls an e´ducation sentimentale—in it self a master touch of irony, for Enkidu’s sexual excess is destined to end Gilgamesh’s—he becomes gentle, experienced, calm, and concerned with ‘‘justice.’’ Not unlike the friendship which developed between Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, as the story unfolds we witness a rapprochement in temperament, a meeting of the minds between the two friends. So that, as Enkidu lies on his funerary
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couch, punished for acting with the impetuosity and hubris characteristic of Gilgamesh, the latter has been tamed to the point of embodying his friend’s gentler spirit within his own. It is not accidental, I think, that Gilgamesh then recognizes . . . that his fate will henceforth be to roam over the steppe, precisely the region, foreign to the urbane Gilgamesh, where Enkidu was created. To be sure, the poet strews all sorts of hints that despite the apparent differences in their early behavior, Enkidu was conceived as alter ego to Gilgamesh. His creation in the hands of the goddess Aruru was to have been a zikru, a replica of Gilgamesh. Instead, she decided to fashion him in the image of the god Anu, perhaps to instill in him a divinity equivalent to, once the hierodule’s instruction is completed, yet different from, Gilgamesh’s. Exceedingly handsome and strong, Enkidu ‘‘looks like Gilgamesh to a hair; though shorter in stature, he is more massive in frame.’’ Repeatedly he is said to be Gilgamesh’s equal. In his dreams, Gilgamesh encounters his ‘‘double’’ and responds to him not as a stranger, but as one who is uncannily familiar. Witness also the important events in Tablet Eleven. Gilgamesh had just been tested by Utnapishtim and his wife. He was to remain awake for six days and seven nights, a period which, incidentally, equals the length of Enkidu’s consortings with the hierodule. But Gilgamesh fails, for ‘‘sleep fans him like a whirlwind.’’ It should not be doubted that sleep and ritual bathing were often considered to be rites de passage, transitions from one state to another. In this case Gilgamesh, upon his reawakening, was to undergo a transformation, one that duplicated wild Enkidu’s metamorphosis toward civilization. To quote the epic: Utnapishtim (said to him,) to Urshanabi, the boatman: ‘‘Urshanabi, (may) the qua(y) reject you, may the ferry landing refuse you forever! May you, who used to frequent its shore, be denied its shore. The man before whose face thou didst walk, whose body is covered with grime, The grace of whose body the pelts have hidden, Take him, Urshanabi, and bring him to the place of washing; Let him wash off his dirt in water like a clean (priest), Let him throw off his pelts and let the sea carry (them) away, that his body may come to look resplendent,
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Let the band around his head be replaced with a new one. Let the garment he wears be his best garment. Until he gets to his city, Until he finishes his journey, May (his) garment have no crease, but may it (always) be new.’’
Lastly, just as the people of Uruk petition the gods for relief from Gilgamesh’s rapaciousness, so do the hunters beg for respite from Enkidu’s repeated interference with their trapping activities. Characteristic of this earliest of epics, incidentally, we meet with the rudiments of all subsequent Doppelga¨nger narratives, very popular in western culture, in which two dramatized personalities are forged into one, ‘‘two characters (are made) to complement each other both physically and psychologically and who together are projections of the crippled or struggling personalities of a third character with whom the author is primarily concerned.’’ In interpreting the omina of Enkidu’s arrival into Uruk, the divine Ninsun is chosen by the poet to fulfill an important function. In an unfortunately damaged section, it is she who solicitously binds Enkidu’s fate to that of her son, Gilgamesh: ‘‘‘Mighty Enkidu, you are not my womb’s issue. I (have) herewith adopted you with the devotees of Gilgamesh, the priestesses, the votaries, and the cult women.’ An indu-tag she placed round the neck of Enkidu.’’ It is not without a certain amount of irony, I think, that this relationship is broken as a direct result of another goddess’ ire. When, after killing the Bull of Heaven sent by Ishtar to punish Gilgamesh for his insolence, Enkidu flings the animal’s right side toward the proud deity, he draws upon himself the brunt of celestial retribution. To be sure, this is not the only act of defiance in which Enkidu becomes involved. [Tablet VIII] specifically credits him with the killing of Humbaba . . . . In that version, Enkidu adds salt to the wound by foolishly taunting Enlil, Humbaba’s protector. He who was created by the gods to control violence, please note, is now forsaken by them for glorying in it. More pointed is the Mesopotamian poet’s skillful use of the other two females. The role of the hierodule in civilizing Enkidu is well-known. In a sense, the harlot’s instructions destroyed the innocence of the ‘‘noble savage’’ by presenting
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him with the realities of human life. It was through her unflinching devotion to duty that Enkidu was made to realize the amenities and the advantages that only a civilized man can extract out of existence. Faced with imminent death, Enkidu manages to gather enough strength with which to curse this woman who had led him away from the idyllic life of an uncivilized creature. But the Sun-god Shamash urges him to withdraw his powerful malediction, reminding him of the many benefits which were showered upon him by the ardors of the hierodule: Why, O Enkidu, [Shamash rhetorically asks] do you curse the harlot Who made you eat food fit for divinity, And gave you to drink wine fit for royalty, Who clothed you with noble garments, And made you have fair Gilgamesh for a comrade? And has (not) now Gilgamesh, your bosom friend Made you lie on a noble couch? He has made you lie on a couch of honor, He placed you on the seat of ease, the seat at the left, That the princes of the earth may kiss your feet. He will make Uruk’s people weep over you (and) the courtesans mourn for you, Will fill (the) people with woe over you. And when you are gone, He will invest his body with uncut hair, Will don a lion skin and roam over the steppe.
To eat, to drink, to be well clothed, and have lasting companionship were among the gifts that the gods gave to mankind. Beyond that nothing more can be obtained. How foolish of Gilgamesh to want more, the so-to-speak ‘‘existentialist’’ poet seems to say. When Gilgamesh appears, haggard and be-draggled, with ‘‘woe in his belly, his face (like) that of a way-farer from afar,’’ he had plainly forsaken these pleasures which an assiduous hierodule, sent ironically enough by Gilgamesh himself, had taught Enkidu, his alter ego. Instead, Gilgamesh now sought rejuvenation. To bring Gilgamesh back to his reality, the poet elects another pragmatic personality, Siduri, barmaid of the gods. The following famous passage reminds the king of Uruk that eating, drinking, clothing, and companionship are the only achievable goals of man: Gilgamesh, for what purpose do you wander? You will not find the life for which you search. When the gods created mankind, Death for mankind they set aside, Retaining life in their own hands. You, Gilgamesh, let your belly be full Be happy day and night. Throw a party every day, Dance and play day and night!
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Let your garment be sparkling fresh. Your head be washed; bathe in water. Pay heed to the little one that holds on to your hand Let your spouse delight in your bosom. For this is the task of mankind. Source: Jack M. Sasson, ‘‘Some Literary Motifs in the Composition of the Gilgamesh Epic,’’ in Studies in Phi lology, Vol. 69, No. 3, July 1972, pp. 259 79.
SOURCES Abrams, M. H., Glossary of Literary Terms, 5th ed., Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1988, p. 52. Campbell, Joseph, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Princeton University Press, 1972. Heidel, Alexander, The Gilgamesh Epic and Old Testa ment Parallels, 2nd ed., University of Chicago Press, 1949, pp. 224 69. May, Herbert G., and Bruce M. Metzger, eds., New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha, Oxford Uni versity Press, 1962. Moore, Steven, ‘‘Carved in Stone,’’ in Washington Post, November 14, 2004, p. T6. Moran, William, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in Gilgamesh: A New Rendering in English Verse, translated by David Ferry, Noonday Press, 1992, p. ix. Olson, Ray, Review of Gilgamesh, in Booklist, Vol. 101, No. 4, October 15, 2004, p. 381. Oppenheimer, A. Leo, trans., ‘‘Sumerian King List,’’ in Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, edited by James A. Pritchard, Princeton University Press, 1950, p. 266. Postgate, J. N., Early Mesopotamia: Society and Econ omy at the Dawn of History, Routledge, 1992, pp. 22 50. Renger, Johannes M., ‘‘Mesopotamian Epic Literature,’’ in Heroic Epic and Saga: An Introduction to the World’s Great Folk Epics, edited by Felix J. Oinas, Indiana Uni versity Press, 1978, p. 44. Review of Gilgamesh: A New English Version, in Publish ers Weekly, Vol. 251, No. 33, August 16, 2004, p. 41. Sandars, N. K., Epic of Gilgamesh: An English Version with an Introduction, rev. ed., Penguin Books, 1972. Tigay, Jeffrey H., The Evolution of the Gilgamesh Epic, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982, pp. 248 50.
FURTHER READING Dalley, Stephanie, trans., Myths from Mesopotamia: Crea tion, the Flood, and Others, Oxford World Classics, Oxford University Press, 2009. This excellent collection includes two versions of the Epic of Gilgamesh as well as the Mesopotamian
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creation epic (the Enuma Elish) and other myths associated with Gilgamesh and ancient Mesopo tamian civilization. The literary material follows the cuneiform closely. Scholarly annotations are also included. Damrosch, David, The Buried Book: The Loss and Redis covery of the Great ‘‘Epic of Gilgamesh,’’ Henry Holt, 2007. Damroschpresentsanengagingaccountofhowthe clay tablets of the Gilgamesh epic were unearthed and sent to England in the mid nineteenth century, wheretheyweredecipheredbyAssyrologistGeorge Smith. Ferry, David, Gilgamesh: A New Rendering in English Verse, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993. Ferry’s book is a lyrical, evocative transforma tion of the Epic of Gilgamesh into verse cou plets. Ferry follows the twelve tablet format and includes brief notes at the end of his translation. This book is a poetic achievement informed by sound scholarship. Foster, Benjamin R., trans., The Epic of Gilgamesh, edited by Benjamin R. Foster, Norton Critical Edition, Norton, 2001. Foster, an Assyrologist at Yale University, pro vides new translations of the Gilgamesh epic and related Sumerian literature. New critical essays by respected scholars such as William Moran and Thorkild Jacobsen are also included. Katz, Solomon H., and Fritz Maytag, ‘‘Brewing an Ancient Beer,’’ in Archaeology, Vol. 44, No. 4, 1991, pp. 24 27. Katz’s article is part of a debate over whether ancient Mesopotamians first began to gather and domesticate grain for the production of bread or for the production of beer. Matthews, Roger, The Archaeology of Mesopotamia: The ories and Approaches, Routledge, 2003.
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With a fine prose style, Matthews presents this knowledgeable and highly readable study of archeology in ancient Mesopotamia. Mitchell, Stephen, Gilgamesh: A New English Version, New Press, 2004. Acclaimed translator, Stephen Mitchell offers a fresh translation of the epic, which he sees as the world’s first novel, concerned with the uni versal theme of growing up. Pollock, Susan, Ancient Mesopotamia, Cambridge Uni versity Press, 1999. Pollock provides an archaeologist’s perspective on the ancient Near East in her description of the homes, daily life, economy, architecture, landscape, and religion of the ancient people who lived between the two rivers. Rothman, Mitchell S., ed., Uruk Mesopotamia and Its Neighbors: Cross cultural Interactions and Their Conse quences in the Era of State Formation (School of Ameri can Research Advanced Seminar), James Currey, 2002. This collection presents essays by leading experts on the Uruk period who discuss the rise of the Mesopotamian city state.
SUGGESTED SEARCH TERMS Babylonian literature Enkidu epic AND Mesopotamia Gilgamesh Sumerian AND literature
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The Faerie Queene The Faerie Queene is a romantic epic, the first sustained poetic work since the work of Geoffrey Chaucer (1340–1400). In this work, Edmund Spenser uses the archaic language of Chaucer in order to pay homage to the medieval poet. Spenser saw himself as a medievalist, but cognizant of his audience, he uses the modern pronunciation of the Renaissance. Spenser uses biblical allegory to tell his story, but the poem is much more than a religious work. Its purpose was to educate, to turn a young man into a gentleman. There are two levels of allegory present. One level examines the moral, philosophical, and religious and is portrayed by the Red Cross Knight, who represents all Christians. The second level is the particular, which focuses on the political, social, and religious, in which the Faerie Queene represents Elizabeth I (1533–1603). Spenser was not born to a wealthy household, as were so many of the other great Renaissance poets, such as Philip Sidney. This fact is important, since his work is colored by this lack of wealth. Spenser needed a patron to support him while he worked, and patrons expect that the artists they support will write flattering words. This was certainly the case with Spenser’s work, The Faerie Queene, which is meant to celebrate Elizabeth I and, oftentimes, to flatter her. In this work, Spenser presents his ideas of what constitutes an ideal England. He also thought that he could use his text as a way to recall the chivalry of a past era and thus inspire such actions again. Spenser influenced many of the poets who
EDMUND SPENSER 1590
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Leicester, who was a close favorite of Queen Elizabeth I. Here Spenser became acquainted with Sir Philip Sidney and Sir Edward Dyer, both of whom were part of the artistic circle at court. A year later, Spenser moved to Ireland as a secretary to Arthur Grey, the newly appointed Lord Deputy of Ireland. There is some evidence that he took with him a new wife, Machabyas Chylde. What is known is that a woman of this name married a man called Edmounde Spenser on October 27, 1579; bore him two children called Sylvanus and Katherine; and died before 1594.
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followed him, including Milton, Shelley, Keats, Byron, and Tennyson.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Edmund Spenser was born in London in 1552 or 1553. The Spenser household was of the tradesman class. Spenser’s father John was a weaver who belonged to the Merchant Taylors’ Company, a guild for people who worked in the cloth trade. Little is known about Spenser’s family, although it appears he had a sister and two brothers. As a child, Spenser attended the Merchant Taylors’ Free School, where his education focused on the new humanist movement. Spenser received a bachelor’s degree from Pembroke College, Cambridge in 1573 and a master’s degree in 1576. While at Cambridge, Spenser was a work study student, earning money to pay for his meals and lodging. After leaving Cambridge, Spenser worked as a secretary for the Bishop of Rochester, John Young. During this period, Spenser composed ‘‘The Shepheardes Calendar’’, which was printed in 1579. Also in 1579, Spenser went to work in the London household of Robert Dudley, Earl of
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Within the next few years, Spenser changed jobs a few more times and, in the process, acquired some property in Ireland, living there with his sister, Sarah. After Sir Walter Raleigh read through an early draft of The Faerie Queene, Spenser agreed to accompany Raleigh to court, where he was presented to Elizabeth I. At this time, Spenser published the first three books of The Faerie Queene and acquired a patron, which allowed him to remain in London. After some sort of scandal, Spenser returned to Ireland in 1591, marrying Elizabeth Boyle in 1594. To honor his new wife, Spenser wrote ‘‘Amoretti’’ and ‘‘Epithalamion’’ in 1595. ‘‘Astrophel’’ and ‘‘Colin clouts come home again’’ were also published in 1595. The next three books of The Faerie Queene were published in 1596, with Spenser once again back in London, although only temporarily. During this time, Spenser continued to work, writing ‘‘A vewe of the present state of Irelande’’, ‘‘Fowre Hymnes’’, and ‘‘Prothalamion.’’ Spenser returned to Ireland when he was unable to secure another patron at court. In 1598, Spenser received an appointment as the sheriff of County Cork, but the appointment did not last long. A rebellion in the area forced the Spenser family to flee to safety. Soon Spenser was sent back to London with messages for the Privy Council. Spenser died in London a few months later, apparently having starved to death, according to Ben Jonson. Spenser was immensely popular with other poets, who mourned his death by throwing verses of their poetry into his grave. Spenser’s body was buried in the Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey. It was never clear how a poet as popular as Spenser was allowed to die in such poverty or even if the story is true. Spenser was never wealthy, but he did earn a comfortable living, having years earlier secured a lifetime pension from the queen, in addition to his wife’s dowry and his salary as sheriff. The facts surrounding Spenser’s death, then, must be considered as undocumented. All that is known
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for certain is that he died on January 13, 1599. Spenser had always intended to publish another six books of The Faerie Queene; they were never found, nor is it known if Spenser ever completed the composition of the missing books.
PLOT SUMMARY In this opening section, Spenser explains the legend of the Red Cross Knight and focuses on the importance of morality and holiness in people’s lives. This first book opens with the Red Cross Knight and Una journeying to destroy a dragon and rescue Una’s parents. When a storm occurs, the knight and lady, accompanied by her dwarf, take shelter in a dark forest. Here they come across the monster, Error, who hates the light of truth, and her thousands of offspring. Error attacks the knight, who does not listen to Una’s warnings. The Red Cross Knight must kill the monster to escape, cutting off her head. As the three continue their journey, they come across Archimago, an evil enchanter, who casts spells on the group as they sleep. The Red Cross Knight is given erotic dreams of Una. The knight and dwarf believe the dreams and abandon Una in the forest. The Red Cross Knight continues on his journey and foolishly releases the evil enchantress, Duessa, from her prison. The Red Cross Knight and Duessa continue on the journey, he still not knowing who she really is. They arrive at a castle, inhabited by Lucifera, the mistress of Pride. She has six wizards: Idleness, Gluttony, Lechery, Avarice, Envy, and Wrath. Together, this group comprises the seven deadly sins. After a fight, which the Red Cross Knight wins, the knight leaves, still unaware that Duessa is not who she claims. Meanwhile, Una, who has been abandoned in the forest, is searching for her knight. She encounters a lion, who is tamed by Una’s beauty. The lion accompanies Una on her journey, guarding her. Archimago, who has disguised himself as the Red Cross Knight, finds Una, who is happy to be reunited with her knight. The group is attacked by Sans Loy, who does not recognize the disguised Archimago. The lion attempts to save Una but is killed by Sans Loy. Una successfully resists Sans Loy’s attempts to seduce her, and she is quickly rescued by Fauns and Satyrs, the wood gods, who worship her as a god. Once again, Una is in need of rescue, and soon a woodsman, Satyrane, helps her
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MEDIA ADAPTATIONS An audio cassette of The Faerie Queene (1998), with John Moffatt as reader, is available from Naxos of America. This recording, which is also available as a CD, contains selections from Spenser’s text. An audio CD of The Faerie Queene (2009), with Michael MacLiammoir as reader, is available from Saland Publishing. This recording, which is also available as an MP3 download, features Book III, Cantos XI and XII.
Book I
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to escape. As they journey, Archimago, now disguised as a traveler, tells them that the Red Cross Knight is dead. While Satyrane engages Sans Loy in a battle, Una flees. Meanwhile, Duessa catches up with the Red Cross Knight. As the knight drinks from an enchanted spring, the giant, Orgoglio, appears and attacks the knight. Duessa agrees to become the giant’s mistress and the Red Cross Knight becomes the giant’s prisoner. The dwarf takes the knight’s spear, armor, and shield and leaves. He meets with Una and tells her of all that has happened. Next, Prince Arthur appears and assures Una that he will rescue the Red Cross Knight from Orgoglio. After a fierce battle, Arthur kills the giant and disarms Duessa, who has used her magic to try to kill Arthur. With the battle ended, Spenser takes a moment to tell Arthur’s story and states that he is on his way to the Queen of Faeries, whom he loves. The Red Cross Knight, now freed, and Una continue on their journey to free her parents. They come to the cave of Despair, who tries to convince the Red Cross Knight to kill himself. Una reminds the knight of his duties and of the rewards of justice and mercy, and the two continue on their journey. Una brings the Red Cross Knight to the House of Holinesse to be healed. There, Reverence, Zeal, Fidelia (Faith), Charissa (Charity), Speranza (Hope), Patience, and Mercy work to heal the knight and restore him to his previous strength and valor. An old man, Contemplation, provides a
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vision to the Red Cross Knight that allows him to see his parentage and the future, in which he will be known as Saint George of England. Although reluctant to leave this happy place, the knight soon sets out with Una to fight the dragon. The battle is a long one, but eventually the knight slays the dragon and the King and Queen are freed. The Red Cross Knight is acclaimed a hero, and he and Una are married.
Book II In this book, the main focus is on temperance and prudence. This section begins with Archimago free from the dungeon that had imprisoned him. He still wants to destroy the Red Cross Knight, and so, in disguise, he tells Sir Guyon, who is accompanied by the Palmer, that the Red Cross Knight has violated a virgin. Duessa pretends to be the virgin and identifies the Red Cross Knight as her attacker. Sir Guyon attacks the Red Cross Knight, but each knight recognizes the other’s virtue, and together, their temperance prevents a tragedy. Next, the Palmer and Sir Guyon meet with a woman whose husband has been a victim of Acrasia and her Bower of Bliss. Sir Guyon swears vengeance for the damage that Acrasia has caused to this family and to the child, now orphaned. Since his horse is now missing, Sir Guyon continues on foot, carrying the child with him. Sir Guyon stops at a castle, wherein he meets Medina, whom he calls an image of the virgin queen. Sir Guyon leaves the orphaned child with her. Spenser includes a brief comic interlude with Braggadocchio (Windy Boasting) and his companion, Trompart. This section describes their meeting with the beautiful damsel, Belphoebe, who rejects the attempt by the comic pair to woo her. Meanwhile, Sir Guyon is having many adventures, fighting Furor and Occasion and others, all of which teach him to beware of false pity. He also meets with Phaedria, who tempts men with idleness. Soon, Sir Guyon, now separated from his Palmer, meets Mammon, who represents financial greed. Mammon takes Sir Guyon on a tour of his riches; this place is hell. When he returns from Mammon’s hell, the Palmer is waiting with Prince Arthur, who must first battle with two paynim (heathen) knights. Sir Guyon tells Arthur that he, too, can be one of the Faerie Queene’s knights, joining her Order of Maidenhead. Sir Guyon and Arthur continue on their journey together, and when they reach the Bower of Bliss, they destroy it.
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Book III This book focuses on virtue and chastity. Sir Guyon and Arthur continue on their journey, where an old squire and a young knight join them. The knight knocks Sir Guyon off his horse, and the Palmer stops the battle after he recognizes that the knight is Britomart, a chaste damsel, who is searching for her love, Artegall. Spenser spends some time telling Britomart’s story and explaining how she came to be looking for Artegall, whose image was shown to her in Merlin’s mirror. Meanwhile, Sir Guyon and Arthur are trying to rescue a damsel, Florimell, who is being chased by a forester. Arthur’s squire, Timias, is wounded, and the fair Belphoebe treats him with herbs and heals him. When he awakens, Timias falls in love with Belphoebe. At the same time, a witch and her monstrous son are pursuing the beautiful Florimell, and soon an old fisherman is lusting for her. Spenser next turns again to Britomart’s adventure. Britomart is told of Amoret, who has been held prisoner by a knight who tries to force her love. Britomart battles the two guards and frees Amoret, who joins Britomart in the search for their true loves.
Book IV The focus of this section is on friendship and loyalty. Amoret thinks that Britomart is a man, since she was disguised as one when she rescued Amoret. But soon, Britomart reveals her identity after successfully defeating a knight during a tournament. After once again assuming the disguise of a man, the two young women continue on their journey. They soon encounter the disguised Duessa and participate in another tournament, of which Britomart is again the winner. One of the knights that Britomart defeats is her love, Artegall, whom Britomart is seeking. However, Artegall as also disguised, and so, Britomart has no idea that she has unseated the man she loves. However, soon Artegall learns that Britomart is a female. Amoret’s true love, Scudamour, is also present and learns that Britomart is not a male and thus could not have dishonored Amoret. Amoret, though, is missing, having wandered off while Britomart was at rest, but after a wild monster seizes her, she is eventually rescued by Arthur. Soon, Amoret and Scudamour are reunited in the Temple of Venus.
Book V In this section, Spenser focuses on justice, with Artegall as the champion of justice. Artegall administers justice quite swiftly and with little indecisiveness.
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Most importantly, according to Spenser, Artegall has the power to enforce justice. Artegall has several successful encounters, but when he confronts a group of women about to hang a man, he hesitates at the sight of their beauty and is captured. When Britomart learns of Artegall’s capture, she sets out to rescue her lover. Britomart defeats the Amazons and Ertegall is freed to resume the journey that the Faerie Queene had sent him on—to free Irena (who represents Ireland) from Grantorto (who represents Spain). Artegall soon arrives at the trial of Duessa (representing Mary, Queen of Scots), at which Arthur is also present. Duessa is found guilty, although she is not sentenced. Belgae (who represents the Netherlands) also asks Arthur for help against Geryoneo (representing Spain). Arthur travels to Belgae’s land and helps to free them from the Inquisition, slaying Geryoneo. After his success in freeing Belgae’s land, Arthur joins Artegall in trying to help Irena. Artegall kills Grantorto and Irena is freed. With his mission ended, Artegall returns to the Faerie Queene.
Book VI The focus of this final book is truth, honesty, and civility. These ideals represent the civilized world, as Spenser defines it. Calidore is the most gentle of knights, a man who represents these traits, which Spenser sees as so essential. Sir Calidore has many adventures, wherein he teaches people the importance of courtesy and living in harmony. Arthur, who has finally been reunited with his squire, Timias, encounters the Blatant Beast. Meanwhile, Calidore is also pursuing the Blatant Beast. Calidore has a pleasant interlude in a pastoral paradise, where he is nearly distracted from his quest. However, he soon continues on his journey, in which at last, Calidore meets and defeats the Blatant Beast.
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CHARACTERS Acrasia Acrasia is the mistress of the Bower of Bliss. She is Circe-like in her ability to lure men to their destruction. It takes both Sir Guyon and Prince Arthur to destroy her bower.
Archimago Archimago is an evil enchanter, a satanic figure who uses spells and disguises to lead his victims to sin. He represents Spain and the Roman Catholic Church. After the Red Cross Knight defeats the dragon, Archimago is arrested and thrown into a dungeon. Archimago reappears frequently, always in disguise, and always in an attempt to injure or tempt someone.
Artegall Artegall is the Knight of Justice. Britomart has seen his face in a magic mirror and is seeking him. Eventually, Britomart and Artegall are united. Later, the Faerie Queene sends Artegall on a quest to rescue Irena (Ireland) from Grantorto (Spain).
Arthur Prince Arthur appears initially as a rescuer first of Una, and later, of the Red Cross Knight. Much of the Arthurian legend is incorporated, including the story of Merlin and his role in Arthur’s birth. Arthur is in love with the Faerie Queene, whom he has dreamt of but never seen and is on his way to find her when he encounters Una. After saving the Red Cross Knight and uniting him with Una, Arthur continues on his journey with Guyon. Later, Arthur will assist both Artegall and Calidore on their quests. Arthur is excessively moral and virtuous, serving the Faerie Queene with the same ardor as exists in the Arthurian legends.
Mutability Cantos
Belphoebe
The Mutability Cantos are two small pieces, which Spenser did not complete. It is uncertain where Spenser intended to put these cantos, but they would have been intended for some section of the six books that Spenser intended but did not complete. These fragments deal with philosophical questions about nature. Mutability breaks the laws of nature, arguing that nature is changeable. However, in a trial, Nature finds that Mutability’s argument has flaws and finds against Mutability. According to nature, beings change but not from their first nature.
Belphoebe is a beautiful woman, as beautiful as the goddess Diana, who reared her, or the Queen of the Amazons. Bellphoebe is a virgin huntress, but she remains aloof from Timias, whom she has saved and who loves her.
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Britomart Britomart first appears disguised as a knight, and like a knight, she is brave and willing to risk her life to do the honorable thing. In a mirror provided by Merlin, Britamart has seen a vision of the man she is to love, and she is on a journey to find this man,
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Artegall. Britomart has several adventures, in which she proves that a woman can be as brave and moral as any man. While disguised as a man, she successfully defeats several men, including Artegall.
Palmer The black-clad Palmer is Sir Guyon’s companion and guide. He represents reason and prudence.
Red Cross Knight
Calidore Calidore is the last knight to appear. He is gentle and courteous, working during his quest to create harmony and to restore compassion to the world.
Contemplation Contemplation is a hermit, who gives the Red Cross Knight a vision of the City of God and sends him back to complete his quest.
Duessa Duessa is an evil enchantress, a partner of Archimago. She appears attractive on the outside, but inside, she is corrupt. Duessa signifies falsehood in general and specifically in the form of the Roman Catholic Church and Mary, Queen of Scots. She reappears in several disguises, but her duplicity is eventually recognized.
The Red Cross Knight carries a shield that is dented and battered due to the many battles that he has fought. There is a cross on the shield that is the color of blood. The Red Cross Knight is a heroic figure, representing England’s Saint George and the universal Christian man. The Red Cross Knight is impetuous and easily fooled, not always able to see beyond the obvious. He is confident of his abilities when he undertakes the mission, but after many confrontations, he is nearly suicidal. The Red Cross Knight is rescued by the teaching of the church in the House of Holiness. He is successful after a lengthy battle with the dragon and is married to Una.
Sans Foy One of three Saracen knights who attack Una and her knight, Sans Foy represents lack of faith.
Dwarf The dwarf accompanies Una and the Red Cross Knight on their journey to kill the dragon. The dwarf represents natural reason.
Sans Joy One of three knights Saracen knights who attack Una and her knight, Sans Joy represents lack of joy.
Error Error is a monster, half woman and half serpent. She represents Eve and the serpent that deceived her. Error is surrounded by thousands of sucking offspring who gnaw at her. She cannot tolerate the light that is reflected from the Red Cross Knight’s shield, and she attacks him. After she is killed, her corpse vomits books and papers. The figure of Error was an important influence on John Milton, who used her as a model for Sin in Paradise Lost.
Gloriana Gloriana is the Faerie Queene, who orders the Red Cross Knight to undertake a mission to rescue Una’s parents. Gloriana is meant to represent Elizabeth I. She is a virgin queen and the knights who fight for her belong to the Order of Maidenhead. Although she has a small role, the Faerie Queene is the motivation for many of the knights’ activities.
Guyon Sir Guyon is a Knight of Temperance. He must be strong and uncompromising as he seeks to destroy Acrasia’s power. Although he is tempted and frequently attacked, by using moderation, Sir Guyon is able to defeat his enemies and succeed in his quest.
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Sans Loy One of three Saracen knights who attack Una and her knight, Sans Loy represents lawlessness.
Timias Arthur’s squire Timias is healed by, and falls in love with, Belphoebe. Disappointed by love, he becomes a hermit but is finally healed by love and reunited with Arthur.
Una Una is a beautiful woman, who is descended from the King and Queen of the West, a daughter of Adam and Eve. Una represents truth and the true church. She requests the Faerie Queene’s help in rescuing her parents. As she accompanies the Red Cross Knight, she rides a donkey, as Jesus is said to have done when he entered Jerusalem. She also leads a lamb, the Paschal Lamb, a symbol of sacrifice. Una can advise the knight, but she cannot force him to listen to her wisdom or protect him from his own impetuous decisions. When she is deserted, she is assisted by the lion, who willingly sacrifices his life for her. After Una is reunited with
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TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY
The Cult of Elizabeth was an important literary force at the end of the sixteenth century. Because of a number of excessively flattering literary portrayals, Elizabeth, as a virgin queen, achieved goddess status. Give a PowerPoint presentation in which various images of Elizabeth I are shown and discuss how Spenser’s depiction of Elizabeth as Gloriana pays homage to this idea of Elizabeth, the goddess.
Investigate the circumstances surrounding the British victory over the Spanish Armada, and write an essay in which you discuss the impact of this event on Elizabethan society. Why was it so important for the British to defeat Spain, a Catholic country? Try to explore how a major victory during wartime contributes to national pride. Consider if this is a factor in Spenser’s epic. Research the Catholic and Protestant conflict in England during the sixteenth century. Using what you discover, discuss with classmates the
the Red Cross Knight and the dragon is slain, she is married to the Red Cross Knight.
THEMES Duty and Responsibility Throughout The Faerie Queene, Spenser emphasizes the importance of performing one’s duty and accepting responsibility to complete the quest. Several heroic figures emerge during the course of the poem, and each is given a task to undertake, a monster or demon to extinguish. Each time, the hero must overcome disadvantage and hurdles to succeed, but the importance of the quest is always the overriding concern. Although the Red Cross Knight must fight several demons and overcome despair, he always continues on the quest to rescue the King and Queen of the West. Similarly, Artegall must be rescued himself by Britomart. Although he really wants to continue with her, he
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depiction of both Catholics and Protestants in Book I of Spenser’s epic. The impact of humanism on sixteenthcentury life was an important factor in how society functioned. Spenser saw the world of knights and religious quests as providing an effective model for teaching people about truth, loyalty, and virtue. Select a modern text or film and research how this piece teaches its audience about these same attributes. Make an audio or video CD, or give a class presentation on your findings.
The tradition of the knight’s quest is rooted in northern European culture. However, heroic quests and stories that teach the importance of virtue are found in many cultures. Research the tradition of the heroic quest and the concept of virtue in any culture other than the one in which you were brought up. Make an audio or video CD, or write and perform a short play or dance, based on your findings.
must complete the quest of freeing Irena. Calidore is also momentarily distracted, enjoying a brief pastoral respite, but he too realizes that he must complete his quest in subduing the Blatant Beast. Throughout this epic, Spenser makes the same point again and again: individuals must be responsible and fulfill the duties set before them.
Deception For Spenser, deception is most often represented by the Roman Catholic Church and by Spain, which is identified with Catholicism in Britain. Archimago and Duessa represent how deception attempts to prevent the honorable man from completing his journey and prevent him from meeting with God. During this period, the division between the Catholic world and Protestant world was fueled by suspicion and animosity. Spenser uses this idea as a way to posit that an ideal Britain is one in which the true religion, the Anglican Church, defeats the
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Spenser dedicated his epic poem to Queen Elizabeth I, depicted here en route to Hudson House. (Ó Bettmann / Corbis)
monstrous Roman Catholic Church. This idea is conveyed by the Red Cross Knight’s overcoming the tricks played by Archimago and Duessa. Since all good men will be tempted, these two characters reappear throughout the epic, requiring their defeat by several honorable knights. Spenser’s audience would have easily identified Archimago and Duessa as representing the Catholic Church or key Catholic personages, such as Mary, Queen of Scots.
Friendship The bond between all men is important to Spenser’s work. None of the knights acts alone. The Red Cross Knight needs the help of Prince Arthur to succeed. Arthur misses his squire, Timias, when he is lost. Arthur reappears frequently in the epic, each time to bond with another knight and help him in his quest. No knight works alone; each one requires the friendship of another to complete his quest. In addition to the friendships between men, friendship becomes the central focus of Book IV. The two women, Britomart and Amoret, continue the search
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together to find their true loves, illustrating the importance in women’s friendships in achieving goals.
Humanism Humanism was an intellectual movement of the Renaissance, beginning in Italy and quickly moving across Europe and into England. Sir Thomas More and Desiderius Erasmus were important authors in this movement, which promoted the education of Christian gentlemen. Ideally, the education of Christian gentlemen emphasized, as a first concern, a preparation for public service. There was an emphasis on classical texts and on learning Latin, the language of diplomacy. Spenser’s purpose in composing The Faerie Queene was to create a model for the ideal gentleman. The poet sought to educate the public regarding chivalric ideals by recalling the medieval romance that he thought presented a better society. Spencer’s text not only revived the classical epic, which in its purest form, had not been used since Virgil, but it emphasized the ideals of charity, friendship, and
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virtue, which are the hallmarks of humanism. Prior to the Reformation, humanism embraced Catholicism as a representative ideal, as did Sir Thomas More. But after the Reformation, Protestantism became the ideal for English humanists such as Spenser.
Justice Justice is an important theme throughout The Faerie Queene, but in Book V, it is the central focus. Sir Artegall is the champion of Justice. As Spenser creates him, Artegall has the power to dispense justice, but he also discovers that justice can be a complex issue, with not every man receiving what is due him. Artegall discovers that what is right or fair is not always clearly defined. With Sir Sanglier, Artegall must use wit to devise a Solomon-like decision to expose the guilty party. Later, Artegall must rule on the consistency of law when he settles a dispute between Bracidas and Amidas. Artegall also discovers, when dealing with the Amazons, that sometimes justice, tempered by pity, does not work well. The trial of Duessa, which completes Book V, illustrates that justice is effective when applied to solve problems.
Virtue Virtue is a theme that runs throughout The Faerie Queene. According to Spenser, the virtuous will succeed at completing their journey or quest. Every knight who undertakes a quest for the Faerie Queene is forced to confront obstacles or deception. Each knight succeeds as a result of his inner strength, his commitment to his quest, and most important, his commitment to a moral life. The knights deserve to win because they are good, virtuous men. To contrast with a life of virtue, Spenser provides the example of virtue’s enemies. In Book I, the Red Cross Knight meets Lucifera, who is the mistress of Pride. She and her six wizards, the seven deadly sins, constitute the opposite of the virtuous ideal. In Book III, four women must fight to preserve their chastity: Britomart, Florimell, Belphoebe, and Amoret. Spenser uses four different examples, and there are several others throughout the six books, to illustrate how important chastity is in a Christian life. Morality is essential to the chivalric ideal in other ways. When Arthur rescues Amoret in Book IV, there is never any question that he will deliver her, unmolested, to her destination. He is an honorable knight, as are Artegall, Guyon, and Calidore. Each man performs according to his code, which makes virtue, morality, and chastity essential parts of each man’s personality.
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STYLE Character The actions of each character are what constitute the story. Character can also embody the idea of a particular individual’s morality. Characters can range from simple stereotypical figures to more complex multifaceted ones. Characters may also be defined by personality traits, such as the rogue or the damsel in distress. Characterization is the process of creating a life-like person from an author’s imagination. To accomplish this task, the author provides the character with personality traits that help define who that character is and how that character behaves in a given situation. Most of the characters in The Faerie Queene differ slightly from this definition, since each characterislittlemorethanatype.Theaudiencedoes not really know or understand the character as an individual. For instance, Una represents little more than a quality and is not an individual. The audience understands that Una signifies truth, an essential component of an ideal world and a tenet of religious belief.
Parable A parable is a story intended to teach a moral lesson. The stories in The Faerie Queene are designed to teach people how to be better Christians and how to live moral lives. The New Testament is one source of parables. This tradition stems from a period in which most men and women could not read, and the clergy found that stories were the most effective way to deliver moral lessons. Spenser uses parables to tell stories that teach a lesson.
Setting The time, place, and culture in which the action of the play takes place is called the setting. The elements of setting may include geographic location, physical or mental environments, prevailing cultural attitudes, or the historical time in which the action takes place. The location for The Faerie Queene is mostly Britain, but the time is in flux, with Spenser interjecting contemporary ideas into his work as he recalls a much earlier period of knights and chivalry.
Spenserian Stanza The Spenserian stanza contains nine iambic lines, the first eight lines in pentameter and the ninth line, called the alexandrine, in hexameter. The interlocking rhyme scheme of abbabbcbcc provides unity and tightness. The finishing alexandrine, with its extra length, gives a sense of completion and inclusion.
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HISTORICAL CONTEXT Humanism and Education Tudor England in the sixteenth century was a place of significant social, religious, and political changes. One transformation occurred in the way English boys and young men were educated. Education had typically focused on males rather than females, but as the fifteenth century drew to an end, the emphasis on education changed. Instead of educating boys and young men as members of the clergy, a new emphasis prepared them for careers in government, requiring a different sort of education. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, the intellectual movement that became known during the Renaissance as humanism, urged preparing young men for public service. New emphasis fell on rhetoric and classical texts and on a need to learn Latin grammar, the language of diplomacy. Latin had always been thought necessary for the clergy, but now, it became clear there were other uses. Each country conducted its international business in Latin, and increased international travel and trade called for men to assume new duties. In this new world, there was a close connection between universities and the government. The sons of nobility attended colleges, but so, too, did an increasing number of commoners, many of whom were destined for government service. Initially, humanism combined classical learning with Catholicism. In humanism’s early development, Sir Thomas More enthusiastically supported the study of Greek classical texts, but he was also a Catholic who chose to die rather than agree to take the oath that acknowledged the king of England as head of the national church in England. With the adoption of a new religion, the second-generation movement of humanism included Protestantism. Like many men of his period, Spenser was a strong advocate of humanism, and so one of his desires in composing The Faerie Queene was to create a model for the ideal gentleman. Spenser was enamored of the medieval world, which was seen as an age of chivalry in which men were honorable and adhered to a code of behavior that emphasized morality and truth. In composing his epic, Spenser sought to educate the public in chivalric ideals, recalling the medieval romance, which, he thought, presented a better society.Spencer’s text not only revives the classical epic, which, in its purest form, had not been used since Virgil, but it emphasizes the ideals of charity, friendship, and
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virtue, which are the hallmarks of the humanistic movement. In addition, Spenser uses allegory to tell his story, and allegory was commonly used in the medieval period for biblical interpretation and teaching. The setting of Spenser’s epic is medieval England, but the topic is Renaissance in origin. As Philip Sidney argued in his Defence of Poesy, poetry has merit in its ability to make education sweeter and easier to swallow. Spenser accomplished this by resurrecting the medieval romance and the chivalric knight as instruments to demonstrate the righteousness of the Church of England and the righteous path of humanistic, Protestant men.
Religious Turmoil In The Faerie Queene, Spenser reflects the Renaissance emphasis on leading a life of beneficial action. At the same time, his text depicts the real-life tensions between the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of England, which was formally established by Elizabeth I in 1559. The pope’s response to the queen’s action was her excommunication in 1570, but officially, there was little notice of the pope’s actions. After the formal establishment of the Anglican Church, some of the tension of the previous twenty-five years dissipated, primarily because the queen was more tolerant of religious choice and less likely to endorse the extreme persecution that Mary I favored. When Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries and abbeys in 1536, it was not because he would not tolerate dissenting religious views. Certainly he rejected the Catholic Church but that was primarily because the pope refused to permit his divorce. And, to assure the succession of any heir he might have after divorcing his first wife, Henry required that his citizens take an oath that recognized him as head of the Church of England. But Henry’s decision to dissolve the monasteries and abbeys was not primarily motivated by religious ideology but by a desire to claim the land, buildings, monies, and expensive art and jewelry that lay inside. Henry understood that eliminating the Catholic Church would make him rich; it was simply a sound economic move. After Henry died, his young son became king as Edward VI and for a while the religious component of Tudor life remained stable. But the young king did not live long, and at his death, his elder sister, Mary, became queen. During the brief reign of Mary I, from 1553 to 1558, religious intolerance and religiously inspired
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COMPARE & CONTRAST
Sixteenth century: In 1517, Martin Luther’s actions grow into the Protestant Reformation. This event has important ramifications for England, when King Henry VIII seeks a divorce from his wife. When the pope refuses to grant a divorce, the king creates himself as leader of the English church. This act, in 1534, creates the Anglican Church and establishes Protestantism as the official religion. In effect, it also outlaws the Roman Catholic Church, since Henry seizes all church property, liquidating it into a source of revenue. Spenser uses this history to depict Una as Truth, the Anglican Church. Duessa represents falsehood, the Roman Catholic Church. Today: In many ways, the English view the Catholic Church with suspicion. Still current laws prohibit a member of the royal family from marrying a Catholic, and the Anglican Church remains the official Church of England. No Catholic can inherit the throne. However, in 2009, the British prime minister, Gordon Brown, opens talks with the royal family about ending the ban on their marrying Catholics.
Sixteenth century: After Henry VIII and his only son, Edward VI, die, Mary I inherits the throne. In 1555 she restores Catholicism to England and outlaws Protestantism. After marrying Spain’s heir to the throne, Mary begins persecuting Protestants, burning those who fail to embrace the Catholic faith. Mary becomes known as Bloody Mary because of her actions. These persecutions lead to an enormous animosity between Protestants and Catholics, which Spenser depicts in his epic by having many evil characters portrayed as Catholic, such as Archimago, Duessa, and Error. In contrast, the good knights, such as the Red Cross Knight, are represented as Protestant.
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Today: Not surprisingly, religion is still a source of conflict around the world. The United States directs its War on Terror against Islamic people and nations, some of whom see the conflict as a jihad or holy war. As in sixteenth-century England, the conflict between Protestants and Catholics still rages, accounting for bombings and deaths in London and Ireland. Each side still views the other as evil and destructive, much as they did when Spenser was writing his epic. Sixteenth century: In 1588, Elizabeth I defeats the Spanish Armada. The Spanish Armada, consisting of 132 vessels, sails against England, with intent to invade and claim the country for the Catholic Church. The English rebuff the invasion and, with the aid of a storm, destroy more than half the ships. Elizabeth is seen as a heroic monarch and thus is depicted in Spenser’s epic as the Faerie Queene, the virginal queen who inspires such loyalty from her knights. Today: The English have a record of successfully defending their small island nation against invasion for the last four hundred years, defeating first Napoleon, and later, Hitler. Devotion to country and ideals celebrated in Spenser’s epic continue to be popular. Sixteenth century: In 1587, Elizabeth I has her cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots, executed, ending nearly twenty years’ imprisonment. While a prisoner, Mary has been the center of frequent plots to overthrow Elizabeth and place the Catholic Mary on the throne. Duessa, tried and found guilty, represents the evil and deception many English citizens assign to Mary. Today: Although the English royalty firmly occupy on the throne, many other countries face the possibility of or experience a coup. Such an overthrow is unlikely in England, where the monarchy remains popular.
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relatively peaceful, religion remained a factor that could divide the people. Spenser reflects these widespread fears in The Faerie Queene.
CRITICAL OVERVIEW Across the centuries The Faerie Queene has had a lasting effect on the literary community. Spenser’s nine-line Spenserian stanza influenced poets such as Burns in The Cotter’s Saturday Night, Shelley in The Revolt of Islam and Adonis, Keats in The Eve of St. Agnes, Tennyson in sections of The Lotos-Eaters , and Byron in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.
Title page from the first edition of The Faerie Queene (Bettmann / Corbis)
murder became commonplace. Mary, who was Catholic, immediately reinstated Catholicism as the official religion in England. Moving quickly, she outlawed Protestantism to please her new bridegroom, Philip of Spain. Protestants were persecuted, and hundreds were burned at the stake when they refused to convert to Catholicism. Mary’s ruthlessness earned her the nickname, ‘‘Bloody Mary.’’ In contrast to Mary’s rule, Elizabeth seemed a refreshing new breath in the kingdom. She was young and beautiful, vibrant and full of energy. She quickly established Protestantism as the official religion, and she manifested none of the intolerance of her older sister, Mary. The legacy of Mary’s reign was a fear of Catholicism and a determination not to permit Catholics to hold government office or any position of power. The immediate effect of Mary’s reign was that any plotting that was discovered, any subversion that was detected, any unexpected crisis, could well be credited to Catholic sympathizers. Although Elizabeth’s reign was prosperous and
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Spenser’s influence extended, however, far beyond the construction of a new stanzaic form. In Paradise Lost, Milton’s depiction of Sin draws from Spenser’s depiction of Error in Book I. More significantly, Spenser resurrected the classical epic literary genre that had been virtually ignored for hundreds of years. While there had been other epics, such as Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, most of these works did not draw on classical traditions. However, Spenser revived the Greek and Latin epic and renewed interest in Homer and Virgil. This new attention to the classical epic inspired Milton in creating his own. Paradise Lost, like The Faerie Queene, is modeled on the classical Greek origins of the genre. Spenser’s work also made a social and political contribution. During Elizabeth’s rule, the handling of female characters in literature was affected by the fact that the country was ruled by a virgin queen. Elizabeth was the object of enormous flattery. She was called Diana (the virgin goddess of the moon and of hunting), Cynthia (celebrated as the goddess of the moon), and Semele (mother of Dionysus). Elizabeth was Gloriana in The Faerie Queene. Few women enjoyed the liberty and personal freedom of Elizabeth. Patriarchal and religious views maintained that women were inferior, but as queen, Elizabeth could proclaim her superiority. As the ordained representative of God, the queen inverted the traditional assumption of male superiority. Poets responded with exaggerated claims of her virtue, wisdom, and strength. The problem with the Cult of Elizabeth was that it provided little for ordinary women, who lacked God’s endorsement of their adequacy. The patronage system and genuine admiration for his queen combined to make Spenser a leading
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proponent of Elizabeth. As an anti-Catholic nationalist, Spenser hoped to leave a legacy of national pride to inspire the sort of chivalry that he found missing in the Elizabethan world. Moreover, the patronage system was an important factor in Spencer’s glorification of Elizabeth. Simple economics influenced Spenser’s work. With Elizabeth providing his income, the grateful poet might be expected to exaggerate her virtues, as well as the strengths of her court and courtiers. Typically, only the first book or at most the first three books of Spenser’s epic are read by students. Spenser’s use of archaic language is difficult for many students, as is the convoluted plot and the many characters, most of whom appear only briefly. First time readers, who are unprepared for the effort it takes to read and absorb the poem, are often intimidated. In spite of these difficulties, however, writers from Spenser’s death into the early twenty-first century have found inspiration in Spenser’s language. Early twentyfirst century critical works on the poem include The Cambridge Companion to Spenser, edited by Andrew Hadfield (2001). The book comprises a useful compilation of essays covering such topics as Spenser’s life and career, the historical context in Britain and Ireland, and critical analysis of The Faerie Queene. In 2006, Nadya Q. ChishtyMujahid’s analysis of character development in the poem and how it affects interpretation of the allegory was published as Character Development in Edmund Spenser’s ‘‘The Faerie Queene’’ (Edwin Mellen Press).
CRITICISM Sheri Metzger Karmiol Karmiol teaches literature and drama at the University of New Mexico, where she is a lecturer in the University Honors Program. In this essay, she discusses The Faerie Queene as an example of the literary ideal and the usefulness of literature in educating people and creating social change. Sixteenth-century England is framed by two fictional works that depict an ideal society. Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) and Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1590), each of which creates an ideal world where men behave with dignity, truth, and valor. This is a world in which personal values are more important than greed or lechery. When More wrote his Utopia, he was responding to changes in English life, as English
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WHAT DO I READ NEXT? Virgil’s Aeneid (19 BCE ) tells the story of Aeneas and establishes a mythic history for the Roman people. Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur (1485) is the story of King Arthur.
The Cambridge Cultural History: SixteenthCentury Britain (1992) is an accessible history of the period, including cultural and social life, architecture, literature, music, art, and Renaissance gardens.
Tamora Pierce’s young adult novel First Test: Protector of the Small (2000) tells the story of a ten-year-old girl who is determined to become a knight. She has to overcome prejudice against girls in a male world and the many obstacles that are thrown in the way of her quest.
Peter David’s adult or young adult novel Knight Life (2002) is a comic updating of Arthurian legend to a modern New York City setting.
The Conch Bearer, by the Indian-American author Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, (2003) is a novel targeted at readers aged nine to twelve. Set in modern-day India, it tells the story of a boy’s quest to help his mentor, a member of the Brotherhood of Healers, to return a magical conch shell to its home in the Himalayas. To succeed in his quest, the boy must learn the virtues of honesty, loyalty, and compassion, reflecting Spenser’s focus on the teaching of morality in The Faerie Queene.
society moved from the Middle Ages into the Renaissance. In More’s world, the emphasis in education was shifting, as men are being prepared for public service. Men were increasingly shifting their interest from careers in the clergy to secular interests. At the end of the century, when Spenser wrote his epic, England is once again facing change. Queen Elizabeth had ruled more than thirty years, nearly all of Spenser’s life, and the country had begun to worry about
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For Spenser, the pleasant taste could be delivered by Prince Arthur and his knights, who can teach honor and truth through entertainment. BY RECAPTURING THE PAST, SPENSER MADE THE PRESENT MORE PALATABLE, AND HE INSTILLED HOPE FOR THE FUTURE.’’
an heir to the throne. Although the queen was healthy (she lived until 1603), the idea of a virgin queen had lost its appeal. Elizabeth resisted all attempts to persuade her to marry and give birth to an heir or, barring that, to name someone as her heir. In short, the Elizabethan world is on the cusp of change, just as More’s Tudor world was eighty years earlier. The composition of a national epic was Spenser’s response, an illustration meant to effect social change. The Faerie Queene depicts Spenser’s concept of an ideal England. In the letter to Sir Walter Raleigh that was published with Books I–III, Spenser states that his purpose in writing is to create a model for educating young men, but he is not simply providing an academic model. Spenser maintains that his purpose is to ‘‘fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline.’’ To ease this learning, Spenser points out that his work will ‘‘be most plausible and pleasing, being coloured with an historicall fiction, the which the most part of men delight to read.’’ Spenser understood that his audience needed to find education palatable, and he stated further that he chose King Arthur and his world as the topic of his epic because Arthur’s story carried no political implications. In fashioning his epic in order to teach valor and graciousness, Spenser met the challenges set forth by Sir Philip Sidney only a few years earlier. In his Defence of Poesy (1579), Sidney argued that poetry creates pleasure and that pleasure makes learning more enjoyable. Sidney pointed out that men learn best when they want to learn, when they are eager to learn. Making learning pleasurable is one goal of the poet, according to Sidney: ‘‘he [the poet] doth not only show the way, but giveth so sweet a prospect into the way, as will entice any man to enter into it.’’ The poet, Sidney wrote, has the power to make the distasteful more agreeable: ‘‘even as the child is often brought to take the most wholesome things by hiding them in such other as have a pleasant taste.’’
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A classical epic, such as those composed by Homer or Virgil, requires a hero of imposing stature, one of national importance. Prince Arthur, the Red Cross Knight, Guyon, Artegall, and Calidore, all fit this definition, since each knight has exceptional abilities far beyond the reach of ordinary men. Their deeds are those of great valor, often demanding super human courage, just as the epic tradition requires. Spenser drew on England’s legendary past, recalling a time of greatness and grandeur. He implied that with these models to guide them, England’s people could achieve greatness. In Spenser’s world, there is sin and evil, balanced by virtue and goodness. Moreover, the manifestations of these qualities are interesting and alive, filled with plotting and deception and the ability to create change. Spenser’s heroes and villains are stereotypes, with the Anglicans pitted against Catholics the common plot. An effective writer needs both heroes and villains to illustrate an idealized world. Unlike Sir Thomas More in Utopia, Spenser takes a chance and reaches back into England’s history to appropriate his knights and their quests. Like More, Spenser was an apostle of humanism, but Spenser sought to use his work to promote chivalric ideals, which he thought were superior to contemporaneous values. In his reading of Spenser, Graham Hough states that Spenser intended to educate the nobility to chivalric integrity by recalling the medieval romance, which he thought represented a better society. Hough points out that there are no exact locations, with everything in Spenser’s epic appearing abstract and dream-like. This vagueness of location conveys an ideal world. He is not competing with his own politicized world, and no one can condemn the poet for wanting to replace England with a dream—no matter how idealized. In his work, Spenser emphasized the importance of leading a life of beneficial action. At the same time, his text reflects the real-life tensions between the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of England. Northrop Frye argues that Spenser saw The Faerie Queene as a means to reclaiming the virtue and education necessary to return fallen men to a higher level of nature in the upper world (Frye divides nature into four worlds and man should be closer to the top). Frye argues that education is the central theme
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of The Faerie Queene, pointing out, ‘‘if we had to find a single word for the virtue underlying all private education, the best word would perhaps be fidelity: that unswerving loyalty to an ideal which is virtue, to a single lady which is love, and to the demands of one’s calling which is courage.’’ This emphasis on fidelity is the underlying ideal that motivates all of Spenser’s heroic action. For Spenser, the Anglican Church epitomized this fidelity. Thus, Spenser’s text relies on biblical allegory to present his perfect world. The imperfect world was represented by allusions to the Catholic Church. For instance, Archimago is first seen as a hermit singing Latin, the Ave Maria, the language of the Catholic Church. He represents evil, deception, and the pope. His accomplice, Duessa, is false, and at different times, she is Mary Queen of Scots, the Roman Catholic Church, and the Whore of Babylon. Her attempts to deceive the Red Cross Knight reveal the attempts of the papacy to deceive the faithful. To serve as contrast to the evil of Archimago and Duessa, Una is truth, the Anglican Church. Red Cross Knight, the hero of Book I, represents St. George, the Patron Saint of England and the Christian man who must rescue Una’s parents and defeat hypocrisy. When he is driven to the brink of despair (a serious sin in Renaissance life), only the teachings of the church (in the House of Holiness) restore him. In this epic, truth defeats the world (the House of Pride), flesh (Duessa at the fountain), and the devil (the cave of despair). Prince Arthur (ancestor to Elizabeth) defeats the giant, Orgolio, and the Catholic Church is defeated by the Anglican Church. The characters in Spenser’s epic are allegorical representations of this tension between Protestant and Catholic belief. The setting is medieval England, but the topic is Renaissance. As Sidney argued, poetry has merit in its ability to make education sweeter and easier to assimilate. Spenser accomplishes this by resurrecting the medieval romance and the chivalric knight as instruments to demonstrate the righteousness of the Church of England. Spenser’s attempt to create an ideal world and to remind men of the importance of virtue was not new. Sir Thomas More had attempted something similar at the beginning of the sixteenth century. The setting for More’s Utopia is the ideal community that More wished could be created in England. This was More’s opportunity to criticize government and the ruling class in a less obvious way. If, as Horace argued (and
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later Sidney), the purpose of art is to educate, that must certainly be what More had in mind with Utopia. In this work, More offered political solutions disguised as fiction. Reform is at the center of More’s design, and religious tolerance is his purpose. More felt that only an objective outsider could see the problems that plagued England. His work, then, was to serve as a guide for how to improve the world. Utopia’s ideal society is a democracy of equal representation and equality of class. More envisioned the responsibilities of government being shared by the people—at least through their elective choices. Tyranny in a ruler would not be tolerated. Interestingly, More rejected medieval chivalry, which Spenser embraced in The Faerie Queene. Because More was really on the cusp between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, this omission is curious. Warriors have no place in his world. Perhaps More was saying that his Utopian people are better Christians than his contemporary Englishmen. Asking such questions in England could be dangerous, as it ultimately was for More. Because of this danger, More used fiction and a fictional faraway location to ask serious questions about, and propose solutions to, the domestic, political, and religious strife that defined English society. The problem with More’s idealized world is that it is boring. There is no art, literature, or drama. There is no difference of opinion and it is too safe. Why does man need God, if his life is already perfect? This Utopian ideal contradicts human nature, which thrives on dissension and argument. Creativity and new ideas evolve out of conflict. Spenser appeared to understand this, since the world he created is idealized and full of conflict; it offers plenty of risk and the opportunity for redemption. In each author’s need to create an ideal world, there existed a desire to make England a better place. A heroic past, which emphasized honor and truth, was particularly important in a society where so much disorder reigned. Peace and the end of the Wars of the Roses were only a century old. In addition, the reign of Mary, which was particularly bloody and painful, was a recent memory. There had also been recent rumblings from Mary Queen of Scots and plots to seize the throne. Elizabeth I craved order, as did her subjects. Peace and order in the monarchy were too recent to be taken for granted. The setting of The Faerie Queene may not evoke Renaissance England, but the content of the epic was still topical and important to its time. By
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A POET VOLUPTUOUS BUT HARDLY SENSUAL, SPENSER CONVEYS A SENTIMENT FOR BEAUTY RATHER THAN A SENSATION OF IT.’’
poem, Raleigh was so perplexed by some parts of it, that he was obliged to ask Spenser to explain them to him. Spenser did so in the letter to Raleigh that is often prefixed to editions of The Faerie Queene. In clarifying his procedure to Raleigh he clarifies it to us.
Illustration by Walter Crane of the Red Cross Knight, representative of Protestant England, killing the dragon, who represents Catholicism and evil, 1894 96. (Ó INTERFOTO / Alamy)
recapturing the past, Spenser made the present more palatable, and he instilled hope for the future. Source: Sheri Metzger Karmiol, Critical Essay on The Faerie Queene, in Epics for Students, 2nd ed., Gale, Cengage Learning, 2011.
Donald Bruce In the following essay, Bruce discusses Spenser’s vision of beauty in The Faerie Queene. Ousted from the Court of Elizabeth I by newer favourites, in 1589 Sir Walter Raleigh retreated to his estate in Ireland to write an epic poem. There he met Edmund Spenser, Clerk to the Council of Munster, and owner of Kilcolman Castle, in County Cork, where they smoked many pipes of tobacco together. Spenser was also at work on an epic, The Faerie Queene. As well as the first three Books, he was able to show Raleigh a long passage from The Mutabilitie Cantos, now assigned to Book Seven: evidence that Spenser, like Virgil, did not write his epic seriatim, but pieced together inspired fragments. Dazzled yet confused by the
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One of Raleigh’s difficulties had been in finding out exactly why Spenser’s knights were riding out on their quests. Spenser does not make it plain early in the poem. That would have emerged fully in the course of the narrative itself, had Spenser been able to complete it. In accord with the advice of Horace in his Art of Poetry, the structure of The Faerie Queene, and of each Book within it, is involuted, and starts in medias res: in the middle of gripping events. As Spenser points out in the letter, ‘a poet thrusteth into the midst, even where it most concerneth him.’ Although Spenser does indeed thrust into the midst, for the most part he continues from there as if he was leading his readers through a picture-gallery in which each picture is clear in its own context. Raleigh’s perplexity was no doubt due to his soldier-like wish to scan the whole terrain at once. Through eight cantos of The Faerie Queene flees the Lady Florimell, glimpsed now and again: beauty in panic at its own effect. Along the wind she ‘flies now, of her own feet afeared.’ Sometimes she pauses in her flight to settle upon the dusty ground, ‘as glad of that small rest as bird of tempest gone’. In the various lechers who hunt Florimell, Spenser represents the wrong kind of love of beauty or, at least, the lower kind. Following Plato, Spenser acknowledges, in his Hymne in Honour of Love, that the desire for physical beauty is not distinct from that for spiritual beauty, but a preliminary searching for it. He admits that the love which responds to beauty merely stirs sensual longing in the ‘baser wit’ that ‘cleaves into the lowly clay’: But in brave sprite it kindles goodly fire That to all high desert and honour doth aspire (F.Q. III v I).
Spenser does not condemn outright the lower kind of love of beauty:
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For beautie is the bayt which with delight Doth man allure for to enlarge his kind; Beautie, the burning lamp of heavens light, Darting her beams into each feeble mynd.
Beauty, then, is an inducement to reproduction, which Plato calls, in his Phaedrus, immortality within mortality. In his Symposium, Plato defines earthly love as a means of sexual selection: the overwhelming urge to propagate and thus immortalise oneself in what one finds beautiful. Spenser describes himself in his Hymne in Honour of Beauty as beauty’s ‘poor liegeman’ (1.273). The contemplation of beauty was a cure in his bouts of depression and the two serious illnesses he had before the completion of his work on The Faerie Queene. In his hymn he addresses Venus on the power of beauty: What wondrous powre your beauty hath That can restore a damned wight from death (11.286 7).
Spenser is amazed at that power, not always benign: Or can proportion of the outward part Move such affection in the inward mynde That it can both sense and reason blynd? (11. 75 7).
Yet the Lady Florimell approaches the abstract. She is the white Florimell, whiter than her milk-white horse, and her face is ‘clear as crystal stone’ (F.Q. III v 5 & III i 15). When a witch makes a copy of Florimell, she makes it out of cold aerial snow. In the lower kind of beauty in Spenser there is generally some subterfuge, as employed by the enchantresses Duessa and Acrasia. Like heavenly beauty, as defined by Plato, Florimell has nothing of the mortal bloom which fades and decays. Florimell is the Idea of Beauty. There was ‘none alive’, Spenser proclaims, ‘but joyed in Florimell’. When she departs from the Faerie court, the court empties as its knights hurl after her. She remains elusive: as unattainable as, in the same Book, Adonis is to Venus through sexual disparity of mind, or Britomart is to Lady Malecasta through sexual parity of body. No more than Acrasia’s veil can Florimell be grasped: More subtile web Arachne can not spin Nor the fine nets, which oft we woven see Of scorched deaw, do not in th’aire more lightly flee.
As Lucretius, whose work Spenser knew well, stresses, there is always some futility in bodily love. The bedmates ‘cling desperately together and press upon each other lips, teeth and salivating mouths—pointlessly, because they cannot rub
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themselves into each other, or interpenetrate, or absorb body into body’. Fearful of her pursuers’ motives, Florimell hastens even from her would-be rescuers, among them Prince Arthur (F.Q. III iv 46). Arthur (in one aspect, and at some points in the story, the Earl of Leicester) wishes to identify Florimell with Gloriana, the Faerie Queene who embodies the public splendour of the Elizabethan state, and thus to relate his quest for the Faerie Queene to his Platonic chase after absolute Beauty (F.Q. III iv 54). When he loses Florimell in the dark, he is compared to a ship when the star which guides, it is out of sight (F.Q., III iv 53). The abusers of Florimell— the witch’s clownish son, the fisherman who throws her down in his boat among the fish-scales and thrusts his hand ‘where ill became him’, the sea-god who woos her in several shapes, but ends by holding her in duress—all perceive beauty, but misapply their perceptions. They ‘cleave into the lowly clay’. Sir Scudamore, Spenser’s type of the true but still earthly lover, is the mean between his professed foes, the womanising Sir Paridell and the womanhating Sir Druon (F.Q. IV ix 30). His love for Amoret is high-minded and ambitious, although sometimes he despairs of the difficulties which, as a courtly lover, he has opted for. He is forced to seek ‘my life’s dear patroness’ (like Spenser himself, who was still courting Elizabeth Boyle at this time) through trials and hardships (F.Q. IV x 28). After overcoming many difficulties, Sir Scudamore enters the Temple of Venus and carries off Amoret, her foster-daughter. Amoret’s coy protestations are belied by the paraphrase from Lucretius’s invocation of Venus, as the goddess of procreative desire, which precedes the abduction; and also by Amoret’s subsequent behaviour. Amoret’s physical charm is more accessible than he fears or she pretends. Spenser provides both a Christian and a pagan explanation of beauty. Beauty was made to represent ‘the great Creator’s own resemblance bright’, but is debased by human sordidness. Yet from the ‘heavenly house’ of Venus ‘all the world derives the glorious Features of beautie’ (F.Q. III vi 12). Such reconciliations of the Christian and the pagan are not unusual in his poetry. Florimell is described as ‘Beauty excellent’ (beauty on high, or Heavenly Beauty) fostered by the three Graces: Comeliness, Modesty and Pleasure. Florimell’s beauty is regarded as sacred: when the witch with whom she hides worships her, Spenser
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comments, ‘T’adore thing so divine as beauty, were but right’ (F.Q. III vii 11). After Florimell, aware of her danger from the witch’s son, has absconded from the witch’s hovel, the witch constructs a False Florimell to comfort him and entertain him with shadows: Earthly Beauty as a substitute for pure or Heavenly Beauty; the parhelion or optical illusion of the sun instead of the sun itself (F.Q. V iii 19). At the first Tournament of the Girdle of Chastity the False Florimell wins the prize which, because of her unchastity, drops from her loins. At the second tournament Sir Artegall, the knight of Justice, exposes her by placing her next to the true Florimell, so that even the crowd—‘the rascal many’, to use Spenser’s favoured phrase—can see the difference. Although he has rejected love as perilous, Marinell (joyfully accepted) yields to Florimell, or Heavenly Beauty, which eluded Prince Arthur, distracted by his vision of patriotic glory. Marinell is a man such as Raleigh, or Spenser himself, whose desire for worldly advancement at last gives way to his ardour for such manifestations of the spiritually beautiful as poetry and philosophy. Laden though it is with treasure, Marinell’s Precious Strand is sterile (F.Q. III iv 23). For all the riches washed up on it, it remains sand, and nothing will grow there. Yet Spenser places limits upon the love of beauty. He always prefers the moral to the aesthetic. Nothing on Earth is more sacred to him than Justice (F.Q. V vii 1). Artegall weakens in his fight with Radigund, Queen of the Amazons, because of her beauty: ‘No heart so hard/But ruth of beauty will it mollify’ (F.Q. V v 13). He throws away his sword: ‘So was he overcome, not overcome’. As a result, Sir Terpine, whom Artegall tried to save, is unjustly hanged. Like the enchantress Acrasia, Radigund is beautiful but vicious. She is ruthless in taking advantage of Artegall’s sentiment. The knight of Justice, Sir Artegall, also represents something in Spenser’s inner life: the stern moral exactitude with which Spenser intended to write The Faerie Queene. Artegall is defeated by beauty, like the conquerors conquered by love in the Tapestries of Cupid in Book Three; and Spenser’s severe morality is ever on the edge of being defeated by beauty too. He excuses Artegall as one allured by: Beauties lovely bait, that doth procure Great warriors oft their rigour to represse, And mighty hands forget their manlinesse;
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Drawne with the powre of an heart robbing eye And wrapt in fetters of a golden tresse (F.Q. V viii 1).
Beauty is changeful: the rose falls; yet it is the poignant beauty of the transient that induces Jove to stay his hand and his thunderbolt when, in the final Cantos of The Faerie Queene, the new aggressor, Mutability, invades the heavens themselves: ‘Such sway doth beauty even in Heaven beare’. (F.Q. VII vi 31). The sharpness and the urgency in the rose’s beauty is that if will not last: Gather therefore the Rose, whilest yet is prime, For soone comes age, that will her pride deflowre (F.Q. II xii 75).
Prince Arthur reviles night and sleep which keep him from an incessant alertness to beauty: What had th’eternall Maker need of thee The world in his continuall course to keepe, That doest all things deface, ne lettest see The beautie of his worke? (F.Q. III iv 56)
Plato held that the constant awareness of earthly beauty was the beginning of a perception of heavenly beauty, which Spenser here, perhaps awkwardly, equates with Gloriana, or Queen Elizabeth I in her self-avowed guise as wife to all her people. Radigund can boast, like the conceited Lady Mirabella later in the poem: That with the onely twinckle of her eye She could or save or spill (F.Q. VI vii 31).
Thus Artegall, like Spenser himself, is taken by beauty’s lovely bait; overpowered by a twinkling eye; rapt in the fetters of a golden tress; swayed, like the heavens, by beauty. Whilst Radigund and Mirabella, both earthlings, misuse their beauty, Florimell is answerable in her conduct to the firmest rectitude Spenser can devise for her. Taken together, Florimell and the witch’s false Florimell approximate to Angelica, whose beauty causes so much havoc in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, a poem from which Spenser at times borrows. Spenser divides Angelica into two figures, so that the False Florimell is Angelica in her guise as a wanton whose immodest adventures lead her, like Shakespeare’s Cressida, into the enemy’s camp, whilst Florimell remains irreproachable in Angelica’s capacity as beauty frequently fleeing lust. At the Tournament of the Girdle in Book IV Artegall first appears in masquerade, decked with moss and oak-leaves, the trappings of a Savage Knight, to represent the fact that he is, so far, wild and untamed by Cupid. (F.Q. IV iv 39). He is soon overpowered by love, a lord stronger than himself,
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as Dante is overpowered in La Vita Nuova by his first sight of Beatrice Portinari, then aged nine, as Dante was himself;, when his body shook violently and his heart said to him in Latin, ‘Here is a god stronger than I am, who has come to rule over me’: Ecce deus fortior me, qui veniens dominabitur mihi. Artegatall’s impending love for Britomart will teach him, as the knight of Justice, to adopt the softer female principles of extenuation and equity. On the other hand, physical love misleads both Malbecco and Hellenore. Malbecco dotes on his young wife, whom he can keep chaste only by force, so that his jealousy torments him and pesters her (F.Q. III x 3). Paridell, a ‘learned lover’ practises upon Hellenore a regular technique of seduction which he has often used before. He does not make much distinction between one woman and another. After he has deserted her (‘so had he served many one’), the satyrs take her up: ‘And every one as common good her handeled’ (F.Q. III x 36). For all her degradations, she refuses to return to Malbecco: ‘But chose among the jolly satyrs still’ to dwell (F.Q. III x 51). Spenser withdraws his eyes from depraved beauty. Like Sir Guyon, the knight of Temperance, he marches through the Bower of Bliss looking ‘still forward right, Bridling his will, and maistering his might’ (F.Q. II xii 53). Moral judgement supersedes sensory pleasure. It is not the libidinous Bower of Bliss which changes at the end of Book II, but Sir Guyon’s appraisal of it: from the fairest to the foulest place (F.Q. II xii 83). Spenser’s own love of beauty is as disinterested and as dispassionate as ever Plato could have wished. It has little admixture of lowly clay. What Spenser aspires to is a beauty, in Plato’s words ‘uncontaminated with the intermixture of human flesh and colours, and all the other idle and unreal shapes attendant on mortality’. A poet voluptuous but hardly sensual, Spenser conveys a sentiment for beauty rather than a sensation of it. His imagination is a sun-mist or dreams, airily suspended. He is as captivated by the butterfly in his Muiopotmos as by Acrasia, or the fleeting nudities of the Bower of Bliss, or even his bride Elizabeth on their wedding day. Faint through heat, lightly sweating in the languor of ‘her late sweet toyle’, the drops of her sweat as clear as nectar, Acrasia lies wrapped in a veil as subtle as a net of ‘scorched dew’: And her faire eyes sweet smyling in delight, Moystened their fierie beames, with which she thrild Frail harts, yet quenched not; like starry light
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Which sparckling on the silent waves, does seem more bright (F.Q. II xii 78).
Acrasia is defined by light falling upon her; shaped by air and brightness no less than the butterfly; enhanced by them as much as are his wings, his horns, his eyes: The velvet nap which on his wings doth lie, The silken down with which his back is dighte, His broad outstretched horns, his airy thies His glorious colours, and his glistering eies
One remembers the axiom of another great delineator, John Constable: ‘Light never stands still’. In Spenser’s poetry, as in Constable’s landscapes, colour and form exist only according to the light, the fluid polychrome twists of space and climate. Spenser’s butterfly possesses ‘the Empire of the aire/Betwixt centred earth and azured-skies’. It rejoices in ranging abroad ‘in fresh attire/Through the wide compas of the ayrie coast’ (M. 18–37). Where the human form is concerned, Spenser is the most amorous and the chastest of poets. His fervent eroticism is matched by another fervour, solemn and devout, for the ‘great Sabbaoth God’ whose creation includes womanhood. His worship is reverent and its outward sign is delight. Spenser’s Amoretti is the record of the decorous Christian courtship which concluded in his marriage to Elizabeth Boyle and his passionate but gentle Epithalamion. Spenser once made a translation, now lost, of the Song of Solomon. Lost though it is, its content maybe traced in many places in Spenser’s surviving poetry, such as his account of the nuptials of St George and Una in the First Book of The Faerie Queene. Spenser’s imagery for a woman’s nakedness, whether he is writing of Acrasia or of Belphoebe, of Florimell or of Serena, of the goddess Diana or of his bride Elizabeth, is always in the spirit of the Song of Solomon, at once a hymn of thanksgiving and of victory. He opens the twelfth stanza of his own Epithalamion with religious words, derived from Psalm 24: Open the temple gates unto my love, Open them wide that she may enter in.
Serena despoiled by the savages is both a triumph and a sacrifice. Her torso, ‘white and clear’, swells like an altar, and her thighs are like a triumphal arch upon which are reared ‘the spoil of princes’ (F.Q. VI viii 42). Belphoebe’s legs are like ‘two faire marble pillours . . . / Which do the temple of the gods support’ (F.Q. II iii 28). The body of Spenser’s bride is:
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about her shoulders (F.Q. III vi 18). Hesper, the evening star, drenches his golden hair in the ocean.
like a pallace fayre Ascending uppe, with many a stately stayre, To honors seat and chastities sweet bowre.
The loveliness of Belphoebe, the sight and scent of her, is able ‘to heale the sicke, and to revive the ded’ (F.Q. II iii 22). The simile which Spenser uses for her appearance as she rushes through the forest recalls Virgil’s description of Venus as a huntress in the First Book of the Aeneid: Such as Diana by the sandie shore Of swift Eurotas, or on Cynthus greene.
Trompart, echoing Aeneas’s words to Venus, addresses Belphoebe as certainly a goddess: O Goddesse (for such I thee take to bee) For neither doth thy face terestiall shew Nor voyce sound mortall (F.Q. II iii 33).
The clown Trompart is no Aeneas, but at least he has a respect for beauty, whilst his master, Braggadochio, has only a relish for copulation. No sooner has Belphoebe finished her speech in praise of simple virtue than Braggadochio tries to ravish her: With that she swarving back, her javeline bright Against him bent, and fiercely did menace: So turned her about, and fled away apace (F.Q. II iii 42).
What allures Spenser above all things is the gloss of eyes and hair. St George, ‘too simple and too true’, is easily enticed by the blue eyelids and newly alert eyes of Duessa waking from a pretended swoon (F.Q. I ii 45). Belphoebe is dismayed to find her suitor Timias, equally tender, kissing the eyes of the unconscious Amoret: From her faire eyes wiping the deawy wet, Which softly stild, and kissing them atweene (F.Q. IV vii 35).
Setting out at dawn with Prince Arthur, Amoret chases from her eyelids ‘the drowzie humour of the dampish night’ (F.Q. IV viii 34). Acrasia, the ‘fair witch’, hangs over her humideyed lover, her own ‘false eyes fixed in his sight’ as she sighs ‘as if his case she rewed’. (F.Q. II xii 72–3). Her eyes moisten too, so that they sparkle like ‘silent waves’ by starlight (F.Q. II xii 78). The eyes of the fainting Pastorella shine like stars in a fog (VI xi. 21). Thirty-seven times Spenser solemnises the glories of blonde hair. It would be tedious to cite them all, but there are some it would be a pity not to mention. The sun-god rends his golden hair at the loss of Hyacinthus, and breaks his garland, ever green (F.Q. III xi 37). Diana’s locks, unbraided after the hunt is over, hang loose and golden
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Water drops from the lustrous hair of the dawn as it rises from the sea (F.Q. V x 16). The morning star, to which Una is compared as she issues from her bedchamber—an anticipation of Spenser’s own wedding hymn—emerges bright with flaming locks (F.Q. I xii 21). Cupid’s curls are golden and his garments vernal green: the tapestries in Busirane’s castle, figured with Cupid’s victories, are likewise green interwoven with gold, which glows like a snake which, in the grass, ‘his long bright burnisht backe declares’ (F.Q. II viii 5 & III xi 28). Spenser’s own lady had fair hair. In the ninth stanza of his Epithalamion he refers to her ‘long loose yellow locks’. All the heroines, and all the enchantresses of The Faerie Queene are blondes. Una’s hair is the colour of the dawn. Belphoebe’s yellow locks wave behind her like a banner and enwrap the leaves and blossoms which have been caught up in them (as in a painting by Botticelli) during her chase through the greenwood (F.Q. II iii 30). Florimell’s fair tresses trail like the blaze of a comet (F.Q. III i 16). Britomart’s blonde hair bewilders Sir Artegall as he battles with her. It is as luminous as sand in sunlit water, as the gold sand which Midas’s river rolled down to Sardis. Falling to her heels, it unwinds like the crests of the Northern Lights in all their twisting refulgence. It floats like the air lanced by the rays of the sun. At Malbecco’s castle it unloosens like shafts of daylight thrusting through a cloud. The eyes of her companions feed upon the wonder of Britomart’s beauty. Soiled though they are—Paridell and the rest—by the world, their gaze is for a while fixed ‘in contemplation of divinitie’ (F.Q. IV vi 20, IV i 13 & III ix 20 ff.) In these descriptions, themselves celebrations of the falling, pouring light, Spenser often alludes to the sky, its source. He is always aware of the sky, always responsive to the weather. Britomart’s face, flushed and damp with sweat from her second duel with Artegall, is like the pink dawn dewed with a rain of silver drops (F.Q. IV vi 19). The face of the swooning Radigund is like the moon on a foggy winter’s night (F.Q. V v 12). Spenser revivifies the spent classical metaphors for dawn and sunset. Dawn draws ‘night’s humid curtains’ from the east (F.Q. V v 1). At evening the sun-god waters his ‘faint steedes’ in the sea (F.Q. I xi 31). The horses sink refreshed into the waves: The Sunne that measures heaven all day long At night doth baite his steedes the Ocean waves emong (F.Q. I i 32).
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They are renewed, as an eagle renews its plumage, by plunging into the water. In a prompt alternation, the evening star arises—the evening star which Spenser invokes in his Epithalamion as: Fayre childe of beauty, glorious lampe of love, That all the host of heaven in ranke doost lead (Ep. 298 9).
At midnight, when the lamps of heaven are half burnt-out, the Hyades, ‘moist daughters of huge Atlas’, drive their weary flock into the sea. Sunset and dawn generally mark important new stages in this insomniac’s narration. The heavens swim with the motion of the air. The Guardian Angel who flies down to Sir Guyon divides ‘the flitting skyes’ in its descent (F.Q. II viii 2). Florimell is like a dove which ‘with her pineons cleaves the liquid firmament’ in its flight from a falcon (III iv 49). Phaedria’s scallop slides through the water ‘more swift, then swallow sheres the liquid skie’ (F.Q. II vi 5). On the wheeling, subtle flow of the air life is borne as well as weather: Next is the Ayre: Who feeles not by sense (For of all sense it is the middle meane) To flit still? and, with subtill influence, Of his thin spirit all creatures to maintaine, In state of life? (F.Q. VII vii 22).
Upon the air storms also hover: Like to a storme, which hovers under skie, Long here and there, and round about doth stie, At length breaks downe in raine, and haile, and sleet, First from one coast, till nought thereof be drie; And then another (F.Q. IV ix 33).
By the air static heat is shaken off, when all beasts ‘hunt for shade, where shrowded they may lie/And missing it, faine from themselves to flie’ (F.Q. IV iv 47). Into the air gnats rise from the fens and sound ‘their murmuring small trompets’ wide as they strive ‘to infixe their feeble stings’ (F.Q. II ix 16 & I i 23). The circumambient air spreads out upon the ocean, with its ‘sea-shouldring Whales’, and encompasses the mariner soused in ‘swelling Tethys saltish teare’ (F.Q. II xii 23 & I iii 31). In his evocation of beauty Spenser does not address himself to the sense of sight alone, but to the senses in unison, and above them to the mind, in his own division of it into Reason, Memory and Imagination (F.Q. II ix 49 ff.). Spenser is a painter who, when he paints a flower, also paints its scent and feel, its movement in the air and in the percipient mind. As his eighteenth-century admirer John Upton said, ‘You do not read his descriptions, you
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see them’. In sleep both the senses and the mind are most open to suggestion. When Spenser envisages sleep or repose, he amalgamates several perceptions in one trickling delight. The traveller in the Bower of Bliss, at ease by the fountain, is insinuated into sleep by the water on its indistinct course through the pebbles: Whilst creeping slomber made him to forget His former paine (F.Q. II v 30).
The hunt over, Diana undresses, ‘after her heat the breathing cold to taste’ (F.Q. III vi 18). The Red Cross Knight discards his armour and rests on the grass by a fountain: ‘he feedes upon the cooling shade’. Britomart drowses: ‘so that at last a little creeping sleepe / Surprised her sense’ (F.Q. III ii 47). Arthur dissembles weariness in Turpine’s castle: ‘as he unable were for very neede / To move one foote’ (F.Q. VI vi 19). Soon afterwards, ‘wearie of travell in his former fight’, he truly sleeps, loosened in silver slumber: ‘in silver slomber lay, / Like to the Evening starre adorn’d with deawy ray’ (F.Q. VI vii 19). In his Epithalamion Spenser writes of the lassitude of his bride: Behold how goodly my faire love does ly In proud humility; Like unto Maia, when Jove her tooke In Tempe, lying on the flowry gras, Twixt sleepe and wake, after she weary was With bathing in the Acidalian brooke.
(Maia, one of the seven daughters of Atlas who were later changed into stars, became the mother of Mercury.) Not content with that alone, Spenser prays for a calm night without storm, or affray, and as protracted as the three nights unbroken by day in which Jove engendered Hercules, native of Tirynthus: Lyke as when Jove with fayre Alcmena lay, When he begot the great Tirynthian groome (Ep. 305 ff.).
No doubt Spenser dwelt upon the pleasures of sleep so closely because he was well acquainted with sleeplessness, like those other great insomniacs of Literature, Chaucer, Herrick, Proust and Colette. He had reason to be so, on his precarious estate in Ireland, surrounded by the vengeful disposssessed and by his litigious neighbours. In his portrayal of Sir Scudamore’s wakeful nights Spenser’s personification of Anxiety, whom he envisages as a blacksmith beating his anvil to pieces in his vehemence, is heartfelt: His name was Care; a blacksmith by his trade, That neither day nor night from working spared, But to small purpose yron wedges made; These be unquiet thoughts (F.Q. IV v 35).
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For his allegories Spenser often attempts a pictorial which can be conceived but not pictured, unless by such modern symbolist painters as Giorgio de Chirico, Rene´ Magritte or Paul Delvaux, with whom Spenser has much in common. Hope, carrying an anchor, comes arm-in-arm with Faith to greet St George at the House of Holiness (F.Q. I x 12–14). Florimell’s ‘faire yellow locks’ disperse behind her like a comet: All as a blazing starre doth farre outcast His hearie beames, and flaming lockes dispred, At sight whereof the people stand aghast (F.Q. III i 16).
The delicate bodies of Britomart and Radigund are denoted even whilst they fight each other in armour: they wound each other’s ‘dainty parts, which nature had created / . . . For other uses’ (F.Q. V vii 29). Most often in Spenser description is interfused with action, as when the dragon approaches St George, ‘halfe flying and halfe footing in his hast’, or gathers himself up ‘out of the mire, / With his uneven wings’ (F.Q. I xi .8 & 40); or when the little woodgod Faunus, dragged by Diana’s nymphs from the bushes where he has been spying on them, casts down his eyes like a snared skylark: not daring up to looke On her whose sight before so much he sought. Thence, forth they drew him by the hornes, and shooke Nigh all to peeces (F.Q. VII vi 47).
Many of Spenser’s scenes are not directly described, but implied by action. There is a constant sense of the forest background of the ‘wandering wood’ traversed by maidens in vivid and mysterious flight, as in a painting by Paul Delvaux: Florimell, Serena, Samient, Amoret, Belphoebe, with their streaming hair. Nearby objects are figured in detail, but against a leafy, romantic haze— a vague perspective of forest, seacoast and castle. Often the greenwood setting is suggested only by passing allusion, as when Timias is ambushed there: Till that at last unto a woody glade He came, whose covert stopt his further sight (F.Q. VI v 17).
Not even in his passages about works of art is Spenser’s description static. His carved and tapestried representations remain mobile. The putti on Acrasia’s fountain ‘did them selves embay in liquid joyes’ (F.Q. II xii 60). In the tapestries at the Castle Joyous, Venus watches the adolescent Adonis, and
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with her eyes ‘she secretly would search each daintie lim’ (F.Q. III i 36). The Tapestries of Cupid at Busirane’s Castle are all activity. Leda spies on Jupiter beneath her eyelids as she pretends to sleep. As Ganymede is carried off by the eagle, the shepherds below call out to him to take surer hold on the eagle’s feathers. Whilst Jupiter is on earth, busied with his amours, Cupid slips into his throne, scoffing that he, not Jupiter, rules the heavens. Neptune’s beard drips ‘with brackish deaw’ as with his trident he clears a ‘long broad dyke’ through the breakers for his chariot: His sea horses did seeme to snort amayne, And from their nosethrilles blow the brinie streame (F.Q. III xi 34 41).
The comprehensiveness and mobility of Spenser’s spectacles, and the luminous swing of his imagery, bear out his own claim that the skill of a poet ‘passeth Painter farre/In picturing the parts of beautie’ (F.Q. III pr. 2). At times he stands in a convolution of splendours. His imagination, like a rainbow straddling a sea-mist and half-lost in it, is sunk in a shining drift of delight. He is enamoured of the surrounding world. His caritas flows out in embracing Franciscan waves towards fair-haired sunrises and dawning womanhood; towards constellations and butterflies. Poetry’s chaste libertine, Spenser is in love with beauty, both earthly and, as far as he can perceive it, heavenly. His is a child’s pious amorousness which extends equally to delectable maidens and glistering winged creatures and the ‘flitting skies’ and the ‘great Sabbaoth God’ who shaped them. Source: Donald Bruce, ‘‘Spenser’s Poetic Pictures: A Vision of Beauty,’’ in Contemporary Review, Vol. 288, Summer 2006, pp. 73 86.
Kathleen Williams In this essay, Williams discusses the use of symbolism to create unity throughout The Faerie Queene. To give unity to so complex a poem as The Faerie Queene would seem a formidable task, and it was a task which Spenser left unfinished. Our loss, in the six unwritten books, is great; and all the greater because of the cumulative method by which the poem’s meaning is revealed. The later books enrich the content of those which have gone before, so that from the first book to the fragmentary seventh the reader becomes increasingly aware of a clear and comprehensive vision, and
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THE WORLD OFTHE FAERIE QUEENE IS ONE IN WHICH THE VALUES OF NEOPLATONISM AND OF CHRISTIANITY ARE FAMILIARLY BLENDED.’’
of a steady purpose which impels him, through a mass of significant detail, towards a final unity. That unity, at the court of Glory herself, was never reached, and without the unwritten books our appreciation of those we have must be incomplete. But even as it stands, half-finished and culminating in the fragment of the presumed seventh book, the poem is a unified whole. For the kind of unity which Spenser achieves, though cumulative, is not architectural; he works not by adding section to section so that the structure is meaningless until it is finished, but by revealing new levels of a structure which we thought complete at our first sight of it. Faeryland is only partially revealed, but it is unified and consistent as far as we know it, though if the poem had been completed it would be seen as only part of a greater unity and a fuller truth. The first book of The Faerie Queene has a simplicity which is proper both to its theme and to the plan of the poem; Spenser begins at the centre of his universe, with the proper conduct of man in relation to God, and the link which still exists between the world of mortality and the realm of eternal truth. Book II shows, almost as simply, the control which is a necessary part of the good life. Themes so essential must be firmly and directly established, but in later books the concern is less exclusively with man, and the natural world too plays its part. Around the centre other and related themes appear, making a richer and more complex whole. Yet Spenser’s method is not a matter only of decorum or deliberate choice. As with any great poet writing seriously about the nature of man and of the universe, his method arises directly out of his vision. An eighteenth century poet, like Pope, will find it natural to write in contrasts, extremes whose balance will produce a truth more central than either. Spenser too sometimes uses a set framework of the Aristotelian mean and its two corresponding extremes, and finds it on occasion a useful piece of machinery;
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but it is not, as with Pope, his most natural way of seeing things. The living world of The Faerie Queene is not one of contrast and balance, but of analogy and parallel, with many kinds of life each complete in itself yet only fully comprehended when seen in relation to the rest. The full poetic effect cannot be contained in Spenser’s own statement to Raleigh, ‘‘The generall end therefore of all the book is to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline.’’ Man holds a place of prime importance in Spenser’s vision of the world, but the conduct proper to mankind cannot be divined by looking at man alone. The other planes of existence must be comprehended too. So Spenser’s is not a simple allegorical world of black and white, concerned only with the ‘‘twelve morall vertues as Aristotle hath devised.’’ There are degrees and kinds of goodness, and these can be seen only when all the parallels are drawn, all the analogies completed. Allegory may present an ideal of moral or political conduct, but beyond a certain point the reader must, to apprehend all of Spenser’s vision, yield to the deepening effect of the poem as a whole. The Aristotelian framework and the allegory of the virtues, the vices, the parts of the mind, form a pattern; one may fit together into a satisfying unity the various kinds of chastity as shown in Belphoebe, Britomart, Amoret, and Florimell. But there is another and more organic pattern, resulting from the inevitable ordering of the material in accordance with Spenser’s way of seeing the world, and developing from book to book to a temporary culmination in the Cantos of Mutability. In this pattern, the shape of the poem is part of its meaning, while characters like Belphoebe and Florimell are symbols which release certain aspects of Spenser’s apprehension of life, and cast about them ‘‘shadows of an indefinable wisdom.’’ Much of the significance of The Faerie Queene is conveyed in the correspondences and parallels which are gradually established throughout the poem, and of course in the choice of symbol; and in both it is the Platonic rather than the Aristotelian influence on Spenser’s mind which is most noticeable. For a poet so much in tune with Neoplatonism it is natural to express not personal reactions only but an interpretation of the universe by means of symbol. ‘‘All things that are above are here below also,’’ and material things which more or less embody the Ideas are themselves already latent symbols of those Ideas. Spenser is always conscious of things as deriving from, and partially embodying, their heavenly counterparts, and as bound together by their common derivation, their
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common if varying possession of ideal truth. Chastity lives in heaven, but is embodied and displayed in each chaste woman. Shamefastness exists as the fountain of Guyon’s modesty, and is not a mere abstraction formed by generalising the modesty of many individuals, as so often in the personifications of later ages. Courtesy, like all virtues, grows on Parnassus, but its ‘‘heavenly seedes’’ were planted on earth, while as a copy among men of this heavenly process the Queen is an ocean of courtesy, from whom all virtues proceed to those who surround her, and to whom they return as rivers to the sea. Such an outlook enables the poet to see about him a multiple unity which is embodied in the development of his poem. There is no division between literal and symbolic truth, for things exist in an order of precedence which is valid in itself, but they have at the same time a symbolic validity as imperfect copies of the world of spirit from which they take their source. In The Faerie Queene events are never merely events; they partially show forth something beyond themselves. Spenser’s battles, it has often been remarked, have less variety of incident and less actuality than Ariosto’s or Tasso’s, but Spenser is interested in something else. Tasso’s Dudon strives three times to raise himself before he dies, and there is a gain in suspense and dramatic climax, but when Red Crosse falls three times to rise again during his fight with the dragon Spenser is concerned less with the dramatic effect of the particular event than with the greater struggle of which it is a shadow. The four-fold repetition of ‘‘So downe he fell,’’ at the death of the dragon is again not only dramatic, it is a solemn ritual repetition meant to emphasize not the size of a dragon but the terror of sin even at the moment of its defeat: ‘‘The knight himselfe even trembled at his fall.’’ Symbol and allegory, often difficult to separate, are especially so in Spenser’s case, for he often uses the same figure now as part of a moral or political allegory, now as a symbol of an indefinable truth. His characters move freely from one plane to another, or exist simultaneously on more planes than one, and that existence is at once both a means of unifying the poem and a symbol of the multiple unity of the world which—among other things—the poem expresses. Occasionally Spenser makes use of incidents or figures which might support the definition of allegory quoted by W. B. Yeats: ‘‘Symbolism said things which could not be said so perfectly in any other way, and needed but a right instinct for its
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understanding, while Allegory said things which could be said as well, or better, in another way, and needed a right knowledge for its understanding.’’ The giant of false justice, in Canto II, of Book V, is such a contrived and limited figure, fitting one occasion, but not suggesting others. But the Giant, and those like him, serve to throw into relief the far greater number of creatures in The Faerie Queene who, like Wordsworth’s monumental shepherds and travellers, hint at the terrible greatness of the events of this world. Nothing exists in isolation, but draws with it an immense but controlled suggestion of other occasions which are yet the same. Another of the figures of Book V, the deceitful Malengin who harries Mercilla’s kingdom, may refer to the guerilla warfare and treacherous behaviour of the Irish, but this falsity is a part of, and a symbol of, all deceit. The chase and the traditional beast transformations suggest the old menace of the covens, and even the primal deceit of the devil; for Malengin is killed as he changes into a snake, and his dwelling goes down to hell. Malengin is one of the representatives of that evil which devil and man have brought into the world, and evil is shown here, as so often in Spenser, as deceit. Like the giant Orgoglio, who vanishes when Prince Arthur kills him, it is based upon nothingness, upon a false view of things. It tries to break the unity and shatter the truth of the universe, but it is doomed to defeat, for ‘‘Truth is One in All,’’ and against that solid truth, present in some degree throughout the created world, evil can have no lasting force. It is seen as an alien intruder into the world of reality, and is embodied in the evil spirits which are used to make the false images of Una and Florimell, or in the devilish Malengin, Despair, and Archimago. To the clear sight of complete virtue it is irrelevant, but to a lesser goodness it is formidable indeed, for it is part of man’s inheritance, making impossible for him the innocence of the natural world, and present in man alone. Nature may be involved in the fall and the suffering of man, but not through its own fault. It is only through the presence of a fallen angel that the snow which makes the false Florimell is corrupted. The world of The Faerie Queene is one in which the values of Neoplatonism and of Christianity are familiarly blended, and of course it is very far from being peculiar to Spenser; but it is expressed in his poetry with a particular vitality. What other poets must show in the flash of an image, Spenser develops through the six Books of The Faerie Queene into a living and consistent universe. Through the growing pattern of the
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poem can be traced levels of being which extend from pure intelligences to inanimate nature, distinct but related by their common reference to the guiding and informing spirit which gives unity and order to a multiple world. It is not a dual world of pointless change contrasting with eternal changelessness; the changing world derives from, and returns to, unity, and each of its levels is good in its degree, being a reflection of the eternal. In ascending scale, created things are more beautiful because more pure—clearer manifestations of the spirit which informs them; Still as everything doth upward tend, And further is from earth, so still more cleare And faire it growes, till to his perfect end Of purest beautie, it at last ascend.
But though distance from the home of pure spirit, and involvement in matter, must lessen the purity and beauty of the creatures at certain levels, all have their beauty and in Spenser’s symbolism their goodness. All are made with wondrous wise respect, And all with admirable beautie deckt,
and in no part of Spenser’s universe is the hand of God absent. His providence sustains and guides even the apparently lawless world of the beasts and the apparently aimless world of inanimate nature, but in this orderly universe springing from and guided by God the disruptive and unruly element is man. Spenser writes in Book V of the impotent desire of men to raine, Whom neither dread of God, that devils bindes, Nor lawes of men, that common weales containe, Nor bands of nature, that wilde beastes restraine, Can keepe from outrage, and from doing wrong.
Other created things are restrained by the laws proper to their being, and when Spenser considers evil the emphasis is, here as in An Hymne of Heavenly Love, on the sin of man, rather than on any sinfulness inherent in the whole material world. Our ‘‘sinfull mire,’’ in which we endure fleshly corruption and mortal pain, is part of the inherited frailty of fallen humanity. We all are subject to that curse, And death in stead of life have sucked from our Nurse.
Amavia, telling Sir Guyon the story of her husband’s submission to Acrasia, accepts it as part of the weakness of man when faced by temptation through fleshly lusts: For he was flesh: (all flesh doth frailtie breed).
The same emphasis appears in the myth of Chrysogone and her two children. In the world of
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humanity, conception is involved in the ‘‘loathly crime’’ of the fall; but Chrysogone conceives in all the lustless innocence of the natural world, without sin and without pain: Unwares she them conceived, unwares she bore: She bore withouten paine, that she conceived Withouten pleasure.
Her children are born of sunshine and moisture, sharing the purity which characterises all the natural world when uncontaminated by the inherited sin of human flesh. Belphoebe is Pure and unspotted from all loathly crime, That is ingenerate in fleshly slime,
but Amoret too shares in the innocent birth, and the fruitful Garden of Adonis in which she is reared is presumably as much a symbol of primal innocence as are the cool chaste forests through which Belphoebe ranges. The innocence and even holiness of nature, when considered without reference to the contamination of sin in the case of humanity, is one of the most noticeable features of Spenser’s world, but there is nothing of that sentimental idealisation of the ‘‘natural’’ to which a later age was to fall victim. Spenser’s clear vision of the ascending planes of existence prevents any loss of proportion, any concentration on a part of life to the detriment of the rest. The satyrs of Book I are innocent and, in their degree, good. Only the sacredness of the old religious rites is shown in their worship of Una, and they are an instrument of ‘‘eternall Providence exceeding thought,’’ an example, like the noble lion of natural law who is killed by Sansloy, of the guidance of God even in the non-human world. But this is not the whole truth about the satyrs, for there is a parallel picture in Canto 10 of Book III, where Hellenore, garlanded like Una, is escorted by a similar band of dancing satyrs. Here the word used is not, as in Una’s case, ‘‘queen,’’ but ‘‘Maylady,’’ and in the scenes which follow the license of the old nature cults, which the word suggests, is fully revealed. The satyrs have not changed; they are still charming, innocent, a ‘‘lovely fellowship,’’ but Spenser is looking at them from a different point of view, and drawing an exact parallel with Una’s story to make clear both the likeness and the difference in their good and our own. Hellenore is capable, as a human being, of a higher and more conscious goodness than that of the innocent brute world, and in entering that world she misuses it just
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as, with Paridell, she had misused the natural goodness and the sacred symbolism of wine.
detailed treatment of earlier books, drawing all their diversity into unity.
There are many of these lesser planes in The Faerie Queene, and Spenser shows them in themselves and in relation to man. In forests and above all in the sea, we are shown kinds of being which, good in themselves, are not proper to mankind. The seas and forests are unknown, lacking by human standards in morality and in spirit. They can contain creatures of non-human goodness, like Belphoebe, but those who go there from man’s world—Hellenore, the forester who pursues Florimell, the fisherman who attacks her—become brutalised. But nature, even at its most remote from man, has its share of the spirit which is the meaning of Spenser’s world. The mutable is not necessarily the meaningless, but can ‘‘work its own perfection so by fate.’’ What is meaningless and dead is the work of sin, of pride and distorted values, the places of Mammon or of Malecasta, where the lifeless glitter of gold and jewels is shown up in all its emptiness by the sudden reference to the stars in their order, reflections of mind and symbols of the steady life of the spirit,
One of the most far reaching of Spenser’s series of inter-linked and expanding symbols is that of Florimell and Marinell, which stretches through three books and embraces many meanings and many characters. In the moral allegory, it is a story which displays Spenser’s knowledge of humanity, and of the various temptations to which different natures will be subject. Florimell is one kind of chastity, the kind which maintains itself not by the awe which Belphoebe and Britomart inspire, but by fear and flight. Her temptation is not, like Amoret’s, passion, but a timorous softness and gratitude. She escapes from her brutal pursuers by instinctive flight, but is disarmed by the protective kindness of Proteus, to be imprisoned by him as Amoret is imprisoned by Busyrane. On the same level of moral allegory, Marinell’s is the nature which refuses to commit itself, and lives remote and self-sufficient, fearing the harm which may come to its own completeness by contact with others. But they are, both of them, more than this, for they play an important part in the network of symbol. Both seem to be creatures of the natural world which stands apart from the life of men but which yet, such is the unity of things, has its relevance to that life as it has to the life of pure spirit. The sea which is so intimate a part of their story is the remotest of all things from man, home of hydras and ‘‘sea-shouldring whales,’’ and yet it is the most perfect of all symbols for the whole multiple, changing, but unified world, ‘‘eterne in mutabilitie.’’ The sea can symbolize the character and meaning of the universe and so embodies a truth beyond itself, but it stands also, in its own right, for nature at its least formed and most nearly chaotic. It can show the thoughtless, blameless cruelty of nature, its blind suffering, and also the justice which works through it as through all creation. Such meanings play through the story of Marinell and Florimell, and the other stories which surround it, drawing even the Fifth Book, in which the justification of one man and one policy plays so large a part, into the scheme of the whole.
th’eternall lampes, wherewith high Jove Doth light the lower world.
It is, then, a universe with varying degrees of good, and evil which is a distortion, or sometimes a subtly distorted copy, of the good: the unnaturalness of Argante, Ollyphant, and the ‘‘damned souls’’ who capture Serena, or the magic and deceit of Acrasia, Duessa, and the false Florimell; and it is revealed partly by the gradual accumulation of correspondences between one kind of life and another. There are parallels between Una and Hellenore, Mercilla and Lucifera, the Garden of Adonis and the Bower of Bliss, Cleopolis and the New Jerusalem, the veiled Venus of Book IV, and the goddess Nature of Book VII. The virtues are seen, more and more, as various aspects of the same heavenly good, embodied in different ways in different kinds of life. ‘‘Truth is one in All,’’ or to put it in another way,
We meet first Florimell, ‘‘beautie excellent’’ and of a kind which delights the world,
O goodly golden chaine, wherewith yfere The vertues linked are in lovely wize.
It is not a matter only of interlinked stories or of characters overlapping from one book into another. It is a linking, by symbol and allegory, of Justice with Constancy, Love with Courtesy; a deepening of content by reference to earlier themes so that nothing is lost, and so that certain passages, pre-eminently the Mutability Cantos, can call up by the briefest of references the more
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For none alive but joy’d in Florimell,
but apparently of a lesser order of being than that to which the great champions of virtue belong. Britomart, usually so prompt to relieve distress, refuses to join in the pursuit of Florimell, and she is clearly right. Britomart’s constant mind, Would not so lightly follow beauties chace.
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She remains faithful to her search for Justice and noble deeds, one aspect of that quest for ideal goodness to which her companions also, Guyon, Arthur, and Arthur’s squire Timias, are in their various ways committed. In abandoning their quest, these others are leaving their proper sphere of spiritual endeavour, constancy to an unchanging truth, to pursue the fleeting charm of a mutable world. As a result, even the steadfast Prince Arthur finds himself at the mercy of passing events and emotions, and is perceptibly a lesser figure during this period of pursuit. Forgetting for the moment his vision of Gloriana, the true object of his quest, he gives way to confused fancies, wishing that Florimell were the Faerie Queene: And thousand fancies bet his idle braine With their light wings, the sights of semblants vaine: Oft did he wish, that Lady faire mote bee His Faery Queene, for whom he did complaine: Or that his Faery Queene were such, as shee: And ever hastie Night he blamed bitterlie.
After a night of sleepless irritation, Magnificence itself becomes almost petulant: So forth he went, With heavie looke and lumpish pace, that plaine In him bewraid great grudge and maltalent.
Florimell’s innocent beauty is too nearly empty of meaning for man to be other than harmful to high endeavour. She has little understanding of what is happening to her, but flies instinctively and suffers blindly, with the infinite uncomprehending pathos of nature. She has no place with the knights and ladies who represent human virtues but encounters, rather, creatures of nature like Satyrane and Proteus, and brutalized human beings who try to make use of her for their own ends. Yet this pathetic, fugitive creature, embodiment of transitory beauty, has her own element of constancy; her desire for union with Marinell, who is born of the sea, symbol of the source and home of all changing things. Her long flight and her suffering begin and end in her love for Marinell, and her story has its meaning, though to the world of men, of Arthur and of Britomart, it may seem to have none. Florimell’s story is a parallel to that of Amoret, and their fates are compared at the beginning of Book IV, while Amoret alone can wear the girdle Florimell has lost. Both are held captive, and the tapestries portraying Jove’s metamorphoses in the House of Busyrane are an echo and reminder of the transformations which Proteus undergoes
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earlier in the same book in his attempts to win Florimell. It may be that in trying to define the meaning of such myths as these one can only rob them of their power. ‘‘Symbols are the only things free enough from all bonds to speak of perfection,’’ and to limit them to a definable meaning is to bind them. Yet one may perhaps suggest, if only as one possible meaning among the many meanings which Spenser’s myths contain, that Florimell is the prototype, in the world of inanimate nature, of the steadfast womanliness of Amoret. Both are saved by truth to the nobler and more constant elements of their own being, for Amoret overcomes enslavement to physical passion by the power of chaste and enduring love, while through her love for Marinell Florimell escapes from the mutable Proteus and so finds safety and the unchanging peace at the heart of a changing