# Have to ask: has anyone else here actually read The Faerie Queene?



## Sir Eowyn (May 29, 2020)

I reference it a lot, because it's astounding. For those uninitiated, this is the vast Elizabethan epic composed by Edmund Spenser. It's unfinished, but that hardly matters. Of all great poets ever to write in the English tongue, he's probably now the least read --- he feels, I guess, so antiquated, and over-Baroque, to the general reader. Given a chance, though...

Tolkien couldn't stand him, but C. S. Lewis adored him. There's an odd, extreme flamboyance in Spenser --- some samples include two giant twins who have incest while still in the womb, a fight with a dragon, the Bower of Bliss, and a woman held prisoner by Proteus under the sea, in a storm-cave. He'll go anywhere, do anything, with The Faerie Queene. It's massive (many thousands of lines), and its language makes Shakespeare look modern, but it's worth it.

Anyone?


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## Alcuin (May 29, 2020)

Parts, 40 years ago, in college. I couldn’t stomach it then. Perhaps another time, in another 40 years. However, there was a computer game called “Star Trek”, and if the Klingons or Romulans or a supernova destroyed the _Enterprise_, you were transferred to _The Faerie Queene_, a vessel with about 60% of the power of the _Enterprise_. There were no personal computers in those days: we played the game in time-sharing mode on a Digital Equipment DEC-10.


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## Elthir (May 29, 2020)

Like Alcuin, parts. Too long ago to even recall which parts, but I enjoyed them.

And there it sits, waiting. I can see it from here, one book (_Parsival_) away from _The Silmarillion._


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## Sir Eowyn (May 29, 2020)

Yeah, I think you either adore it or you drop it like a biting spider. Can hardly think of any really great poetry that so against the grain of modern literature, what it's supposed to be. He was, let's not forget, really the last great poet in English pre-Shakespeare. After that, everything changed. But I wouldn't give up Spenser, for anything.


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## Olorgando (May 29, 2020)

At 1552/1553 – 1599, Spenser was rather a contemporary of Shakespeare’s (1564 – 1616), the latter being 26 when the "The Faerie Queene" was published, and their productive periods overlapped by something like a decade.
But the Wiki article on Spenser states that "The language of his poetry is purposely archaic, reminiscent of earlier works such as "The Canterbury Tales" of Geoffrey Chaucer …".
So would this be something like the divide between JRRT and the "modernist" writers of our own time?


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## Sir Eowyn (May 29, 2020)

Sure, Spenser died in 1599, but he spent the last twenty years of his life in Ireland, mostly. Shakespeare wrote plays through the 1590s and had them performed, but aside from some quarto editions in London, he was unpublished and it's unlikely Spenser knew him at all. He did come back to England on occasion, so I suppose he just might have seen one of the plays --- but in any case, The Faerie Queene was written before this.

So yes, they overlapped in time, but Spenser was the last major poet to not be impacted by Shakespeare. 

For the archaic language... this is tricky. Yes it is, in a sense, but Spenser wrote like Spenser, no one else. You could say that he wrote in a dialect of English spoken by him alone. It's hard to imagine now, now that he's been largely forgotten, but his impact on the Romantics was HUGE. Shelley, Keats, etc. all owed him a lot. And Lewis, of course. Decidedly not Tolkien.


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## Olorgando (May 29, 2020)

Is what may be had nowadays by Spenser (or for that matter Shakespeare) something of a "modernized translation"? I'm thinking that to read any of this "in the original" (spelling wasn't regularized until much later; same in Germany, this may have not been until the late 19th century) might be something of a chore, making even The Sil "easy reading" (and never mind Chaucer, living 200 years earlier). I have a book about Martin Luther, or rather his times, which contains examples of the original writings (spellings) of the first half of the 16th century. Luther's German translation of the bible had quite an influence on regularizing written German, which still, nonetheless, still had a way to go. Some of those approximately 500-year-old writings are quite a challenge to read due to spelling.


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## Elthir (May 29, 2020)

Looking at some of the hardcovers editions out there . . . I might suddenly "need" a new copy.

Not in love with my paperback copy (a "selection"), which is in slightly worse condition than this version (same illustration) I found on the net.


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## Sir Eowyn (May 29, 2020)

My edition is the original spelling... for me it's become inseparable from his style, and if you gave me a modern spelling edition, I wouldn't want to read it. But yes, if that's the really daunting factor, by all means.


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## Alcuin (May 31, 2020)

Sir Eowyn said:


> My edition is the original spelling... for me it's become inseparable from his style, and if you gave me a modern spelling edition, I wouldn't want to read it. But yes, if that's the really daunting factor, by all means.


A modern edition might be useful to decipher some of the more arcane usages, but I agree with you: without Spenser’s style, it loses some of its positive impact. And I write that not liking it nearly as much as you! I have the same opinion of _Canterbury Tales_, which I do enjoy; and yes, I need explanations for some of the more arcane usages there, too. 

But I wonder if Spenser’s usages are always correct? They seem natural to Chaucer, but stilted in Spenser. (Hence some of my distaste.) He was reasonably close to Chaucer in time: two hundred years apart. But if we tried to imitate the English usage of, say, Sir Walter Scott, Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, Earl Grey, John Quincy Adams, Thomas Jefferson, or (for Olorgando) von Goethe, or any other notable writer or orator two centuries before our time, how well could we reproduce his style or usage?


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## Sir Eowyn (May 31, 2020)

He may have been archaic in his diction, but I really don't think he was obsolete --- you compare him to Sir Philip Sidney or someone like that, or Sir Walter Raleigh (yes, he wrote poetry), it sounds about on par. I think it's Spenser's medieval aesthetic that gives this impression, but I really think he was fresh, and in his own time modern. It's just strange, is all. And I never find him stilted. It's remarkable how he sustains such a complex stanza scheme (the "Spenserian" stanza, later used by Byron, Keats and Shelley, etc.) over so long a work.

And I love Chaucer too. But setting aside the truism that Spenser was archaic, do they really sound all that similar? I think he sounds way more like Sidney and even like Shakespeare than he does like Chaucer. 

There really aren't many Spenser fans around anymore --- it'd be nice to see a Spenser Forum, just like this one, people debating his intricacies. But alas, one can't have everything.


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## Squint-eyed Southerner (May 31, 2020)

I'm about halfway through a well-annotated edition. I need to dig it out again.

I have to say some of Tolkien's remarks about other authors should taken with a salt lick. There's a perception that he despised Shakespeare, for instance, based upon his comments on the use of "elves", and the "ent controversy". But he compliments a performance of Hamlet in a 1944 letter.

An extreme example of grouchy behavior by him was reported by Clyde Kilby, when he expressed admiration for the character of Sam. Tolkien apparently went on a rant about how he loathed Sam.

Spenser did spark an idea about Middle-earth in me, which I have yet to pursue.


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## Sir Eowyn (May 31, 2020)

Well, he disliked Shakespeare "cordially," didn't he? Shakespeare's hard to dismiss, but I can imagine him causing some furrowed brows on the Oxford don. An anarchic flamboyance runs through his work, as it does to a large extent through Spenser's. 

Don't think Tolkien LOATHED him or anything (Spenser), but I can see how this shameless allegorist, who wrote in the most cheerfully "corrupt" form of English imaginable, wouldn't exactly delight him.

But maybe he was some influence, after all. Just in the sense of creating a world with celestial realms and nightmare side by side... Spenser didn't map it out, and there's no cohesion there whatsoever, in terms of the giant's castle being forty miles from here, etc. But we should also take people's influences with a salt lick --- T. S, Eliot claimed to dislike Walt Whitman. Well, he later copped to that.


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## Chaostyr (Nov 5, 2020)

I bought The Faerie Queen simply because it has been mentioned several times on Exploring the Lord of the Rings (Signum University). I had no idea it was so massive nor the language so archaic. I feel like I need to learn a whole new language and culture just to get started. It will be sitting on my shelf, unread, for quite some time I think.


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## Squint-eyed Southerner (Nov 5, 2020)

I'd certainly recommend an annotated edition, though admittedly, constantly checking footnotes does tend to break the flow.


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