The Faerie Queene

De: Edmund Spenser

Narrado por: David Timson

This remarkable poem, dedicated to Queen Elizabeth I, was Spenser's finest achievement. The first epic poem in modern English, The Faerie Queene combines dramatic narratives of chivalrous adventure with exquisite and picturesque episodes of pageantry. At the same time, Spenser is expounding a deeply felt allegory of the eternal struggle between Truth and Error....

Download the accompanying reference guide.Public Domain (P)2015 Naxos AudioBooks

Kind of wish I had it in paper. So quotable.

I can't believe I have not read this before. I love fairy and folklore.

That said, this is in old-middle English style. So it can be a bit hard to get through.. I had to re-listen to a bunch of sections to follow what was going on. The poetry is amazing and there are many quotable passages.

Personally I wish it didn't mix in so much Christianity into the story, but it's a product of its time.

In short I think this is my favorite audio book I have listened to this year.

High Adventure

My goodness. I am blown away by the artistry and genius of The Faerie Queene. Spenser weaves together a rich tapestry of adventure, horror, and romance while highlighting virtue and morality. The allegory whether to be agreed with or not is pure artistry. Spenser is a master and offers a finely crafted poetic narrative. This 30+ hour epic poem is well worth the time.

Good story, organized poorly

I liked the challenge of the Victorian English poetry. A companion summary helped me understand it much better. HOWEVER, Audible has failed in just using Chapter 1-80+ for each chapter title. That’s not how it’s organized. It would have been much easier had the chapter titles reflected the ACTUAL divisions, ex. Book 2, Canto 3, etc. I found myself having to constantly go back to the beginning of a “chapter” to find where I ACTUALLY was in the story.

Sheer Fun and Pure Poetry in a Faerie Fantasy Epic

For decades I avoided Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene (1590-96), fearing that it would be a lengthy poem-allegory-sermon attacking Catholicism and paganism and promoting Protestant Christian doctrine, a proto Pilgrim's Progress (1678) in verse. How happily wrong I was when I finally tried it!

Its six books (and incomplete seventh) depict the moral adventures of various knights (Elfin, British, Saracen, chivalrous, discourteous, errant, retired, etc.) in Faerie, an infinite fantasy land teeming with damsels in distress and squires in bondage, love-sick Amazons and free-agent huntresses, wild vegetarians and savage cannibals, newsy dwarves and lustful giants, scheming magicians and vengeful witches, rapacious tyrants and merciful queens, rakehell rabblements and Lincoln green teens, randy satyrs and brigand slavers, iron men and simulacra women, ravaging dragons and Blatant Beasts, Roman and Egyptian gods and goddesses, personifications of Greed, Slander, Lust, Guile, Envy, Detraction, and more. Equipped with magic rings, mirrors, spears, swords, and shields, the knights undertake quests and engage in gory fighting, tender loving, identity mistaking, cross dressing, prisoner liberating, justice meting, marriage celebrating, and more in a variety of settings: lewd castles, bespelled dungeons, pagan temples, inhospitable huts, hellish dens, enchanted groves, submarine caves, and violated monasteries.

Apart from timeouts for things like the histories of Britain and Faerie, Spenser's work is non-stop entertaining action: the Redcrosse Knight debating Despair or fighting a vast dragon; Britomart spurning a smitten lady in a castle of pleasure or smiting every man in a tourney; Artegall whacking off Britomart's helm and then making a religion of his wonder; Guyon getting tempted by Mammon; Venus and Diana bickering about Cupid; knights fighting over the false Florimell; Scudamour spending a night in Care's blacksmithy; Braggadocio getting in over his head; Artegall taking up the distaff; Calidore going pastoral; a band of cannibal brigands hungering for Serene's nude body; and much more.

Spenser is suspiciously good at evoking sins like greed, lust, and despair. True, in the nick of time he'll recall his Christian moral compass and punish an unknightly knight or save a virtuous virgin. But he usually only moralizes briefly at the start of each Book, after which he pricks on his steed of poesy to adventure through Faerie. And after the first Book about Holiness featuring Una and the Redcrosse Knight, pagan gods and beings and temples far outnumber Christian representatives. In this Spenser's allegory sure differs from Pilgrim's Progress, which, although also full of exciting fantastic events, strictly adheres to Protestant Christian doctrine. Whereas John Bunyan writes mostly about love of Christ, God, and church, Spenser focuses on other kinds of love, "Love, that is the crown of knighthood," romantic, comradely, familial, chivalrous, spiritual, physical--and also its opposite, hate.

As Spenser explained to Sir Walter Raleigh in a letter, he wrote The Faerie Queene "to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline" by entertaining his reader with "an historicall fiction" full of a "variety of matter." Thus he imagined King Arthur as a prince possessed of all the moral virtues and then imagined other knights representing specific virtues (Holiness, Temperament, Chastity, Friendship, Justice, and Courtesy) and their opposites, and then set them all adventuring in Faerie.

In addition to Spenser's fertile imagination of Faerie and developments comedic or sublime, acts bestial or divine, moods sensual or spiritual, and descriptions foul or beautiful, the pleasure of his epic lies in his poesy, so rich in rhyme, consonance, simile, and diction--despite or because of his restricting himself to his nine-line stanza end rhyming ABABBCBCC. I often found myself chuckling, whether from the outré events in the poem or from its exuberant language and rhymes.

After Book I, as I became familiar with Spenser's grammar and idiom, it was surprisingly easy to understand his poetry. He has been taken to task for overusing artificially archaic words, but most of the archaisms are close to our modern forms (e.g., gan/began, eftsoons/soon, brent/burnt) or are easy to figure out from context (e.g., prick/spur, eke/also, dight/clothe, wight/person, weet/know, and--my favorite--shent/ruined). Spenser describes a bloody battle ("That vnderneath his feet soone made a purple plesh"), for instance, so we can enjoy the exotic "plesh" while using the context and the familiar word splash to figure out its likely meaning.

Any stanza in the poem is worth savoring, but here's a fine one about the eyes of a dragon:

His blazing eyes, like two bright shining shields,
Did burne with wrath, and sparkled liuing fyre;
As two broad Beacons, set in open fields,
Send forth their flames farre off to euery shyre,
And warning giue, that enemies conspyre,
With fire and sword the region to inuade;
So flam'd his eyne with rage and rancorous yre:
But farre within, as in a hollow glade,
Those glaring lampes were set, that made a dreadfull shade.

Spenser's spelling often differs from modern (e.g., u and v switch places, and i stands in for j) and may be inconsistent (e.g., gyant/geante/geaunt), but if you listen to the audiobook the spelling is no problem.

About the Naxos audiobook, David Timson's reading makes The Faerie Queene easy to understand and enjoy, because he plays characters and emphasizes phrases and words in just the right ways so as to highlight or clarify meaning. He clearly relishes Spenser's poetry, so we do too.

Fans of poetry, fantasy, Faerie, chivalry, classical mythology, and so on, should enjoy Spenser's magnum opus. I've never felt such pleasure and had such fun with any long poem as his. I only regret that he died before he could complete Books VII-XII.

fantastic poetry, message, narration

Spenser inspires the reader on many levels. Planning to read it again, it's dense and difficult I had to read the book alongside the audio, and the audio perfectly narrates Spenser's stanzas, getting every appropriate beat, rhythym, and pronunciation. very helpful