[MUSIC] Today we start one of the more challenging weeks of the course. We're going to be reading the first canto of book three from Spenser's the Faerie Queene Spenser's poetry is often seen as very difficult for contemporary readers. he is, is an over-poet. He overlapped with Shakespeare. he did most of his writing a little bit prior to Shakespeare's main period. But his language is more archaic than Shakespeare's language is. it's not middle English. Some people make the mistake of thinking Spencerian language is middle English, like Chaucer. But no, it's not middle English. It's renaissance English. But, its orthography, that is its spelling and his diction makes the work superficially seem more difficult. it's intentionally archaic. Spenser used poetic language and lots of illusions to myth and contemporary references to the early modern political scene that. present surface difficulties. But I want to keep emphasizing that these are surface difficulties. If you stick with it, after two or three stanzas you'll find it gets easier to read. Let me give you some advice on how to read the poem. Listen to the videos first, if you like. Feel free to skip the proem. That's that little intro, introductory poem of about five stanzas long that is a, dedicatory set of stanzas to Queen Elizabeth, and Spenser is praising her with the most over the top flattery imaginable, and it's got lots of interesting touches, but I want you to get straight to the plot of the poem. And that brings me to another point. This is a narrative poem. It's not like the lyrics by Keats and Browning that we read before. This is a great example of action narrative poetry. And you should read it for the plot. Don't worry about getting every word right, or understanding every single line, especially first time through. Because you'll have a lot more fun, if you just read this poem for what's going on in the general sense. you might even want to read a summary of it. I certainly don't object for you, if you go online and read a summary of the action of the poem. Because it will give you a better sense of what you're encountering, in this first encounter, for many people, with Spencerian English. I especially recommend listening to the audio version of the poem. It really helps to hear the words. Often they look more odd than they are. When you hear someone pronounce it, you go, "oh! Now that's what that means" because he, he has irregular spelling. Spelling had not been regularized completely in, in Spencer's time. You're reading only one canto which-, of one book. And this canto itself is about, oh, somewhere around 600 lines. This is one of six books, each book has multiple cantos. He published the first three in 1590, and then six years later, he published the entire poem that we have today, books one through six. But we know from a letter that he wrote to Lord Raleigh that his original plan for this book was, get this, 24 books long. It's already one of the longest poems in the entire English language, and he only got around to writing six of the books, and, of a planned 24. Well, many scholars, and I, I agree with them, many scholars think that he'd basically said what he had to say. and though we have a fragment of a seventh book in something called the Mutability Cantos that are very highly regarded as Spenser's, Spenserian poetry. I believe that he basically made his central points. It's a book, that allegorizes the great virtues of the age. Each book covers a specific virtue. Book one is the virtue of holiness, and it's incarnated by the red cross knight who's questing in search of his love, Una, and Book Two is Temperance, which features Guyon and you meet Guyon quite a bit in Book Three. You, you, you see Guyon initially in the first stanza of the poem of, of Book Three. Book Three is an allegory of chastity. And the main character is of course the female heroine Britomart, whom you meet disguised as a male knight. and we're reading this canto of this book because of Britomart. Britomart as you will see gives us a opportunity to discuss a part of the fantasy genre that we haven't spent enough time on, which is the portrayal of female figures in fantasy literature, The other three books go on to cover a less Personal virtues. Friendship is book four. Book five is justice. And book six is courtesy, a great chivalric virtue. So why are we reading Spenser? There's plenty of more important sources for Tolkien. He drew directly on Beowulf, both the prose and the poetic eddas. on the Finnish epic the Kalevala. Spenser was not a, major source for him. So why are we reading it? Well, he did write, about Spenser, in his scholarly work. He certainly knew Spenser really well. But this is not a course about Tolkien's sources. If this were a course about Tolkien sources, we'd be reading a lot of medieval literature. Rather, this is a course about how the romance legacy has come down to our entire culture. And Spencer's portrayal of knights and ladies was deeply influential on the Victorian period. We really see Keats in La Belle Dame Sans Merci drawing much more on Spenserian imagery, and Spenserian notions of knighthood and, and ladies and evil. Then we do real medievalism. Victorian, medievalism is really filtered through Spencer. And Tolkien grew up with this kind of imagery of knights and ladies and chivalric code and honor and battles, and boy, Spencer's Faerie Queene has it all. I mean, the first book Redcross has to defeat a dragon. You know, it's just like the first, The Hobbit, really. he, it's got ogres, it has trolls it has dwarves, knights, and castles, and rugged landscapes. It's really got everything that fantasy literature has, has capitalized on and that Tolkien did so much to make really important. This is a tiny piece of it. I hope readers of the course find themselves charmed, magically charmed by Spencer's beauty and poetry and want to read more of it on their own. But you'll get a good introduction to it just with this one canto. [MUSIC]
