Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene: A Prose Rendering
Created by Sky Turtle Press
A text-faithful prose rendering of the 1590s epic poem by Rebecca K. Reynolds, with nearly eighty new illustrations by Justin Gerard.
Latest Updates from Our Project:
A magic ring, a lost tale, and a phoenix. (Faerie Queene Update)
almost 2 years ago
– Fri, Jan 20, 2023 at 08:38:50 AM
Today I want to share a story about my favorite piece of historical jewelry—the Chequers ring. This ring is marked with E (Elizabeth) and R (Regina/Queen) on the outside, and it opens to reveal two miniature portraits. There is also a phoenix on the bezel, a symbol of resurrection and chastity. This ring was owned by Elizabeth I.
No sovereign is without fault, and I believe Elizabeth I made some grave mistakes as a leader. However, she also overcame challenges that would have been difficult for any of us—let alone a woman in the 1500’s.
Elizabeth was officially (and unfairly) labeled a “bastard." She endured sexual harassment as a child, faced the skepticism of her male advisors as an adult, navigated national financial strain and military hostilities, survived assassination attempts, was betrayed by several close to her, and lived unable to marry the man she loved. Before becoming queen, she was imprisoned in the Tower of London by her half-sister Mary I--but perhaps the most difficult trauma of all was the loss of her mother Anne Boleyn, who was murdered by her father Henry VIII when Elizabeth was just two years old.
Enter the Chequers ring.
Many theories surround this piece of jewelry, but I’ll share only the one I believe to be true: I think this ring contains portraits of Elizabeth I and her mother. I won’t go into the reasons historians have argued for and against that theory or why I have landed here. But as I’ve read about Anne Boleyn’s execution and considered what it must have been like as a mother facing death, knowing your daughter would likely endure terrible dangers (if she even survived), my heart has ached for both women.
In Spenser’s grand tale, Elizabeth I is represented by several characters, but Gloriana (the actual Faerie Queene) is primary. Just like the Chequers ring opens to reveal a rich and beautiful enigma, images within Spenser’s Faerie Land radiate mystery, grandeur, and longing. This epic poem is full of tales of danger, survival, and the fumblings of real human souls attempting to navigate their own weaknesses in a complicated world.
So many stories these days are told at a single level. Those stories are amusing for an hour or two, but they cannot be unpacked for decades. Rare souls who have already fallen in love with The Faerie Queene have found a treasure more like this ring—a magic ring that contains sadness, hope, victory, and glory all at once.
Spenser’s stories have never died, but they have fallen silent for too long. A phoenix lives within them, however, a hidden wonder waiting for the resurrection of Faerie Land. Thank you for helping make this happen.
RKR
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Book Club Deal
Tomorrow begins our eight day book club deal. If you are interested in reading The Faerie Queene with friends, here's an opportunity to get a $10 discount on each set purchased. Also, there's a free gift for the person who makes the order.
This deal ends on January 28, so don't miss it.
Faerie Queene Update: Third stretch goal unlocked! What is Prose? Epic Conventions (Part Two) An Invocation to the Muse
almost 2 years ago
– Thu, Jan 19, 2023 at 09:01:52 AM
Congratulations! We reached our third stretch goal in three days! Now, everyone who has invested at a mailed reward level will also receive a set of three gorgeous prints by Justin Gerard. I think you will treasure these beauties. I can’t wait to get my hands on a set.
Our next stretch goal will benefit anyone who has purchased a set of books, both standard and deluxe. We will add sewn-in ribbon bookmarks to add a touch of class, and also to help you keep track of your place as you are reading through Spenser’s epic adventures. So, let’s see if we can hit $75,000.
If you happen to know influencers who review books, or if you are in online reading groups, maybe mentioning this project would help spread the word? Also, if you are on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, or TikTok but can’t think of how to share what’s happening here with your friends, I’m including three potential posts at the bottom of this message, so you can just copy and paste.
There’s so much advertising noise in the world days, it’s not easy to let real people know when a worthwhile endeavor is launching. Human-to-human contact is worth a thousand bot bombardments; so, as deeply as we appreciate your individual financial investment, your willingness to get the word out is an equally valuable gift. Thank you for being a real person telling other real people about what we are doing here.
Now, for the literary part of this post.
If you've missed the past few updates because you're new to the campaign, you are welcome to click back and catch up. These instructional posts aren't necessary for you to read and enjoy our books, but they can be fun for those who enjoy digging a bit. So far, I’ve posted about:
1. Spenser’s duality and pageantry
2. The epic convention of Catalogues/Lists/Genealogies
I’d planned to share two epic conventions in today’s post, but we have a change of plans because I want to leave space to answer a question that we received from a patron: What is prose?
PROSE
Prose is regular language. It’s what we use every day to communicate. Prose can be spoken or written, but it doesn’t have meter, rhyme, or much compression. It’s easier for most of us to read prose because we encounter it day in, day out. (Free verse, blank verse, shape poetry, and other variations of poetic structure challenge this definition a bit. There’s also a hybrid language form developing in social media that runs between prose and poetry. But since we are summarizing here, let’s keep things simple.)
Prose can be a bit poetic. Fiction writers like Thomas Hardy, Edgar Allan Poe, Wendell Berry, and Ray Bradbury occasionally use prose language so melodic and so full of imagery, a reader can feel some of the same sensations she might feel while reading poetry. But their writing still occurs in paragraphs, not in poetic lines, so technically, it’s still prose.
When we say this rendering of The Faerie Queene is prose, we mean that we have taken sentences in which subjects, verbs, and modifiers were originally crafted to fit a particular rhyme scheme, and we’ve rearranged those same ideas into simple language patterns you will more easily recognize. Sometimes we don’t change many words, we just move the existing words into a more common order, and the meaning immediateily pops out with more clarity. This re-organization can be particularly helpful with Spenser because the stanza form he used, and the difficult rhyme scheme that he adopted, compelled him to do a bit more gymnastics than the average poet.
Some things are lost through this method, which we explain in our introduction to Book One. So, we do hope that after you learn to read Spenser through our books, you will charge into an annotated version of the original text. Still, there is tremendous benefit to being walked through his stories gently at a first pass—which is why this endeavor exists.
TODAY’S EPIC CONVENTION: INVOCATION TO THE MUSE
Now, on to the epic convention of the day: Invocation to the Muse. When I was in undergraduate school, my friends and I would spend late nights at a truck stop/diner called Grandma’s Kitchen. We’d drink too many pots of cheap coffee and eat hashbrowns slathered in ketchup while splitting up parts of Shakespearean plays to read aloud. Inevitably, we’d get caught chasing a few rabbit trails—including the distortion of very serious literary conventions.
On one of my favorite nights, we abandoned our official assignment to write a faux-epic drama. We included ridiculous characters like Spec-ta-cles (Spek-ta-klees) a “god of vision”--and instead of an Invocation to the Muse, we inserted an Invitation to the Moose. At this point in the play, a burly poet lumberjack stood on stage and shouted, “Oh, Great Moose! Come visit us with your wisdom! Grant us the words we need to develop our epic masterpiece! “ We were slap-happy, and this amused us probably more than it should have.
Just by reading that story, you’ve gained some sort of understanding about how an Invocation of a Muse works in ancient literature. This convention allows a poet to appeal to some sort of unseen, inspirational figure to guide the creation of the poem or play. It allows the poet to appear a bit humble, claiming the inability to create entirely on his own. At the same time, however, it elevates the poet. For the authority of the mythical inspirational figure is adopted in the work, and the poet is seen as a conduit for this wisdom and power.
Rhetorically speaking, an Invocation to a Muse is a type of “apostrophe.” An apostrophe is a rhetorical device in which the flow of events pauses as the speaker appeals to a non-living or absent entity. If you’re familiar with the play Hamlet, the moment in which dead Yorick’s skull is held up while the man Yorick is addressed is an apostrophe.
A more modern example might occur if your 5G is down, so you yell into the cyber silence, “Verizon, why do you never work in these mountains!” Or, you could hold up a Christmas ornament made by a deceased grandmother and say, “Granny, I miss you so much! I wish you were still here.” If I remember correctly, there's a touch of Invocation to the Muse in Charlie Brown's address of The Great Pumpkin, as well. (I'll have to check to make sure. It's been too long.)
Anyway, in an Invocation to a Muse, an invisible force is addressed. This often occurs at the beginning of an epic, though it can also take place within the text, particulary at the start of a new canto. So keep your eyes peeled as you read Spenser. You’ll find this convention several places in The Faerie Queene.
SOCIAL MEDIA SAMPLE POSTS
Before I close, I promised to include some potential social media posts. Thanks to everyone who is willing to spread the word. When I've posted, I’ve been able to include URLs everywhere but Instagram, where I think it has to go in the bio? But a friend of mine in tech suggests sticking the URL in a comment for the sake of algorithms.
Reddit is new for me as a contributor, though I've read it for years. It feels like the big boss, with more rules and snags than anything I've ever encountered online. So, if any of you are Reddit Jedi masters who know the way through this forest, you'll have my big-big thanks if you'd use your skills to spread the word there.
Thanks to all who are making this happen. It's so moving to basically sit in a library alone for almost four years studying and crafting, and then to feel the rally of so many fellows at the end of that journey. I'm feeling a little like Frodo finally home.
I have tried to read 1590’s The Faerie Queene several time, but the language was just too difficult. So, I can’t wait to get my hands on this new prose version, and I’m helping Kickstart it here. Illustrations by Justin Gerard look amazing, and the swag is great. There's even a sword! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/skyturtlepress/edmund-spensers-the-faerie-queene-a-prose-rendering #thefaeriequeene #justingerardillustration #skyturtle press #renaissance #literature Tag @skyturtlepress @justingerardillustration
The Faerie Queene Update: Epic Conventions (Part One)
almost 2 years ago
– Wed, Jan 18, 2023 at 05:39:28 AM
And so it begins . . . day three. We are about $3600 away from our next stretch goal of $50,000! Hurrah! At that point, every investor who has purchased a mailed item will receive a set three beautiful quote/art prints by Justin Gerard. Thank you so much for continuing to share this project in your groups!
Today I’m going to share a little about epic conventions found in The Faerie Queene. If the term “epic conventions” sounds intimidating, don’t worry; these are basically just story patterns, common tools writers used to organize their long adventure tales.
(NOTE:As always, these bonus descriptions of Spenser's technique and content are optional reading. Some people enjoy learning details about story mechanics; others just want access to the tale itself. Don’t feel badly if you’re in the second group. The Faerie Queene will be fun for you either way. But if you love knowing the backstory behind a story, the rest of this post might be enjoyable for you.)
We still use artistic patterns, even if we don’t use formal conventions. Instinctively, we know when a jump scare is about to take place in a movie. Though a song is new to us, we can usually tell when the chorus is about to begin. The bookish girl is probably going to have a Cinderella moment. And if a story makes you fall in love with a dog, friends, don’t get too attached to him.
Modern culture delights in disrupting and defying such artistic patterns. Shrek is funny because the prince is bad, the ogre is good, and the big Cinderella moment is, well, unconventional. Going back several hundred years, however, we also find authors like Cervantes and Edmund Spenser openly twisting conventions for the sake of humor. Those authors were bright enough to tease and shock readers by upending expectations, just as they were able to use patterns in all seriousness to maximize their narrative power.
Edmund Spenser wrote The Faerie Queene attempting to give Britain an epic poem equal to the Iliad, The Odyssey, or The Aeneid. There are all sorts of reasons why his moment called for the development of a grand national tale. Perhaps we can explore those in another post later. But in terms of literature, at the time in which Spenser was writing, most of the glories of British poetry, prose, and drama had not been written yet.
Chaucer had accomplished a great deal in the 1300’s. But the first three books of The Faerie Queene were published in 1590, and Shakespeare’s first play was written and performed somewhere between 1589 and 1591. Get this: Hamlet wouldn’t be written until nine to eleven years after the first three books of The Faerie Queene were published. Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus wouldn’t be published until 1604. Paradise Lost wouldn’t hit until 1667. And of course, the well-known Romantic poets like Wordsworth and Coleridge weren’t going to show up for another two hundred years after Spenser. So even though many of us consider Britain the birthplace of poetry in the English language, Spenser’s world had almost none of this glory behind him.
The events represented above are purely fictional and are performed by unpaid meme faces. Do not attempt.
However, the Greek and Roman epics were esteemed in the late 1590's. So, to elevate his homeland and honor his queen, Spenser chose a model that borrowed many conventions from that genre.
I’m hoping to keep these posts short enough to read in just a few minutes, so today I’m just going to offer a partial list of conventions used in epic literature. Then, I’ll zoom in on one convention found commonly in The Faerie Queene. Tomorrow, you’ll have all this background behind you, so I’ll jump right in to explaining two more conventions you’ll find in Spenser’s work.
(If you are a great scholar, please know that I’m trying to keep these updates accessible to teenagers who are encountering epics for the first time. If you are a teenager, please know there are wise scholars waiting to blow your mind with more about this poem and the epics upon which Spenser leaned to create it.)
“Bears. Beets. Battlestar Galactica.” When Jim makes this joke in the office, he’s giving a nod to an old rhetorical technique called enumeration. Enumeration is employed to make a story feel grander and more powerful by the inclusion of lists.
We don’t use enumeration much in story these days. In general, modern writers are urged to be devastatingly efficient with their words, stripping away every bit that doesn’t directly enhance a main idea. But for thousands of years, humans approached story a bit differently. Genealogies, catalogues, and lists were included to help orient readers within the vastness of time and space, and also to expand a created world within a story.
We still use a form of this technique in movies and television, occasionally. When the camera pans over a wide army of orcs, it’s cataloguing the scope of a battle. When Avatar: The Last Airbender shows us the generations preceding Aang, we understand where he falls in time.
In The Faerie Queene, you will find three sizeable genealogy sections as well as a few catalogues/lists. For example, in the very first episode of the poem, Red Cross Knight, Una, and their dwarf companion enter a dangerous wood, and Spenser takes the time to name every sort of tree they encounter. Here’s an excerpt from my rendering:
". . . the sailing pine, the cedar proud and tall, the vine-prop elm, the never-dry poplar, the oak for building (king of all forests), the aspen for staves, and the cypress for funerals. There were also the laurel (reward of mighty conquerors and sage poets), the weeping fir, the willow worn by heartbroken lovers, the obedient yew that yields to a bender, the birch for arrows, the sallow for the mill, the myrrh that bleeds sweet in its bitter wound, the warlike beech, the ash used for nothing ill, the fruitful olive, the plantain round, the holm-oak, and the maple that is beautiful on the outside but unsound within. Oh, trees, and trees, and more trees all around! Delight led the travelers deep into the wood, though they did not realize they were losing their way until the blustery storm was overblown."
Such a list accomplishes multiple things at once. As a form, it elevates The Faerie Queene, connecting it with “Ennius and Virgil and Ovid, Seneca and Lucan and Claudian and Statius, Boccaccio and Chaucer and Sannazaro and Tasso” (Tonkin 1989:58). It also assigns meaning to the trees, making the wood feel like a place pregnant with stories of their own. Finally, it impacts our emotional state as readers. Mark Rose notes the strategic, almost hypnotic effect of this particular list: “as the catalogue of woody virtues continues, we too get caught up in the song until, like the knight and lady, we can no longer see the forest for the trees: we too are becoming lost in nature” (1975:7).
To help modern readers realize when an epic genealogy, list, or catalogue is coming, I marked these with italics in my rendering of The Faerie Queene. If you enjoy such expansiveness, you can read those sections. If you simply want to skim these technicalities and get back to the plot, that’s also an option. However, I do think understanding what such lists are and why authors included them can help us process such elements when we encounter them.
Rose, Mark. Spenser’s Art: A Companion to Book One of The Faerie Queene. Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press, 1975.
Tonkin, Humphrey. The Faerie Queene. London: Unwin Hyman, 1989.
Faerie Queene Update: An Introduction to Spenser's Duality and Pageantry
almost 2 years ago
– Tue, Jan 17, 2023 at 07:23:00 AM
We're nearly to $40,000! Amazing work, folks. Thank you for spreading word about this endeavor to your friends on social media! If we make it to $50,000, every backer who has purchased a mailed item will receive three gorgeous prints by Justin Gerard. I do hope we reach this goal, because the set would be beautiful hanging together.
As this campaign progresses, I’ll occasionally offer brief reflections to prepare you for reading The Faerie Queene. These posts aren’t necessary reading, but they might help you appreciate the magnitude of Spenser's work as you wait to receive your books. Today, we will learn a little bit about the poem’s duality and pageantry. I’ll be citing Alastair Fowler’s collection of C.S. Lewis’s writings on Spenser, one of my favorite books about the poem.
DUALITY
Lewis was quite a scholar, yet after forty years of reading The Faerie Queene, he had grown to consider it, “perhaps the most difficult poem in English” (Lewis 2013:1). While you and I might find archaic language our biggest barrier to comprehending Spenser, Lewis was actually referring to another sort of difficulty: the poem’s ability to work on two levels simultaneously.
Duality has actually become one of my favorite things about The Faerie Queene. This work can can thrill readers at a simple story level, inviting a childish delight as we read. Yet, the plot also runs so deeply, those who revisit the work discover more at every pass. Have you noticed that Narnia has grown with you as you age? Do you ever wonder how you missed certain connections as an eight-year-old? Expect the same perpetual discovery from The Faerie Queene, for Lewis learned this (in part) from Spenser.
The first time you explore The Faerie Queene, I suggest cozying up with a cup of tea and reading for adventure’s sake. Feel the thrill of Faerie Land. Let your mind’s eye take you on a marvelous journey. Your subsequent readings, however, may move you at new levels. You may begin to find some of your own questions and struggles in shadows that pass through the book. You may also find companionship, hope, direction.
PAGEANTRY
If you’re familiar with Tolkien’s criticism of allegorical methods, perhaps you’ll cringe a bit at the thought of symbolism in The Faerie Queene. When we hear "symbol," it's easy to imagine heavy-handed, didactic 1:1 connections that leave little to the imagination. This was certainly a fear of mine before I read The Faerie Queene for the first time.
Yet, Spenser was too creative and too emotionally astute to make such mistakes often. I have left long thoughts about Spenser's use of allegory in the extended Introduction to Book One (found on our website), so I won’t go into all that here. But I would like to explain a single allegorical method that you will find repeatedly in Spenser’s epic poem: pageantry. This sort of pageant was comprised of “…a procession or group of symbolical figures in symbolical costume, often in symbolic surroundings.” (Lewis 2013:3)
Perhaps a more modern example will help clarify this concept? When my daughter was in elementary school, she participated in a musical in which many students took on the role of a celestial body. One by one, the students would appear on stage and explain how their planet, moon, or star worked. So badly, my girl wanted to be the moon instead of Copernicus. Yet, she was far luckier than her classmate Levi who was chosen to play the sun. Before a gymnasium full of his peers, he had to proclaim boldly that he was “just a big ball of gas.” You can imagine the response. We laughed about it with him for years. Funny and simple as it was, this musical actually borrowed a bit from historical pageantry; very quickly, viewers realized that we were about to encounter a series of figures, so we settled into that expectation as we watched.
Justin Gerard's illustration of one pageant in The Faerie Queene
Such progressions aren’t quite as common these days as they were in the Elizabethan era. We do find occasional representative figures like “Mayhem” from those insurance commercials. But rarely do we experience a parade of symbolic characters telling a unified story. In this way, our culture is quite different from the Elizabethan era. For as Lewis states, “Spenser lived in a society that had inherited this whole complex of iconographical traditions” (Lewis 2013:9-10). Elizabethans were culturally trained to recognize such series and settle down to hear the story of a given progression, like parents listening to my daughter’s elementary school play.
You’ll encounter your first mini “pageant” in the opening scene of Book One: a knight, a lady, a dwarf, a donkey, a lamb. Spenser introduces these figures so naturally and so gently, it’s easy to miss the pageantry of their entrance. Later in the book, however, you will find more overt pageants. Caricatures will appear in a series, as will fearsome threats, manifestations of goodness, and dreamlike horrific events haunted by sequential characters. By the time you finish Book Six, you’ll have a richer understanding of how the pageant works and why it was so often employed in archaic storytelling. If you're a writer, perhaps this knowledge will inspire a revival of some sort of pagentry in a work of your own?
Lewis, C. S. Spenser’s Images of Life. Edited by Alastair Fowler. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,. 1967.
Duessa Vanquished! (and Stretch Goal Two Unlocked)
almost 2 years ago
– Mon, Jan 16, 2023 at 03:43:05 PM
Apologies, folks, we now have the Duessa situation under control.
Our early attempts to dissolve her by dumping a bucket of water over her head proved unsuccessful; British enchantresses must work a bit differently. (Should we have tried cups of tea?) However, by feats of derring-do, we have vanquished her at last.
From this point forward in the campaign, we advise you to be wary. Giants, dragons, horrid beasts, and jealous women lurk in these enchanted woods and could appear at any moment.
Do not fear, but be alert. And raise a toast to meeting our second stretch goal!A free 8x10" print of a Justin Gerard Faerie Queene illustration will now be included with all mailed levels! Hurrah!
Should we reach the $50,000 mark, all mailed levels will receive a complete set of three of 8x10" Justin Gerard prints. So, please resist any opposition you receive from dark and dastardly characters attempting to prevent you from spreading the word.
