VIII: can't stop, must stop

Canto VIII

Little life lessons as canto openers seem to be a recurring thing. In this case, the lesson we're told to take from Ruggiero's bamboozlement by Alcina is that there are a lot of fake-ass people out there— and not just the magic ones.

Now back to Ruggiero's escape, and one of the chasiest chase scenes that ever were chased. Ruggiero is riding on a black horse called Rabicano, whose former owner was none other than Astolfo the myrtle tree. He's away from the palace and heading into the woods when he runs past “a servant of the fay” (i.e. of Alcina), a nondescript man who's got a falcon, a dog, a horse, and a stick. The falcon goes shooting off after Ruggiero, followed by the horse, the dog, and the man, all running alarmingly fast. (The endnotes inform me that these four have allegorical meanings, representing “allurements of sensuality”; an odd choice of symbols if so.) Soon Ruggiero is having more trouble than he did with a whole mob of monsters:

The man, approaching, gives him a sharp blow.
The dog, in that same moment, bites his foot.
The horse, unbridled, likewise is not slow
To rear its mightily crupper and lash out,
Three times and more— a formidable foe.
The falcon swooping on him, follows suit …

Unlike the earlier fight where he thought it wouldn't be fair to use his magic shield, this time he decides to be practical and removes the curtain from the shield, putting the mini-mob to sleep with a blaze of light. (The man, the dog, and the horse just keel over, but the bird hilariously “in vain / Attempts to fly on wings that droop and fold.”)

Meanwhile Alcina is enraged, storming around and calling herself an idiot. She really isn't thinking very well, as she sends all of her troops out after Ruggiero (including some on ships, in case he's somehow managed to get across the water already); this leaves the city to Melissa, who quickly goes around restoring hundreds of people who had been turned into animals, vegetables, or minerals, or who were just in jail for whatever reason. And the last one is Astolfo! Thank goodness— he deserved a break.

Melissa carries Astolfo with her on her horse, heading for Logistilla's place, but first she stops to find a valuable item Alcina had stolen from him: a golden lance that can't miss. He won it from Argalìa. Argalìa who? It sounds like we're supposed to know him, so I presume this is another character from Orlando Innamorato. Yes: according to the index, he is actually Angelica's brother, and he is also the dead knight whose ghost criticized Ferràu in Canto I for taking his helmet. So quite a few of our protagonists are people Angelica has reason to be mad at.

Ruggiero's horse is good but not as good as Melissa's magic one, so he has to go the long way to Logistilla's domain, and it's through a terrible desert:

The near-by mountain wall in the sun's glare
Throws back a blaze of heat so furious,
It liquefies the sand and turns the air
To fiercer blast than a glass furnace-house.
All birds, in the rare shade, are silent there.
Only the cicadas' monotonous
Refrain, rising where desert plants abound,
Fills hills, dales, sky and sea with deafening sound.

I had to quote the whole verse because, damn, that is just amazing. Ariosto could've just given us a featureless landscape and gone on about how hot it is, but instead he drops in one feature, the mountain wall, just enough to give the place a physical identity; and then he tells us how hot it is, and there's the silence of the birds; and then when you're thinking about heat and silence there's incredibly loud cicada buzz everywhere. If you've ever heard a lot of this on a hot day, you know how it makes the heat even more actively miserable. I salute the translator for bringing in that sound dead last.

Slogging through “heat and thirst and pain” with no end in sight is as good a place as any to leave Ruggiero. So now we turn back to exotic but temperate Scotland, where Rinaldo is still hanging out with the king.

Now that the princess issue is resolved, Rinaldo remembers about the war he's supposed to be in, and tells the king that Charlemagne would like some troops from Scotland (there was no mention of this earlier, as he'd been sent specifically to England, but why not). The king instantly agrees, and says he'll put his son Zerbino in command as soon as he gets back from wherever. The king sees Rinaldo off at Berwick on the south shore of Scotland, and bursts into tears when that nice young man leaves. Finally Rinaldo arrives in London, asks the English for some troops as well, and gets them. And that's all that Rinaldo does in this canto.

How about some more of Angelica? She's been out of sight since the beginning of Canto II, when a helpful hermit used magic to get Rinaldo off her trail. Ariosto now picks up her story exactly where he left off, and it's much the same story: she has stalkers everywhere.

The nice old hermit is not so nice after all. Feeling a thrill in “the frigid marrow of his bones,” he starts trying to follow her on his decrepit donkey, but fails; so he resorts to magic again, conjuring a demon to possess Angelica's horse. As with his earlier use of a genie, it's not immediately clear what the plan is with this, since Angelica is still getting away. As she gets to the coast of Gascony, the demon sends the horse crazy and it swims out to sea. This horse (the one she's been on since the beginning, an unnamed palfrey) is a very good swimmer, and eventually Angelica is marooned at night on a distant rocky shore.

After having been in mostly constant headlong motion since the beginning, now she has nowhere to go. She's not doing anything at all:

She stood stock still; none any sign might trace,
Nor in her immobility remark
If she a woman were of flesh and bone,
Or else a painted image made of stone.
Bemused and motionless, on shifting sands …

She starts to speak, the first dialogue we've heard from her. She accuses Fortune of treating her badly, and she has a point: she's far away from home, her father the Great Khan and her brother Argalìa are dead, and so far nearly every man she's seen has pursued her with unchivalrous intent. She asks to be put out of her misery, say, by a wild animal. But instead, here's the hermit.

He's caught up to her, “By demons through untrodden paths conveyed,” six days ago— how long has she been stranded? Not recognizing him, she cries on his shoulder and tells him her story; he responds by groping her, and when she tries to push him away, he spritzes a sleeping potion in her eyes. She's unconscious and things are looking very bad. Fortunately, the hermit forgot he was impotent:

Years having undermined his aptitude,
The more he strives, the less he can make good.
Whatever methods he experiments,
His lazy courser simply will not jump ….
To sleep beside her, then, is less expense.

If only all rapists were as inept as this one and Sacripante. The hermit is about to get an even worse surprise. Here Ariosto makes an abrupt detour, to bring in some more mythology that will be part of the book's most famous scene.

It seems there is an island “Beyond Ireland, among the Hebrides” called Ebuda, where the king's daughter caught the lustful eye of Proteus, a sea god. Proteus raped her and gave her a child; that made her a pariah to the Ebudans, who killed her and the baby too. Proteus went wild and attacked the islanders with swarms of unspecified monsters, until they found a way to appease him: leave a young naked woman tied up on the shore once a day. They're basically the Skull Island tribe in King Kong. Proteus isn't interested in women as such any more, he just wants endless revenge, so he feeds them to one of his monsters (it's referred to as an orc, which seems to just mean “monster” in general and may be related to “orca”— not the gobliny creatures Tolkien used that name for). The islanders keep doing this every day, and when they're short of young women, they grab them from other towns. Ariosto sums it up by saying that life for women is even worse in Ebuda than it is in other parts of the world.

Angelica is now picked up by these miserable bad people; they take the hermit too, although they're not sure what to do with him. After some delays in which they keep putting other women in line ahead of her because she's just too beautiful, she's finally led off to the sacrificial post. And Ariosto is so overcome by horror (he says this story would disturb even snakes, tigers, and poisonous desert reptiles) that he has no choice but to leave off her story there— and switch to another character you may have wondered if you would ever hear of again:

Orlando! Yes, after seven and a half cantos, the title character of Orlando Furioso has appeared for the first time. This unstoppable warrior isn't involved in furious action, he isn't doing anything at all. He's just very nervous:

Orlando that same night lies wide awake,
His thoughts, distracted, rambling here, now there.
He tries to concentrate but cannot make
His troubled conscience settle anywhere,
As on the crystal surface of a lake
The trembling shafts of sunlight mirrored are …

He's thinking of course about Angelica. Orlando's obsession with Angelica drove the action of Orlando Innamorato and, even though she never returned his affection at all, he's convinced that everything would've been great if only he hadn't let her out of his sight. This is all conveyed directly in monologue, and the only other character whose thoughts we've heard like that was Angelica just a while back. Orlando's thoughts are just as flowery and self-pitying as hers, except that she was focused on her own real problems; Orlando is just driving himself nuts with what he claims is concern for her, but clearly it's something a bit creepier— his greatest fear is basically what if someone else took her virginity, so now I can't? If that happens, he'll kill himself.

He's not enjoying these thoughts. He can't sleep (there's a nice half-verse about how every other creature in the world manages to get to sleep somehow, except him) and then finally he sort of does, but he's dreaming a rather cinematic dream: he sees Angelica's shining face, there's a huge storm and everything's ripped apart and he can't find her anywhere. As he's searching he hears a voice: “Confirmed are all your fears!”

The nightmare flings him out of his anxiety trance and, as Angelica did in the beginning, he starts off in no particular direction on his horse (Brigliadoro). He goes incognito, and he's all in black, lest anyone mistake him for a happy knight.

Charlemagne is indescribably pissed to hear that his star warrior has snuck off at midnight— and to pursue the same woman that the emperor had been trying to keep out of his range! He's now a wanted man. The first knight on his trail is Brandimarte, Orlando's friend. All we know about this person so far is that he's got a sweet girlfriend named Fiordiligi who doesn't know that he's going to look for Orlando, because

he hoped within a day's
Duration to complete the task in hand.
Events detained him longer than he planned.

Fiordiligi waits a month; there's no news of Brandimarte; so she goes off looking.

Counting the characters we might reasonably expect to see again, we now have three on rescue missions, one lost in the desert, two on the verge of unknown action, one waiting patiently, one doing his job, and one about to be eaten alive. This was the longest canto since V, and about ten times more eventful than that one— things have shifted into higher gear lately, and with a great variety, like a bouquet of different kinds of suspense.

VI: don't be a tree like me

Canto VI

It's almost time to get back to Ruggiero's adventures, but we're not out of Scotland yet. The first fifth of the canto revisits the end of the Ginevra/Polinesso/Rinaldo story from a new point of view: the mystery knight who turns out to be Ariodante, Ginevra's sweetheart, not dead after all.

He did throw himself off a cliff into the sea, but then changed his mind about the suicide. After swimming to safety, naturally his first question was whether Ginevra cried about his death; when he learned that she did, he decided he might have been wrong about her. That meant he would have to fight his brother Lucranio, who brought the charges against Ginevra; Ariodante couldn't let anyone else take on that fight, because no one else is as good at fighting as he is. Fortunately it all worked out well.

After Ariodante has revealed himself, the king rewards him by giving him Ginevra's hand in marriage, and Polinesso's former title of Duke. But what about Dalinda, who helped in the evil plot? It's clear that she meant well, so no problem. Having had enough of Scotland and of men, she decides to become a nun in Denmark.

Now, enough of courtroom drama: Ruggiero is still being propelled through the sky on a hippogriff. He's already left Europe and is somewhere “over the forbidden seas,” three thousand miles away. (Of our three main characters so far, Bradamante is the only one who's still on the continent.) Finally the hippogriff decides to land in a very nice place:

Mid cultivated plains and rounded hils,
Lush meadows, shadowed banks and sparkling rills,
Welcoming groves of laurel, cool and soft,
Of palm, and myrtle, fragrant and most sweet ….
In myriad lovely forms which twine aloft
A leafy shelter from the summer's heat ….
And every creature frolics without risk.

Ruggiero leashes the hippogriff to one of the myrtle trees and takes a much needed rest, until he notices that the animal has started freaking out and pulling on the rope, causing so much distress to the tree that the tree moans, shrieks, and finally speaks.

Where another writer might have just said a voice came from the tree, Ariosto describes the voice in inventive detail, first saying that it's like the rushing of air through a hollow log that's on fire, and then that it's actually sap that flows through the tree's bark and is converted into sound. But Ruggiero isn't interested in how this works and, after a brief double-take, he's not even all that surprised; he just apologizes to the tree for tying the unruly hippogriff to it, and asks if he can do anything to help.

The tree introduces itself as Astolfo, a French knight who is another one of Orlando's cousins. Returning from a long ocean adventure, he and Rinaldo and some others had run across the mysterious Alcina, who was standing on the shore fishing without a hook or net— fish just offer themselves up to her. You might think that that's someone you should hesitate to approach, but Astolfo is drawn in by her “courteous manner and disarming speech,” and also because, as he now admits, he tends to do things without thinking.

Alcina isn't just any magician; she's one of King Arthur's half-sisters, the one you haven't heard of, since Ariosto invented her. She's a lot like her famous sister Morgana le Fey, who in this version of the myth is purely evil, but they've got a third sister who's purely good, Logistilla (also original to Ariosto).

Astolfo doesn't know any of this yet and he follows Alcina onto what he thinks is a small island, where she promises to show him a “fish menagerie” and also a siren. But the island is really a whale, and he's quickly carried away with Alcina. She wastes no time in finding “ways of consoling” him, and by the time they get to her castle, he's far gone:

Alcina in great bliss now held me in
Her toils, and with a love insatiate
She burned, and I enamored was no less ….
Naught can I do but on her beauty stare.

But after two months she meets someone else, gets bored with Astolfo, and turns him into a tree, as she's done with her last thousand lovers (except for a few who are now animals or streams). In case this cautionary tale wasn't clear, Astolfo spells it out for Ruggiero: do not date this woman— not only for your own sake, but also for the poor guy before you, who will get turned into a rock as soon as she sees your pretty face.

Ruggiero thinks this is a very sad story (especially because Astolfo, being a tree, can no longer do “noble deeds which for a knight win fame”), and he agrees that he should under no circumstances go anywhere near Alcina. He asks how to get to the domain of the good sister, Logistilla, and he sets off that way on foot along with the hippogriff.

It's a difficult hilly path, especially since he's within sight of the solid gold city where Alcina lives and it looks very inviting; this seems to be an allegory about self-restraint. He's making a good effort, until he's ambushed by a huge mob of diverse monsters, “female or male or both”:

Some, human downwards from the neck, were seen
With cat or ape-like heads to be ill sorted ….
Some old and slow, some young, with urchin grins,
Some naked, and some clad in furs or skins ….
The monster who was captain of this crew,
His belly swollen and his lips distended,
Upon a turtle rode ….
On this side and on that were ruffians who
With kind solicitude on him attended;
For he was drunk …

They're not well armed or armored but there are a lot of them, and Ruggiero is having difficulty killing them all. He's actually carrying the magic shield that came with the hippogriff, which could just render the whole crew unconscious, but he feels it would be unfair to use “the aid of fraud.” Fortunately for everyone, the monsters suddenly stand aside as two beautiful young women appear from the golden city, in high style— extremely well dressed and riding on unicorns. He forgets all about Alcina and, “with a rosy blush upon his face,” follows them inside.

The golden city, much like Atlante's steel castle, is a perfect oasis of gardens, games, love and leisure. The young people there are kept in a permanently moony state by arrows from swarms of little Cupids who flutter around in the treetops. (Ruggiero, ask yourself why there are so many trees.) But our hero doesn't intend to stay there; he just observes, and follows the two young women as they lead the hippogriff away and replace it with a cool new horse bedecked with jewels.

They claim to need his help. Outside the city there's a bridge guarded by a monstrous giant fanged woman, Erifilla, who prevents people from crossing the bridge and also raids the garden from time to time; some of the monsters Ruggiero has just fought were her children. The women leave it at that without actually asking Ruggiero to do anything in particular, but he gets the idea and agrees to help them out:

I wear this coat of mail, not for the sake
Of conquest or of plunder, but that I
May honorably serve the good and true,
And, most of all, fair damsels such as you.

I imagine that somewhere behind him, a tree is swearing.