VII: be a man

Canto VII

An introductory message from Ariosto: Are you an unimaginative homebody who thinks crazy adventures in far-away places are implausible? Then this story is not for you. It's for people like my man Ippolito, who can really understand it.

So, Ruggiero has arrived, ready for a fight, at the bridge occupied by Erifilla. Except for being a “monstrous giantess,” she's not described physically, but all of her accessories are impressive: she's got multicolored jeweled armor, a shield with the image of a poisonous toad, and a “sandy-coloured surcoat, like the frocks / Which prelates wear at court”; and she rides on a wolf the size of an ox. None of it helps much: Ruggiero immediately hits her so hard that she flies off the wolf and lands six yards away. He's ready to kill her, but the unicorn-riding damsels from the golden city show up and tell him to let her be. It doesn't occur to Ruggiero that this was a suspiciously easy quest.

They ride together through the woods until they get to the most beautiful palace in the world, and here's Alcina, the most beautiful woman in the world. Just as the palace is described as being not only fancy but full of very classy people, Alcina isn't some sleazy seductress, she's an ideal beauty with subtle charms:

Beneath two finely pencilled eyebrows, dark
As are the brilliant eyes they frame, her glance,
Compassionate, will lingeringly mark
The target where Love's arrows, not by chance,
Will accurately strike, until the spark
Becomes a flame …

Still, Ariosto doesn't beat around the bush here: she is also hotness incarnate.

Two ivory breasts, firm as young fruit, below
Her bodice move, as when soft breezes pull
The waters at the margin to and fro.
Her other parts would be invisible
Even to Argos with his hundred eyes,
But from the rest their beauty we surmise.

Ruggerio likes what he sees and doesn't put up a struggle at all. He remembers Astolfo telling him about her evil ways, but he decides that that story was obviously bogus and that if she did turn Astolfo into a tree, it was probably for some good reason. Lest we think Ruggiero was too easy, Ariosto tells us that we shouldn't blame him, because it's magic and there's really no way to fight it. That's what they all say.

The next 14 verses describe the very nice place where Ruggiero now lives— the golden city from the last canto, apparently not the same place as this, was just a warmup— and what a good time he has there. Whereas the other magic leisure castle he was trapped in before (Canto IV) sounded like a pleasant but limited and repetitive place in a sort of Hotel California way, this one sounds a lot more like somewhere you'd want to spend a lot of time on purpose. It's teeming with cool people enjoying food, drink, music, poetry, stories, party games, gardens, hunting, fishing, and sex— especially sex between Ruggiero and Alcina. Although these scenes are less physically explicit than the earlier descriptions of Alcina's eyes/breasts/etc., they are still very, very steamy, thanks to the lengthy buildup in which Ariosto describes how Ruggiero waits up every night listening as she walks toward his room in a transparent silk slip, which she then removes, and... we must imagine the rest, but we do know that “No lack of pleasure causes them distress” and that they're changing their clothes two or three times a day.

Of course, this is not what he's supposed to be doing. For one thing, the war is going on without him— although Ariosto's brief reference to this is slightly confusing, since Ruggiero is fighting on the “wrong” side and would only cause more problems for our other heroes if he were back in France. But we don't have to think about that at the moment, we can just root for Bradamante to get him back.

Bradamante has been looking everywhere, including in the Saracen camps, where she sneaks in with her invisibility ring and then convinces the soldiers that she's one of them; but no luck. Finally it occurs to her to go back to Merlin's cave and ask the sorceress Melissa, who seems to know everything. Sure enough, Melissa is fully aware of Ruggiero's enjoyable detour— which is now described a little more judgmentally:

So now he wastes the flower of his youth,
And in unending idleness this knight
Would have consumed his soul and body, both;
And that which lingers when the rest is quite
Defunct ….
Would have dispersed upon the wind like fume.

Melissa decides to rescue him, although she knows he won't like it— she compares her role to a doctor who uses “poison, knives and cautery” for the patient's own good. By contrast, we're reminded that the other magician, Atlante, also thought he was doing what was best for Ruggiero, but was “blind with love” and didn't want to allow him to suffer at all. In fact, we now learn, Atlante is actually responsible (presumably by controlling the hippogriff) for Ruggiero ending up on Alcina's island.

Unlike Canto III in which she sent Bradamante off with instructions, Melissa will take care of this mission herself; not only is she able to leave the cave, she can also conjure up a nifty high-speed horse (all black except for one red foot). She borrows the magic ring from Bradamante and leaves her to wait in Provence while she zooms off to the island. There, she changes from her usual form (a plainly dressed woman with bare feet and messy hair) into an illusion of Atlante, with some great visual touches:

Over a palm in stature first she grew ….
Guessing Atlante's size, she chose the norm
Of all the necromancers whom she knew.
That done, she draped a beard about her chin,
Furrowed her brow and wrinkled all her skin.

Why Atlante? Apparently, although the old magician did kidnap Ruggiero earlier, he'd known him since childhood and the knight still respects him— at least that's how this passage reads to me, as Melissa-as-Atlante berates Ruggiero for having abandoned his past badassery:

Was it for this on marrow-bones I fed you
Of lions and of bears? And, as a child,
Was it for this along ravines I led you,
Hunting for snakes to strangle in the wild?

Ruggiero certainly isn't eating any lions now; he's wearing gilded silk, scented hair oil, and jewelry. Although this is described as being the result of Alcina's magic spells, it seems more like a parody of a manly man's worst nightmare: getting so far gone over a girl that you let her dress you! This fits with the locker-room tone that pseudo-Atlante adopts when describing Alcina: “she leads you by the nose …. She whom you make a queen, what has she got / More than a thousand whores, that you're enraptured?” However, Melissa also throws in a reference to the prophecy about Ruggiero's noble descendants (although this is the first he's heard of it): he's got to get back together with Bradamante so that, among others, the awesome Ippolito and his brother can be born (“For in their valour they will be sublime”).

This rant is persuasive enough that Ruggiero is willing to try on the protective ring that Melissa/Atlante offers him, which breaks the spell. Melissa resumes her real form, and so does Alcina— it turns out that all those descriptions of her eyes etc. were false, and she's really an old hag. How grossed out and embarrassed is Ruggiero now? This much:

… as a boy who hides a fruit away
And then goes off, forgetting all about it,
On finding it long afterwards one day
Within a drawer or cupboard where he'd put it,
Astonished at the sight of such decay,
Is more than willing now to do without it ….

In preparing to escape, Ruggiero shows a little more subtlety and patience than he has previously: he doesn't let on that he's seen through the spell, he just finds excuses to get his armor out of storage and to obtain a horse— he leaves the hippogriff behind for now— and sneaks off to a side gate, where he finally releases all the violence he's been saving up as he annihilates a bunch of guards within three lines. He gallops off toward freedom and responsibility, probably still wearing his scented hair oil.

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.