A loving travesty of The Faerie Queene.

*

With something of a reputation for starting wildly (over)ambitious creative projects, it should come as no surprise that I bear an enduring affection for gargantuan Renaissance larping poem, The Faerie Queene. Edmund Spenser’s epic comes in at six (and a bit books), 79 odd cantos, more than 4000 stanzas and some 48,000 lines… and was still unfinished. Spenser’s original plan called for another six books, for a total of twelve.*

While being driven slowly mad by my degree, I founded myself writing a Spenserian epic of my own. Ostensibly a travesty – “a literary burlesque of a serious work or subject characterised by grotesque or ludicrous incongruity of style, treatment or subject matter” – part of me thinks it’s too serious in its literary allusions to be a parody of anything but myself. If anything, it’s a love letter to my scuffed, postbox red, absurdly huge copy of The Faerie Queene, all the way down to the lines and lines of tiny, faux scholarly annotations.

Regardless, I’m quite fond of it really, and even a little proud of all those Spenserian stanzas. So here it is, tidied up, lightly edited and with the last few fragments strung together.

*Amusingly, the crowd power of Wikipedia can’t even finish the summary.

*

*