Orlando Innamorato - A Forgotten Classic

“Neglect of Italian romances robs us of a whole species of pleasure and narrows our very conception of literature. It is as if a man left out Homer, or Elizabethan drama, or the novel. For like these, the romantic epic of Italy is one of the great trophies of the European genius: a genuine kind, not to be replaced by any other, and illustrated by an extremely copious and brilliant production. It is one of the successes, the undisputed achievements.”— C. S. Lewis

“One’s first encounter with any of these epics can be somewhat jarring; they are far and away the most wildly farraginous and gloriously irresponsible masterpieces in Western literature. They are at once heroic, comic, allegorical, lyrical, satirical, fabulous, and (occasionally) dark; they move with alarming ease between the metaphysical and the ribald, the allegorical and the brutal, the spiritual and the grotesque. The Innamorato might almost seem formless but for the ingenuity with which Boiardo continually weaves the innumerable strands of his story together into ever more diverting designs. At any moment in the story, a paladin might find himself confronted by a giant Saracen astride a galloping giraffe, or trapped in an enchanted castle oblivious of his own name, or beset by an army of demons, or challenged by an ogre, or lost in a fairy otherworld full of the most exquisite enchantments, or at the mercy of a sorcerer. And Boiardo—even more than Ariosto—is so irrepressibly inventive a fabulist that one often has the feeling that, but for the author’s mortality, the story need never come to an end.” — David B. Hart