The Faerie Queene eBook

The Faerie Queene is Edmund Spenser's magnum opus, composed for Queen Elizabeth I. The epic poem is incomplete, as only six of the intended twelve books were published before his death. Despite that, it stands as one of the longest poems in the English language.

During its composition, Spenser invented a new type of verse form: the Spenserian stanza. The form consists of eight lines in iambic pentameter followed by a line in iambic hexameter, with the rhyme scheme ababbcbcc. He purposely included archaic language and spelling to make the work feel comparable to the Arthurian myths written during the Middle Ages.

Spenser used Aristotle's list of virtues as the foundation for his work. Each of the six books follows a different knight who symbolize a unique virtue: the Knight of the Redcross for Holiness, Guyon for Temperance, Britomartis for Chastity, Cambell and Telamond for Friendship, Artegall for Justice, and Calidore for Courtesy. Fragments of an unfinished seventh book-the "Cantos of Mutability"-would have centered on the virtue of Constancy. In a letter to Sir Walter Raleigh, Spenser reveals that King Arthur represents the virtue of Magnificence, "the perfection of all the rest."

The first book opens with the Redcross Knight on a quest ordered by Queen Gloriana to defeat a horrible dragon. Traveling with him is Lady Una and her dwarf servant, who are leading the knight to the land where the dragon dwells. A terrible storm forces the travelers to shelter in the nearest cave-and a monster's den.

The source for this public-domain ebook is Standard Ebooks (standardebooks.org). Ebooks from other sources often have typos, inconsistent spelling, missing accent marks, and missing punctuation. Ebooks from Standard Ebooks are proofread line by line against a scan of the original printed pages, then proofread again from cover to cover. They are also formatted and typeset following a professional-grade style manual, resulting in new editions supporting state-of-the-art ereader technology: automatic hyphenation, popup footnotes, complete and consistent metadata, high-resolution and scalable vector graphics, and ereader-compatible tables of contents. All of this makes the finished ebooks accurate, functional, and beautiful, a pleasure to read. (Waking Lion Press is not affiliated with or endorsed by Standard Ebooks.)