A Quest that begins in a Tavern...

[bellatrys]

...with a female Paladin disguised as a man, sent by the ghost of Merlin the magician, meeting up with a halfling Thief, both of them competing to rescue a mixed-race Warrior, who is also a descendant of Hector and Andromache of Troy (their son Astyanax was secretly saved and hidden from the Greeks along with Hector's sword, which is an Augmented

Comments

Yes, but Orlando was cracky when it was fresh

[bellatrys]

also much with the cliches, some of them he seems - operative word "seems" - to have introduced, but I'm more and more inclined to think he just popularized them, that they were already "out there" in late medieval pop culture and what he did was take ALL of them and throw them into this giant mulligan stew, with snappy writing and a lot of humour plus Teh Sexay (and a lot more equal-opportunity than many modern creators.) And somehow it was *exactly* what Western European consumers of adventure fic wanted, right then.

But basically what he's doing is taking the plotline that Boiardo concocted - and I am *finally* almost about to be able to get a copy of the unabridged Orlando Innamorato, at a bargain price, so I'll be able to see what he invented/changed in his fanfic/fixfic - which was already a head-on collision of the existing Charlemagnian legends with The Mysterious East and oodles of fantasy cliches like giants and magic rings and enchanted armour and sentient horses and teleportation spells - and dialed it up to 11.

And it was *very* postmodern - he's explicitly ObReffing classical mythology like mad even while he knocks off entire sequences out of the Greco-Roman canon. This kind of thing was already being done by Chaucer (q.v. the Knight's Tale) but it takes a special kind of l'audace to invoke Hercules and Hector and Astrea and Athena, and then redo the entire Perseus-saves-Andromeda sequence starring your own characters and setting it on the coast of Ireland instead. While the famous, ubiquitous medieval "ZOMG WHALE NOT ISLAND" story is just a throw-away aside in the middle of a complete and unhidden remake of the Circe sequence done up as a whacky sex comedy with lots of monsters. It's kind of the Barbarella-meets-eighties-Flash Gordon of chivalric romance - and I haven't even touched the business with all these knights running around in the forest like characters in a Marx Bros. movie, or making Saiyan-style leaps in full armor. It's basically the exact opposite of the elegant, refined, erudite, Humanist culture you read about in history books, and people then *loved* it, which itself says about the times that has gotten left out of the official version of The Renaissance. Renaissance Humanism on crack - and flying off the shelves.

Thus you get Spenser remaking it and trying to make it significantly less cracky (and succeeding) and much more unified (and succeeding) but losing a lot of the bizarro charm of it. And Tasso the same, trying to write stuff in the same vein but more serious and "high-minded" as well as mindful of the Aristotelian unities. (Oh hey! Remember so-and-so who we last saw shipwrecked in Scotland, hundreds of pages ago? Getting back to him now...) As much as Boiardo's original (which was itself remade in a less-cracky fashion a few decades after Ariosto's sequel came out) I'd love to find some contemporary critical responses to the Furioso, because it's so much not the old, quirky "Matter of France" type stories that it's so-loosely based on, and so much the anticipator of madcap fantasy/drama in English lit, especially Shakespeare, and Shakespeare's plays gave the Serious Literary Folks fits back when because *they* didn't follow the Establishment's rules for fiction, *either*.