The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser: Free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB Download
The Faerie Queene
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The opening of Book I
Lo! I, the man whose Muse whylome did maske, As time her taught, in lowly Shephards weeds, Am now enforst, a farre unfitter taske, For trumpets sterne to chaunge mine Oaten reeds, And sing of Knights and Ladies gentle deeds; Whose praises having slept in silence long, Me, all too meane, the sacred Muse areeds To blazon broade emongst her learned throng: Fierce warres and faithful loves shall moralize my song.
Helpe then, O holy Virgin! chiefe of nyne, Thy weaker Novice to performe thy will; Lay forth out of thine everlasting scryne The antique rolles, which there lye hidden still, Of Faerie knights, and fayrest Tanaquill, Whom that most noble Briton Prince so long Sought through the world, and suffered so much ill, That I must rue his undeserved wrong: O, helpe thou my weake wit, and sharpen my dull tong!
And thou, most dreaded impe of highest Jove, Faire Venus sonne, that with thy cruell dart At that good knight so cunningly didst rove, That glorious fire it kindled in his hart; Lay now thy deadly Heben bowe apart, And with thy mother mylde come to myne ayde; Come, both; and with you bring triumphant Mart, In loves and gentle jollities arraid, After his murdrous spoyles and bloudie rage allayd.
It begins with the first three stanzas, as the Redcrosse knight rides out in arms already dented by blows he has not yet received:
Download Full EPUB1590 & 1596
~280,000 words (estimated)
Approx. 15.5 hours
Standalone
Faerie Land, an allegorical England under Gloriana
Six books and a fragment, grouped here into eight parts
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1.25 MB (EPUB) · 2.21 MB (AZW3) · 1.67 MB (KEPUB)
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Standard Ebooks · Project Gutenberg #6930
The Faerie Queene is Edmund Spenser’s allegorical poem in six books, published in 1590 and 1596, with a fragment of a seventh printed after his death. Each book follows one knight who carries one virtue: Holiness, Temperance, Chastity, Friendship, Justice, Courtesy. Prince Arthur, in love with the Faerie Queene, crosses all six and rescues the knight in trouble; behind the queen of Faerie Land stands Queen Elizabeth, and behind the knights stand the moral ideas the poem was written to teach.
It is also the great unfinished poem of the English Renaissance. Spenser planned twelve books of private virtue and more of public virtue, wrote six and part of a seventh, and explained in his letter to Raleigh that the general end of the book is to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline. The Faerie Queene came out in two instalments, three books in 1590 and six in 1596. The text is available via Project Gutenberg #6930 and Standard Ebooks.
The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser: Summary, Characters & Themes
This is a summary and analysis of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, the poem he published in two instalments and never finished. The first three books appeared in 1590; the edition of 1596 added Books IV to VI and revised what came before. Each book puts a knight on the road with a virtue to carry: the Redcrosse knight is Holiness, Guyon is Temperance, Britomart is Chastity, Cambel and Triamond are Friendship, Artegall is Justice, Calidore is Courtesy. Arthur rides through all of them, and every lady, giant, hermit and dragon he passes is an idea with an English face.
Nothing in the poem is quite what it looks like. Spenser writes in the nine-line stanza that bears his name, eight lines of iambic pentameter closing on a longer alexandrine, and in a deliberately archaic English thick with Chaucer’s words and with spellings a century out of use. The result is a landscape both familiar and estranged: a wandering wood, a house of Pride where the seven deadly sins sit as counsellors, a cave of Mammon, a bower of bliss that has to be pulled down, a dragon that takes three days to kill. The allegory works by doubling, so that Una is truth and the true church and a woman alone in a desert, and Duessa is falsehood and Rome and a witch’s daughter. A figure can be a person, a doctrine and a piece of contemporary politics in the same stanza, and Spenser rarely tells the reader which is which.
Edmund Spenser was born in London around 1552, went to Merchant Taylors’ School and Pembroke College, Cambridge, and spent most of his working life in Ireland as a colonial official at Kilcolman in Munster, on land confiscated after the Desmond rebellion. He published The Shepheardes Calender in 1579, knew Philip Sidney and Walter Raleigh, and crossed to London in 1589 with the first three books of his epic. In 1598 the plantation was overrun in Tyrone’s rebellion and Kilcolman was burned; he returned to London and died in 1599, and was buried in Westminster Abbey near Chaucer.
The poem is long, and its argument is not hidden, but it is a story first, and Book I can be read as one. A reader who wants the shape of the whole before the parts can begin there, with a knight who has never fought meeting a dragon, or with Book III, where Britomart carries a spear that no man can withstand. The world Spenser inherited is on this site in Le Morte d’Arthur, Malory’s prose romance of the Round Table, and in Beowulf, the oldest English poem of a hall and its monsters; The Odyssey gives the wandering hero Spenser names as one of his models, and Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, which he also names, is the romance he follows most closely.
The text here is complete: the dedications of 1590 and 1596, the seventeen dedicatory sonnets, the letter to Raleigh, all six books, and the Mutabilitie Cantos with the fragment marked Unperfite. It follows the Standard Ebooks edition, which was prepared from digital scans from the Internet Archive and keeps the spelling and punctuation of the early printed texts; Project Gutenberg #6930 holds the same poem. This particular ebook is based on digital scans from the Internet Archive.
Historical Context
Elizabeth was fifty-six when the first three books appeared in 1590, two years after the Armada, and the poem is loaded with her. The dedication calls her the most high, mighty and magnificent empress; the letter to Raleigh explains that in Gloriana he means glory in his general intention and the queen in his particular, and that her two bodies, the royal and the beautiful, are shadowed in Gloriana and Belphoebe. Raleigh, who had brought Spenser to court, was the poem’s sponsor, and the letter is dated 23 January 1589.
Ireland is the other country in the poem. Spenser held land at Kilcolman and served in the conquest and settlement of Munster, and his prose dialogue A View of the Present State of Ireland argues for a hard subjection of the native Irish. Book V comes closest to that experience, with its iron man Talus, who executes the judgements Artegall declares and cuts the hands off the lady Munera, and with its wars in a landscape of bogs, woods and ruined castles. Modern readers find the poem’s beauty and its violence hard to hold together; Spenser wrote both, and the poem does not apologise for the second.
The 1596 edition added three books and revised the first three, and the Mutabilitie Cantos were printed in 1609, ten years after the poet’s death. Spenser calls his method a continued allegory, or dark conceit, and the phrase admits how much work the reader is expected to do: the poem was written for a court that read allegory as a matter of course, in tapestries, pageants and sermons, but its meanings are not fixed by a key, and no contemporary gloss survives to tell us what every figure was meant to carry. The letter to Raleigh, with its account of the twelve planned books, is the only map the poem has, and this edition prints it in full.
Key Characters & Literary Archetypes
- Redcrosse: The hero of Book I, a knight of the Faerie court who rides out in the armour of a Christian man, fresh from the armoury and not yet tested. He is George of England before he has earned the name: he kills the monster Errour in a wood, is separated from Una by the enchanter Archimago, takes up with the false Duessa, is taken prisoner by the giant Orgoglio, and is brought to the house of Holiness to learn repentance. He fights the dragon for three days, and the book ends with his betrothal to Una and his promise to serve Gloriana six years more.
- Una: Daughter of an emperor and the lady of Book I, dressed in black and riding a white ass with a lamb beside her; her name means one, and she is truth, the true church, and the woman the knight fails. She is separated from Redcrosse by a false dream, wanders in the wilderness with a lion that guards her, is nearly taken by Sansloy and is saved by satyrs, and never stops looking for the man who abandoned her. At the end she is betrothed to him, and the book closes on her wedding rather than on his victory.
- Duessa: Falsehood with a beautiful face. She is first Fidessa, the lady Redcrosse believes after he has doubted Una, and she leads him to the house of Pride, to the fountain where he loses his strength, and finally to Orgoglio’s dungeon. When Arthur strips her in canto eight she is revealed as a witch’s daughter, half woman and half monster, with a fox’s tail and a seven-headed beast behind her. She is also, in the reading the poem invites, the Church of Rome and Mary Queen of Scots, and she reappears to accuse Redcrosse before the Faerie court.
- Britomart: The lady knight of Book III, chaste and armed, who carries the spear of Artegall and sees his face in the magic mirror of Merlin’s glass. She travels in search of a man she has never met, unhorses Guyon, endures the castle of Malecasta, hears Merlin prophesy the Tudor line, rescues Amoret from the house of Busyrane and its masque of Cupid, and in Book V crosses the country dressed as a man to free Artegall from Radigund’s Amazon rule. She is the poem’s argument that chastity is a form of strength, and the ancestress, in Merlin’s glass, of Elizabeth.
- Guyon: The knight of Temperance in Book II, travelling with an old Palmer who carries the staff of reason and with a horse that has to be kept in hand. He binds the madman Furor and his mother Occasion, resists the witch Phaedria’s idle island, walks through the cave of Mammon without touching the gold, faints from the ordeal, is robbed by the sons of Acrates and rescued by Arthur, and comes at last to the Bower of Bliss. He pulls the bower down, binds Acrasia, and sails away while Gryll, turned back into a hog, refuses to be a man again.
- Artegal: The knight of Justice in Book V, trained in the lore of law and sent to free Irena from the tyrant Grantorto. He travels with Talus, an iron man with a flail who carries out the sentences while Artegall gives them, and the pair cut a hard road through the book. He is beaten and imprisoned by the Amazon queen Radigund, an episode the poem treats as his one great defeat, and is freed by Britomart, who kills Radigund and restores the rule of men. He ends at the Faerie court, enduring the hags Envy and Detraction, and his story is the coldest in the poem.
Core Literary Themes
- Allegory and the dark conceit: Spenser called his poem a continued allegory, or dark conceit, and the phrase is a warning as well as a description. The figures mean more than one thing at once and do not hold still: Orgoglio is pride and a giant and, in the historical reading, Spain; the dragon is sin and a dragon; the house of Pride is a palace and a state of soul. The poem expects a reader who enjoys the story and looks for the second sense at the same time, and much of its difficulty, and most of its pleasure, lies in the fact that the two senses never quite separate.
- Holiness and the Reformation: Book I is a Protestant everyman’s progress. The knight’s armour comes from the epistle to the Ephesians, his fall and recovery follow the shape of repentance, and the house of Holiness, with its teachers Fidelia, Speranza and Charissa, instructs him in faith, hope and charity before the dragon can be faced. The poem’s enemy is Rome, seen in Duessa and in the beast she rides, and its hero becomes Saint George of England. Critics have mapped every episode onto Reformation controversy; the poem invites that, and the story survives the mapping.
- Chastity and the woman knight: Book III is the poem’s boldest experiment: a book of chastity whose hero is a woman in armour. Britomart is not a virgin in a garden but a knight who unseats men, and the book argues in its proem that women’s deeds have been written out of history by envious men. Chastity here means faithfulness in love rather than abstinence, and its symbols include the married love of the Garden of Adonis and the girdle of Florimell, which only a true wife can wear. Spenser offers the queen a mirror of her own rule in a woman’s body.
- Justice, empire and the Irish war: Book V is the book modern readers find hardest. Artegall restores a queen to her kingdom, punishes a tyrant and reforms a country by force, and Talus the iron man executes sentences that no mercy can reach. The poem’s justice is administrative and often bloody: hands are cut off, a castle is razed, a land is reduced to order. Spenser wrote as a planter in Munster, and the book’s confidence about conquest, and the unease that shows through it, is the most direct English poetic record of the Elizabethan conquest of Ireland.
- Mutability and the end of all things: The two cantos and the fragment of Mutabilitie stand outside the six books and change the poem’s scale. Change, a Titaness, claims the rule of the moon and then of all things, and the gods meet on Arlo Hill to hear her case; Nature, asked for judgement, rules that change is not a loss of being but its unfolding, and that all things return to their first estate. The fragment ends with the wish for rest, on the pillars of eternity, in the sight of the God of Sabaoth: the poem stops, unfinished, on the one argument that answers all its earlier virtues. It is the poem’s last word and its least finished one.
Why Download Our Custom E-Reader Edition of The Faerie Queene?
Because it is the poem in which English romance becomes a moral world, and it reads better than its reputation suggests. Six books, six knights, one dragon, one bower pulled down, a woman knight with a spear, a giant carrying a whole castle on his back: the adventures are vivid and the allegory does not stop them from being adventures. The text here is complete and unabridged, down to the canto arguments and the fragment marked Unperfite, and the Project Gutenberg #6930 transcription is there for anyone who wants to compare.
The files are built for reading something very long. Navigation runs by book and canto, so the six books can be entered one at a time, and the spelling of the early editions has been kept without the black-letter page images that make scanned copies hard on the eyes. The same file opens on a phone, a Kindle, a Kobo or an old e-reader, the type can be enlarged, and there is no account, no sample and no conversion step between you and the first stanza.
Read the chapters below as a map, not a substitute. The summaries stop short of the endings, because the endings of Books I and II are among the things that make the poem worth its length: a dragon killed on the third morning, a bower taken apart while its owner sleeps, a hog who prefers his sty. If you know the poem, the notes may help with the allegory; if you do not, let the first book do its work and keep the notes for later.
- Based on the Standard Ebooks Edition, via Standard Ebooks, whose text was prepared from digital scans from the Internet Archive and keeps the spelling and punctuation of the early printed editions.
- Complete text, six books and a fragment The 1590 and 1596 dedications, the dedicatory sonnets, the letter to Raleigh, all six books and the Mutabilitie Cantos, with nothing cut and nothing modernised except the encoding of the file.
- EPUB, AZW3 and KEPUB One download per format, so the poem opens on Kindle, Kobo, Apple Books and other readers without conversion, with book and canto navigation that still works on older devices.
- Free and DRM-free Public domain in the United States, with no account and no sample; download it once and it stays yours to move between devices and to read again.
- Le Morte d’Arthur — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
- Beowulf — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
- The Odyssey — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
Chapter summaries
The Faerie Queene has six books of twelve cantos, plus two cantos and a fragment of a seventh. The eight parts below follow the poem’s own divisions and are meant as a map of the journey rather than a replacement for it: each note covers one book or half a book, keeps the endings light and points to what the allegory is doing.
- Book I, cantos 1 to 6, Errour to the house of Pride: Redcrosse and Una ride out, and within a hundred lines the knight kills the monster Errour in a wood of error, a fight described with more disgust than glory. Archimago, a hermit who is not a hermit, sends a false dream and a false Una, and the knight abandons the lady he was sworn to. He takes up with Duessa, is shown the house of Pride and its seven counsellors, fights Sansjoy for the honour of his false lady, and the first half ends with Una alone and the true knight on the road to ruin.
- Book I, cantos 7 to 12, Orgoglio to the dragon: Duessa finds Redcrosse disarmed beside a fountain and leads him to the giant Orgoglio, who throws him in a dungeon. Una meets Prince Arthur, who kills the giant, strips Duessa and frees the knight, and Arthur tells the story of his dream of the Faerie Queene. The party meets Despair in a cave, and Una takes her knight to the house of Holiness, where he is taught repentance and shown the heavenly city. Then comes the dragon, three days of fighting, and a betrothal.
- Book II, the twelve cantos of Temperance: Guyon, with his Palmer, finds a dying lady and a babe whose hands stay bloody however often they are washed. He binds Furor and Occasion, passes the witch Phaedria’s idle island where pleasure and idleness keep their own calendar, and walks into the cave of Mammon, where the god of gold offers him the world and he takes nothing. Fainting, he is robbed by the sons of Acrates and rescued by Arthur; the house of Alma shows the body as a castle under siege, and the book ends by pulling down the Bower of Bliss. No knight in the poem is so careful, and none is so nearly undone.
- Book III, Chastity and the Britomart romance: The book opens with Britomart unhorsing Guyon, and spends its twelve cantos testing what chastity means. She sees Artegall’s face in Merlin’s mirror, hears the wizard prophesy the Tudor succession, and rides out to find a man she has never met. Around her the poem spins other loves: Florimell in flight, Belphoebe in the forest, Amoret in the house of Busyrane, the Garden of Adonis where all forms are made. The book ends with Britomart breaking the enchanter’s spell and leading Amoret out of the masque of Cupid.
- Book IV, the legend of Friendship: Friendship is the hardest virtue to make into a plot, and Book IV knots it into pairs. Scudamour and Blandamour fight over Amoret and the false Florimell; Cambell and Triamond fight over Canacee and are reconciled by Cambina’s cup; Britomart and Artegall meet and part. The middle of the book wanders in the Florimell story, lost and found again, and the whole concludes with the marriage of Florimell and Marinell, the sea-nymph’s son, in a canto of water pageantry and a wedding on the shore.
- Book V, the legend of Justice: Artegall, trained in the law, is sent to free Irena and destroy Grantorto, and travels with Talus, an iron man with a flail who executes without pity. He exposes Munera’s golden hands, kills the pagan Pollente at his bridge, judges between two brothers, and is then beaten by Radigund, the Amazon queen, and set to spin with her women. Britomart kills Radigund and frees him. The last cantos take in the trial of Duessa under Mercilla, the rescue of Belge, and the hags who accuse Artegall at the Faerie court.
- Book VI, the legend of Courtesy: Calidore is the most courteous knight, and the quest he is given is the strangest: to hunt the Blatant Beast, a monster of slander with a thousand tongues. He saves a lady from a discourteous knight, takes the young Tristram as squire, and fails his own quest for a while, falling in love with Pastorell among the shepherds and watching the Graces dance to Colin’s pipe. He finds Pastorell again among the brigands and brings the Beast to heel, and the last canto lets it break loose once more.
- Mutabilitie, the fragment of a seventh book: Two cantos and a fragment, printed in 1609. Mutability, daughter of the Titans, climbs to the moon and claims the empire of the changing world, then takes her case to the gods on Arlo Hill, where Nature sits to judge. Her long procession of the seasons and months is one of the great set pieces of the poem. Nature rules that change is the working of constancy, and the fragment breaks off in two stanzas of longing for rest, on the pillars of eternity, in the sight of the God of Sabaoth. No ending in the poem is more open.
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Part of: Poetry & Epics · Classic Fiction
