Strategies for reading Spenser's Faerie Queene

In my last post I described how I prepared to read aloud Spenser’s Faerie Queene to my children. It took some time, but it didn’t cost me any money at all, as the high quality, literary retellings for children that I used were written over a century ago and are available for free on the internet.

In this post, I’ll describe how I read the whole thing aloud over the course of two years. It took us that long partly because since we’d never read the longer children’s versions before, we were reading them before reading each book of Spenser. Subsequent readings have taken us a little over a year, reading two or three cantos a week during our school year.  

But before that I want to mention briefly how I first tried and failed to read The Faerie Queene so that you can avoid those pitfalls.

When I first started trying to read FQ, the only prior knowledge of the story I had was that “Saint George and the Dragon” was a part of it. I was intimidated by the poem, so I got an edition of Book I that had modernized spellings, and some modernized words, and included lots of footnotes and sidebars that were meant to be helpful. The biggest mistake I made was stopping to read all the footnotes and sidebars. This interrupted the flow of the story and took so much time that each time I started reading it I only made it through a few stanzas before I was too tired to carry on. By doing it this way, I lost the flow of the story so badly that I could hardly remember from one day to the next what I had read before.

Occasionally the beauty of the language caught my attention, but mostly it was unpleasant work. I don’t remember how long I struggled though it like this before I finally quit, thinking I just wasn’t capable of understanding it.

It was after that failure that I read what C.S. Lewis said about the story in various places. He said that up until the early 20th century, children’s versions of the story were pretty common, and he made it sound like something a regular person could read with pleasure—like it didn’t require any special training or knowledge, so I started over with my children, as I described last time, reading children’s versions.

This time, when it was time to read Spenser Himself, instead of reading from my modernized and annotated version, I read aloud from the fat Penguin book. This edition has a little commentary and plenty of notes explaining unfamiliar words, but they’re all located in the back of the book instead of cluttering up the pages of the text.

 

The method

Two or three times a week, during our Morning Time, I’d read aloud an entire canto, pausing occasionally to let the children narrate. Reading this much at one go is essential to the experience. Spenser’s poetry isn’t the kind where you ought to linger over individual lines or words, as you might do with Shakespeare or Donne. It is poetry, written with a very exacting meter and rhyme scheme, but the words aren’t the point—the images and the mood are. To enter this story, we must not only “surrender ourselves with childlike attention to the mood of the story,” but we must read it like Spenser’s original audience, “an audience who have settled down to hear a long story and do not much want to savour each line as a separate work of art.”

 

Preparation

The one thing I did in the way of preparation was to look over the commentary and explanatory notes in the back of the book the night before I planned to read the canto to my children. If there were any unfamiliar words, I’d make a brief entry in the margin of the text, so that I would know what the words of the text meant. In this way I could read the whole line with understanding.

Sometimes there were particular words or names or literary allusions that were going to come up in the canto that I felt my kids needed to be acquainted with before they met them in the story. In this case I’d briefly say something before we started the canto.

On very rare occasions, while I was reading I substituted the translation for the original word. I did this when the original word might cause misunderstanding, but wasn’t the kind of word I wanted to spend any teaching time on.

 

Demonstration

Since all of this is easier done than said (heh) I’m going to share a recording of myself reading the first three stanzas of Book I, Canto 1. This way I’ll be able to show you several different things. Here’s the text, with my own marginal notes added (based on the notes from the back of my Penguin edition.

 

The first thing you’ll notice from this image is the crazy spellings, and not just words like “mightie” and “deepe.” Those are easy enough to figure out. The hard ones are words like siluer/silver, euer/ever, Vpon/Upon, and iolly/jolly. You’ll get used to it in time, I promise! The U/V swap happens often enough that you’ll probably have no trouble within just a few stanzas. The I/J swap takes longer to get the hang of because it doesn’t happen as often. It really is a learning curve, but stick with it! Before too long you’ll feel like you’re mastering a new language (and really, you are—Early Modern English isn’t quite the same thing as Present Day English).

 

Kelly Cumbee · Faerie Queene I.1.1 - 3

Now you’ll notice that I’m pronouncing the words in my everyday read-aloud voice, not trying to recreate Elizabethan English or even stick to Spenser’s rhyme scheme. As I said, the poem is written according to a very strict meter and rhyme scheme, and those things are beautiful in themselves, but they aren’t the point of The Faerie Queene. The point is the story itself. I’m reading in a way that’s natural to the setting—reading aloud to my children so that they can experience the story.

 

And here’s a slightly different example from Book IV, Canto 1.

In this one, when I get to the word “sterve,” which is the word “starve,” I might go ahead and substitute “die” because the point is that the character is thriving off of her victims’ deaths, not their hunger. The meaning of the word has changed enough in the last few centuries, and this is an important enough aspect of the story, that I feel the change could be justified. Use your own judgement.

 

That’s it!  

• Do a little prep work before you read aloud. 
• Plan to read the entire canto in one sitting. 
• Pause every once in a while to let the kids narrate. You’ll be surprised how much they’ve retained from reading the children’s versions.

 

In my next post, I’ll list several editions I can heartily recommend, including two with updated spellings.

How to read The Faerie Queene; or, You are already qualified to read Spenser's masterpiece

Many of you know that last school year I taught a year-long class on Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene. To help prepare myself for the classes, I spent hours and hours reading commentaries and scholarly essays on the poem, because I wanted to give my students (mostly adults, but a few high schoolers as well) value for their money. If you’re going to pay for a class, you should get more out of it than you can get just by reading something on your own.

Before deciding to teach the class, I had read The Faerie Queene aloud with my children three times over the previous several years. I loved the poem and wanted to share it with other homeschool families, so that, in my opinion, was my main qualification for teaching it—I was familiar with it and I loved it.

But what qualified me to read it to my kids in the first place? I don’t have a college degree, let alone a degree in English. I didn’t have any specialized knowledge of Edmund Spenser or Elizabethan England or of the kind of poetry Spenser was writing.

The only qualification I had was that I wanted to read it. And I wanted to read it because I loved C.S. Lewis, and he loved The Faerie Queene.

The only specialized knowledge I had was that I knew the Bible pretty well, I was fairly familiar with Greek and Roman mythology, and with fairy tales and the legends of King Arthur. Really you can’t even call that specialized knowledge. All of that is what every child ought to have been listening to from birth, “building blocks of story,” as Angelina Stanford says, summarizing Northrop Frye and his brilliant commentaries on literature.

So, how do you, dear Homeschool Mama, begin reading this glorious masterpiece to your own children?

Here’s what I did with my four children who were still at home with me—my fifteen year old daughter, thirteen year old son, and eleven year old daughter, plus my nineteen year old special-needs son.

Charlotte Mason suggests having younger children read from Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare before reading the bard himself so that they will be familiar with the stories. I felt it was even more important to do this with Spenser’s Faerie Queene, since the language in his poem is more difficult than in Shakespeare’s plays.

Most of us are familiar with C.S. Lewis’s mention of first reading The Faerie Queene from a large illustrated volume on a rainy day. Here is the quote in full:

Beyond all doubt it is best to have made one’s first acquaintance with Spenser in a very large—and, preferably, illustrated—edition of The Faerie Queene, on a wet day, between the ages of twelve and sixteen; and if, even at that age, certain of the names aroused unidentified memories of some still earlier, some almost prehistoric, commerce with a selection of “Stories from Spenser,” heard before we could read, so much the better.
(“On Reading ‘The Faerie Queene,’” in Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, p. 146)

I had been reading Margaret Hodges and Trina Schart Hyman’s gorgeously illustrated edition of Saint George and the Dragon since before some of these children were born, and Lewis’s words here spurred me on to find another high quality children’s edition of the whole story, for he says that that’s where even the mature reader must start, if not with the children’s versions, at least with the child’s unjaded appetite for stories like “Jack the Giant Killer,” and his lack of awareness of any allegory or moral purpose. In the same essay, Lewis says,

It may not be necessary for all readers at all stages of the narrative to know exactly what the poet means, but it is emphatically necessary that they should surrender themselves to the sense of some dim significance in the background—that they should feel themselves to be moving in regions “where more is meant than meets the ear.”

 

I found two beautifully written editions that served us well. The first and shortest is Stories from the Faerie Queen by Jeanie Lang. Her book is just a few chapters long, roughly one chapter per book of Spenser’s FQ, each taking 15-20 minutes to read aloud. The second is Mary Macleod’s much longer Stories from the Faerie Queene. The chapters are all “read-aloud” length, like Lang’s, but Macleod’s book covers the poem in much more detail than Lang’s book.

Our method was to read a chapter of Lang one day (kids narrating), then in the following days I would read aloud the corresponding chapters from Macleod (again having the kids narrate). Then I read aloud from my Penguin edition of The Faerie Queene (pausing occasionally for narrations). In this way we worked through FQ, one book at a time.

If your kids are much younger than mine were, say all under twelve, you could read aloud the whole Lang book, and later read aloud the whole Macleod. Do be sure to have your kids narrate both books. This way they’ll be so familiar with the basic outline of the story that when you get to Spenser they’ll be able to follow the Elizabethan poetry without trouble in the way that Lewis describes.

In my next post, I’ll give some tips for reading the full edition of The Faerie Queene.