The Orlando Furioso

Somewhere past the sphere of the moon lies a valley where everything lost on earth is heaped up: broken vows, wasted afternoons, the sighs of lovers, fame gnawed thin as moth-eaten cloth. A knight arrives on a winged horse to fetch back one jar, and the label on it reads Orlando's Wit. That is the joke and the wound at the centre of these forty-six cantos. The greatest paladin in Christendom has lost his mind over a woman who loves somebody else, and roams the countryside naked, tearing oaks out of the ground. Lodovico Ariosto keeps a dozen plots in the air at once, abandons each at its worst moment, and writes ottava rima so buoyant it seems to cost him nothing. Spenser rebuilt the poem as The Faerie Queene, Milton lifted a line for Paradise Lost, Byron paid Walter Scott his highest compliment by calling him the Ariosto of the North. And through all of it rides Bradamante in her armour, unhorsing men who learn her name only once she is gone.