The Faerie Queene: Book 5: Canto I

This is a canto from Book V of Edmund Spenser's *The Faerie Queene* (1596), an Elizabethan allegorical epic poem. The canto introduces Artegall, the Knight of Justice, who has been trained since childhood by the goddess Astraea (the classical embodiment of divine justice) and armed with Chrysaor, a sword forged by Jove. His quest is to rescue Irena — an allegorical figure representing Ireland — from the tyrant Grantorto, on behalf of the Faerie Queene (a figure for Elizabeth I). Along the way, Artegall encounters a test case of justice: a headless lady, a grieving squire, and a villainous knight named Sanglier who stole a woman and killed his own companion. Artegall resolves the dispute through a ruse modeled on Solomon's judgment — offering to split the living woman in two, then awarding her to the squire who recoils in mercy, and condemning Sanglier to carry his victim's severed head as public penance. The passage is distinctive for its insistence that justice requires both iron enforcement (embodied by the automaton Talus and his flail) and shrewd equity, and for its layered political allegory linking Elizabethan imperial ambitions — particularly in Ireland — to classical and mythological precedents of heroic world-ordering.

The Faerie Queene: Book 5: Canto I

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