Continuing with our Hesiodic catalogue of rivers, we came up against questions of aging and time: the Scamander is ‘purpled yet with blood / Of Greeks and Trojans, which therein did die’ (20), seeming to exist in an eternal epic present. ‘[T]he aged Ocean, and his Dame / Old Tethys’ are the parents of all the other rivers (18), yet still living: age here seems to be more genealogical than chronological, so these eldest rivers can be eternally Grandparent Age. (There seem to be only two ages in The Faerie Queene: auncient, or young, hot and ready to be wed. This may be why we haven’t seen our ostensible heroes, Campbell and Triamond, since they were married.)
In a semantically and politically unsettling moment, the narrator gives a call towards colonialism: as men have failed to subdue the Amazons, Britain should be ashamed for failing to subdue the New World and giving the Spanish so much ground (22). The narrator cloaks colonial intention in awkward legalese: ‘The whom the right thereof itselfe hath sold’.
We move from the mythographic catalogue of ancient world rivers to local rivers, into the Anglo-Saxon register of English place names. Spenser draws on the genre of choreography, a place-based history, and tacks back and forth between modes of allegory, simile, and personification, leading to some amusing tautology: ‘the Rother, decked all with woods / Like a wood God’ (33). Alongside the display of learning of the mythographic catalogue, Jeff pointed out a covert realism as this wedding is used for political machinations between dynasties, minor rivers able to hobnob with major ones, etc. We also had a moment of The Real Edmund Spenser, fondly memorialising ‘My mother Cambridge’ (his alma mater, 34), unlike his usual narratorial evasions. Jamie noted that this wedding is eternal: the Medway and the Thames are always meeting, rendering the moment of marriage a stylisation of a spatial rather than a temporal fact. What kinds of futures, therefore, is this wedding opening?—a question for the poem at large.
[EKL]