Sir Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene is, in many ways, the unacknowledged urtext of the modern Anglophone epic fantasy novel. Everything we love about epic fantasy—sword fights, monsters, jaw-dropping scale, a cast of thousands, deliberate antiquarianism, the ability to make magic real to the “rational” reader—is there in The Faerie Queene. Book One, at least, is one of the masterpieces of English literature.
However, The Faerie Queene also prefigures many of epic fantasy’s weaknesses: It rambles horribly in later books (and was in fact never finished). There’s far too much description of clothing. More important, via a series of gruesome caricatures—of women, of Arabs, of Catholics—Spenser sets a sort of precedent for epic fantasy’s all-too-common hatred of the Other. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, Book One’s recurring Muslim villains—the “Saracen” brothers Sansfoy, Sansloy, and Sansjoy—have always spoken to me. What was it like for them, being trapped in this hateful allegory? That question led to this story …