Two Odysseys: Rinaldo's Po Journey and the Poet's Homecoming in Orlando furioso

RONALD L. MARTINEZ

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Rinaldo's journey from Paris to Lipadusa frames the concluding episodes of the 1516 Orlando furioso, leading directly into the final exordium and its presentation of the narrator arriving by ship in port after the long, forty-canto excursion of his poem. As the longest and most complex episode in the poem, Rinaldo's episode offers narrative, ethical, and cultural implications I propose to discuss in this essay. Beyond the intrinsic interest of Rinaldo's character and of the two novelle he hears on the subject of jealousy, the final position of the episode makes it important for critics interested in epic and romance closure; more recently, Dave Henderson has suggested that in its original form the episode was composed as early as 1507, making it one of the germs of the Furioso. The poem began, then, with its end.

In the midst of a journey that had begun with Charlemagne in Paris, and continued via the Ardennes, the city of Basel, and the headwaters of the Rhone, Rhine, Danube, and Po, an anonymous Mantuan host delays Rinaldo and proposes he drink of the testing cup that would determine if his wife, Clarice, is faithful. To compensate for the delay, Rinaldo's host offers him overnight passage down the Po to Ravenna in a swift riverboat furnished with an informative helmsman, who narrates for the paladin the tale of Anselmo's comeuppance as a sequel to the host's own tale of misfortune caused by jealousy. After a refreshing night's sleep on the boat, Rinaldo continues overland to Urbino, Rome, and Ostia, and from there by sea to Trapani, site of Anchises' tomb, arriving finally in Lipadusa, though too late to save the life of Brandimarte, killed, at the tragic climax of Ariosto's narrative, by Gradasso wielding Orlando's sword, Durindana.

But the place where Rinaldo wakes up during his passage is also important: the neighborhood of Ferrara, including the island of Belvedere. Passing it, Rinaldo prophesies a future Estense golden age of good government, liberal studies, and courtly manners. Although the Gascon Rinaldo is hardly Ferrarese, his arrival near Ferrara has the quality of a homecoming—indeed he refers to a previous visit. Readers have therefore intuited that the journey suggests Ariosto's own cultural itinerary as well—not merely the derivation of chivalric literature from France, but recall of accomplishments by the Renaissance courts of Mantua, Ferrara, Urbino, and Rome. In this sense, the transition to the narrator's homecoming from the sea, opening the subsequent and concluding canto in the 1516 Furioso, is the logical pendant to Rinaldo's journey down the Po. The poet's homecoming is also a return to his cultural springs.

Wings of Oars: Ulysses in Homer, Pulci, Boiardo, and Dante.

Preparing a previous study of this episode with an eye on the theme of destroying chastity with money, I was struck by parallels between Rinaldo's journey and another famous voyage of homecoming, that of Homer's Odysseus, sent home to Ithaca from Scheria, the island of the utopian Phaeacians ruled by King Antinous and Queen Arete. Like Odysseus, conveyed in the sure, swift ships of the Phaeacians—ships as fast as chariots or birds—Rinaldo's host offers him a perfectly safe journey in a ship as fast as a hunting falcon. Like Odysseus, who sleeps a deep sleep, very like death, as he returns to his home (Odyssey 13.70-125), Rinaldo sleeps between his journey's beginning in Mantua and his arrival near Ferrara—the future home of Este rule and of the poet Ariosto, perhaps not by accident itself compared, in terms of the island delizia of Belvedere, to the island of the Phaeacians in stanzas Ariosto added for the 1532 edition (of 43.56-50). Like Odysseus, whose last nights before sailing are spent hearing two principal tales—the tale of Troy sung by Demodokos, and Odysseus's wanderings related by himself—Rinaldo hears a pair of stories, one before, one as he sets out on his journey. The narrative functions exercised by Demodokos and Odysseus are represented in Ariosto's episode by the helmsman and by the Mantuan host who tells his own story, while Rinaldo retains Odysseus's function as auditor, an attribute Rinaldo displays in the related episode of Ginevra earlier in the Furioso. Finally, like Odysseus, for whom the journey home to Ithaca is the turning point in his journey when his wanderings finally become his homecoming, Rinaldo's journey, though not taking him home, does return the poem to its origin in the culture of the Po valley.

In proposing these parallels, I am not overlooking the difficulties in documenting Ariosto's direct knowledge of Homer's text, in any language. I take it as probable that like his predecessor, Boiardo, he had a working understanding of the principal episodes in Homer's narrative, and certainly of an episode in the poem as crucial as Odysseus's return to Ithaca—one that was, in addition to its structural importance, significant in the tradition of Neoplatonic glosses on the Homeric poems and in Aristotle's discussion of epic form in the Poetics. Still, my case rests not on the Homeric text alone, but on the complex tradition accreted around the figure of Ulysses in Latin literature, in the text of Dante's Commedia, and in the tradition of Cantastorie and chivalric romance, notably Pulci and Boiardo.

For even granting that Ariosto has drawn from Homer in fashioning Rinaldo's voyage down the Po (I will discuss his very significant modifications later), the adoption of the Homeric model is scarcely unmediated. In the chivalric tradition it is precisely the figure of Rinaldo who draws to himself the reputation and practices of a wandering and curious Odysseus, whose reputation, seriously damaged under Roman culture because of his role in the destruction of Troy, began to be rehabilitated in the Quattrocento. But the ambivalence Dante expresses for Ulysses did not disappear. The Renaissance, which knew and praised the prudent and durable stoic Ulysses, as well as the Neoplatonic Ulysses, who exemplified the return of the soul to its home, still hesitated before the wily and crafty Ulysses, master of dangerous stratagems and virtuoso of lies, fandi fictor.

Ariosto found the link between Rinaldo and Dante's Ulysses fully formed in Pulci's Morgante. Late in the poem, after the rout of Roncevaux and death of Orlando, Rinaldo announces to Charlemagne that he is going exploring past the pillars of Hercules to the antipodes, "to search the whole world like Ulysses" (28.29.3-4). Pulci's comparison sets the seal on Rinaldo's extensive wanderings thus far in the poem, an odyssey in themselves: to Egypt to see the pyramids (25.122), thence through the Hellespont to Mount Olympus and Mount Zion in the Holy Land and all the way to "India" to see Prester John. Finally he returns to Egypt through the pillars of Hercules "and above all he commended Ulysses / who went to the other world to see" (25.130). These journeys are completed with the...