The Demon's Feast
Canto II of the Morgante
Previously:
Introducing Luigi Pulci
Canto I: Giants on the Mountain
Alright, canto two of Morgante. Meant to do this ages ago and kept putting it off. Let’s go.
The canto’s invocation has the poet asking Christ to pilot his ship, and from there we return to our story, already in progress. The abbot sees Orlando get emotional at the fresco in the monastery’s armoury, and Orlando explains that this is the story of his father, and more than that it turns out he and the abbot are half-brothers. The abbot and Orlando, weep with joy and their new friend Morgante joins in, because why not? Orlando asks the abbot why he didn’t become a knight like everyone else in their family, and the abbot gives an answer about piety, etc, but the subtext is that he’s a coward. The abbot and Orlando cry tears of joy at meeting each other, and Morgante joins in.
Then Morgante goes back to looking for suitable weapons, first trying on a steel helmet, maybe a kettle hat, at which Orlando jokes that he looks like a mushroom: a small cap on a long stalk. He finds what will become his signature weapon underneath a broken bell—the bell’s clapper. Extremely heavy, but hey, he’s a giant.
Orlando then begs the abbot to guide them to some new adventure, and the abbot tells of Manfredonio, who is besieging the land of King Caradoro until Caradoro gives up his beautiful daughter. So Orlando and Morgante decide to go check it out, travelling through the desert, Orlando on horseback and Morgante on foot.
Eventually, they spot a tavern up ahead, which is more like a mansion once they reach it. Inside, they find the hall is richly decorated and the table is set with delicious food, but otherwise the place is abandoned. Orlando senses a trap, but Morgante doesn’t care and “reason[ing] with the logic of his teeth” sets to eating. And so they eat. There’s “peacock and partridge, hare and pheasant, deer / and rabbit, and fat capon; there was wine / to drink, and water also for their hands. … they both drank like sick men, and ate like healthy ones.”
In the morning they wake up ready to leave and resume their adventure, the narrator jokes that they planned on skipping out of the inn without paying their bill, but now they can’t find an exit, and the table and staircase are gone too. Orlando wonders if he’s still drunk, Morgante figures it’s ghosts, or a dream they can’t wake from.
He kept on saying, “Could this be a dream?”
Morgante, happy still for the free food,
said, “When I ate, I know I was awake;
who cares about the rest, for heaven’s sake?“What counts is that my meal was not a dream;
and even if it came from Satan’s hand,
tell him to bring me in the future more.”
For three full days they wandered all about,
ever unable to escape from there.
On the third day, the walls of the mansion’s sepulchre start speaking, announcing that this will be their tomb, that they’re here forever now. Morgante investigates, and lifting up a tombstone finds a demon.
Blacker than coal—lo and behold—at once
a devil came out of that very tomb—
a bundle of proud bones shaped as a ghost,
naked and bare and with no flesh about.
The demon attacks Orlando, but together, Orlando and Morgante beat it into submission, putting it back in the tomb. The demon says that they’ll be able to leave if Orlando baptizes Morgante, and this works. We’re not told how, just that once they leave, the mansion makes a loud roar and disappears behind them. Morgante says his heart is telling him to look in the ground for a hole, so that they can go down into Hell and wrestle with even more demons, but Orlando tells him to leave off: there’s no food for them to eat in Hell, and, ever the glutton, Morgante immediately drops the idea.
So instead they resume their journey and their next stop is a fountain, where they find two couriers fighting wildly against each other. It turns out they’re both looking for Orlando, but with opposing messages. One courier was sent by Orlando’s famous cousin, Rinaldo of Montalban, a renowned knight and leader of the Four Sons of Aymon, while the other courier was sent by Ganelon the betrayer (Boo! Hiss!) with some sort of scheme to entrap Orlando (we aren’t told what the scheme is, but it’s a common enough trope by this point that an associate of Ganelon should be immediately considered suspect). Morgante, incensed, grab’s Ganelon’s courier by the throat and beats him until every bone is broken, then drowns the guy in the fountain.
Orlando has the courier, his name is Chimento, take messages back to France. To Charlemagne, the courier is to advise him to keep following Ganelon’s counsel, because unless he receives an apology, Orlando now considers himself a foe, but instead of war, Orlando will just wander in Pagan lands with his new giant friend. The courier is further tasked with asking Rinaldo to look after Orlando’s beloved Aude, and to inform Ogier the Dane that Orlando has borrowed his beloved sword Cortana and horse Rondel. But Chimento begs Orlando to return home, as Charlemagne hasn’t been himself since Orlando left. He tells a curious fable:
Well—once upon a time a little ant
began to roam the earth, as many do,
until a horse’s skull at last she found.
Inspecting it, she crawled round and round,till, having reached the region of the brain,
this looked to her so beautiful a room
that in her heart great happiness she felt,
and kept on saying, simple and naive:
“Surely some mighty lord used to live here.”
Finally, after searching every cell,
convinced that there was nothing there to find—
no crumbs to eat nor food of any kind—back to her little hole at last she went.
But Orlando refuses to go home, instead wandering with Morgante until they find the siege camp of Manfredonio, where they are welcomed whether they are Pagans or Christians (Orlando gives the false name Brunoro, and they pretend to be Saracens), and offered jobs as paid mercenaries to fight against Lionetto, the son and greatest warriot of King Caradoro, and also sister to Meridana, the princess Manfredonio is trying to win by force of arms.
Lionetto comes out to the battlefield, and Orlando goes to test him, Morgante to watch. Orlando wins the joust, knocking Lionetto to the ground. Lionetto complains that it was his horse’s fault. He remounts, and now he and Orlando go at each other with swords instead of lances, but here the canto breaks off…
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"The canto’s invocation has the poet asking Christ to pilot his ship, and from there we return to our story"
So, the narrator came right out and said "Jesus, take the wheel"?