Sergio Leone and the Orlando Furioso.

According to Bev Vincent, "When Stephen King started working on the first story of the first book that would become the Dark Tower series, his intentions were nothing grander than to write the longest popular novel in history. Now a grandfather in his late fifties, King looks back with sympathy and understanding at the youthful hubris that gave rise to such an aspiration. “At nineteen, it seems to me, one has a right to be arrogant. . . . Nineteen is the age where you say Look out world, I’m smokin’ TNT and I’m drinkin’ dynamite, so if you know what’s good for ya, get out of my way—here comes Stevie.”  The Lord of the Rings inspired King, though he had no intention of replicating Tolkien’s creations, for his inspirations went beyond that epic quest fantasy to embrace romantic poetry and the spaghetti westerns of the 1960s and 1970s. After graduating from college, he decided it was time to stop playing around and tackle something serious. He began a novel “that contained Tolkien’s sense of quest and magic but set against [director Sergio] Leone’s almost absurdly majestic Western backdrop (275)".  Earlier on in the same book, Vincent elaborates a bit more on what has to remain the quirkiest idea that ever occurred to the still reigning King of Horror.  "The story that would become" The Dark Tower series "had its genesis almost a decade before the first" installment "appeared in F&SF, when King and his wife-to-be, Tabitha Spruce, each inherited reams of brightly colored paper nearly as thick as cardboard and in an “eccentric size.”  

"To the endless possibilities of five hundred blank sheets of 7" x 10" bright green paper, King added “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” by Robert Browning, a poem he’d studied two years previously in a course covering the earlier romantic poets. “I had played with the idea of trying a long romantic novel, embodying the feel, if not the exact sense, of the Browning poem.”   In an unpublished essay called “The Dark Tower: A Cautionary Tale,” King says, “I had recently seen a bigger-than-life Sergio Leone Western, and it had me wondering what would happen if you brought two very distinct genres together: heroic fantasy and the Western.”   After graduating from the University of Maine at Orono in 1970, King moved into a “skuzzy riverside cabin” and began what he then conceived of as a “very long fantasy novel,” perhaps even the longest popular novel in history.   He wrote the first section of The Gunslinger in a ghostly, unbroken silence—he was living alone—that influenced the eerie isolation of Roland and his solitary quest.  The story did not come easily. Sections were written during a dry spell in the middle of ’Salem’s Lot, and another part was written after he finished The Shining. Even when he wasn’t actively working on the Dark Tower, his mind often turned to the story—except, he says, when he was battling Randall Flagg in The Stand, which is ironic since both Flagg and a superflu decimated world became part of the Dark Tower mythos many years later (7-8)".  That's the closest I think anyone's ever come to granting a basic outline of how King contrived his most erratic narrative.

It's a story that both Vincent and the author himself have related time and again over the years.  There's nothing very new to be said about it, as of this writing, except perhaps for one overlooked element.  It has to do with, of all things, not any famous literary text (or at least, maybe not directly) but rather a filmmaker.  I'm talkin specifically now about an Italian filmmaker named Sergio Leone.  However strange this may sound. it kinda-sorta turns out he's one of the key components that King used in constructing his grandiose, yet somehow forever incomplete secondary world.  He's yet another part of of the tale Vincent and King have to tell about how the Tower had its genesis.  Ever since catching a fateful viewing of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly at a local movie theater in about the year 1967-8 (web), King has made no secret of the impact that the artistry of Leone has had on his own work as a writer.  This appears to be one of those deep influences for the author.  Something that has been allowed to become at least part of the artist's personal storehouse of potential Inspirations.  In his 1981 non-fiction book Danse Macabre, King even devotes a few pages to Leone and his filmic creativity.  As is typical of the author, he brings Leone up in the course of discussing the art of the Horror genre.  To be specific, he's contemplating how a work like Frankenstein can become its own modern form of myth?

"The most obvious answer to this question is, the movies. The movies did it. And this is a true answer, as far as it goes. As has been pointed out in film books ad infinitum (and possibly ad nauseam), the movies have been very good at providing that cultural echo chamber... perhaps because, in terms of ideas as well as acoustics, the best place to create an echo is in a large empty space. In place of the ideas that books and novels give us, the movies often substitute large helpings of gut emotion. To this American movies have added a fierce sense of image, and the two together create a dazzling show. Take Clint Eastwood in Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry, for instance. In terms of ideas, the film is an idiotic mishmash. In terms of image and emotion—the young kidnap victim being pulled from the cistern at dawn, the bad guy terrorizing the busload of children, the granite face of Dirty Harry Callahan himself— the film is brilliant. Even the best of liberals walk out of a film like Dirty Harry or Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs looking as if they have been clopped over the head... or run over by a train.  

"There are films of ideas, of course, ranging all the way from Birth of a Nation to Annie Hall. But until a few years ago these were largely the province of foreign filmmakers (the cinema “new wave” that broke in Europe from 1946 until about 1965), and these movies have always been chancy in America, playing at your neighborhood “art house” with subtitles, if they play at all. I think it’s easy to misread the success of Woody Allen’s later films in this regard. In America’s urban areas, his films—and films such as Cousin, Cousine—generate long lines at the box office, and they certainly get what George (Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead) Romero calls “good ink,” but in the sticks—the quad cinema in Davenport, Iowa, or the twin in Portsmouth, New Hampshire—these pictures play a fast week or two and then disappear.  It is Burt Reynolds in Smokey and the Bandit that Americans really seem to take to; when Americans go to the films, they seem to want billboards rather than ideas; they want to check their brains at the box office and watch car crashes, custard pies, and monsters on the prowl.

"Ironically, it took a foreign director, the Italian Sergio Leone, to somehow frame the archetypal American movie; to define and typify what most American filmgoers seem to want. What Leone did in A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and most grandiosely in Once Upon a Time In The West cannot even properly be called satire. O.U.A.T.I.T.W. in particular is a huge and wonderfully vulgar overstatement of the already overstated archetypes of American film westerns. In this movie gunshots seem as loud as atomic blasts; close-ups seem to go  on for minutes at a stretch, gunfights for hours; and the streets of Leone’s peculiar little Western towns all seem as wide as freeways (57-58)".  A page or two later, while still discussing Frankenstein as an example of a new modern Myth, King once more brings up the significance of Leone's achievement.  The funny thing is that he does so by pairing up the Man With No Name alongside King Kong, of all characters, saying, "Like Eastwood in Leone’s spaghetti westerns, Kong is the archetype of the archetype (61)".  It might not seem like much to go on, yet perhaps King has left his readers with some interesting food for thought when it comes to a good starting place for unpacking Leone's particular brand of artistry.  To start with, King makes a distinction between films of Ideas, and what I'm going to call a reliance on modern Emblems.  It's a phrase I'm borrowing from scholar Michael R. Collings, and his 2001 book Towards Other Worlds.

In the course of a chapter with the stimulating title of Stephen King, Richard Bachman, and Seventeenth-Century Devotional Poetry, Collings theorizes that the author of books like Carrie and The Regulators has taken the Renaissance concept of the Emblem, and "transferred it into an appearance that renders appropriate and acceptable to modern audiences (150)".  While the imagery of a book like The Regulators "belongs largely to the world of prose", it is the writer's ability to take the "Cultural icons of suburban Middle America" and treat them as a form of Modern Emblemology, that makes King able to bridge the gap between Idea and Image mentioned above in Danse Macabre.  What's interesting to note about Collings take is that the cinema of Sergio Leone is able to fit into King's rubric of modern Emblems (149-50)".  I think Collings efforts need to be highlighted here, because unless that happens, the full significance of his words will get all too easily overlooked.  What he's saying in this chapter is that not only does Stephen King's artistry owe a great deal to the literary practices of the Age of Shakespeare, he also goes a step further by perhaps leaving room for applying the same consideration to the work of the director of Once Upon a Time in the West.  Collings only mentions Leone just that one time, in passing, while keep his focus solely on King.  The idea that a guy who writes a book like Christine might be a literary heir to the practices of Elizabethan Drama is a hard sell for most of us.

What are we to do with the notion that the same Renaissance dramaturgy applies to a man who makes films in which Dirty Harry runs around filling most of the cast full of lead?  I'll have to admit it's more or less impossible to believe that films like A Fistful of Dollars amounts to anything like a Story of Ideas, as King calls them.  At the very least, this has not been any major part of the reputation that Leone has garnered for himself, whether among critics or audiences.  Very few of us can see any reason to take a film like The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, seriously.  And so one day I ran across a book about Leone, and somewhere very near the beginning of the text, I made a discovery.  It counts as no more than one of those minor revelations tucked away in an otherwise passing comment.  Yet I'd argue that if we zero in on it, it might be possible to discover an interesting reason for considering the creator of the Man with No Name as having perhaps a greater integral relation to Stephen King's Dark Tower Mythos than has previously been assumed.  Even the most dedicated Tower Junkies assume that films like TGTB&TU amount to little than jumping-off points, something like a simple yet necessary puzzle piece that was required to unlock the door to the artist's Imagination.  However, if the work and scholarship of Sir Christopher Frayling is anything to go by, then there might just be a more vital yet hidden connection between Sergio Leone, and the various tales told about the character of Roland. 

 The Director and the Poet.

A lasting reputation is a hard thing to come by, whether in the Arts, or in real life.  It's one of the great truisms of life, yet it's also a fact that's proven to be a problem for some artists more than others.  I can't tell at this point in time where the career of someone like Ryan Reynolds will be in a decade or so.  Yet it might just be possible to claim that guys like Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg will still find their reputations going strong.  This is also a problem that a director like Sergio Leone doesn't have to worry about any time soon, even many a long year after his passing in the late April of 1989.  A lot of the reason for that goes back to what King said about him.  In putting the Spaghetti Western genre on the map, Leone has pretty much guaranteed himself the kind of immortality that seems durable enough to survive the changing guard of tastes and expectations that most film-going audiences are prone to with the passage of time.  It's an acknowledged fact, yet that still doesn't explain how he managed to pull it off in the first place.  There's a tale worth telling there, yet the problem I've discovered with doing that is most of us are very poor students of history, even if it's on a subject that we love.  Nor is this anything like a modern phenomenon, either.  It seems like the only way to get anyone interested in a historical figure like George Washington is to talk about the time he chopped down a cherry tree, rather than just recite a catalogue of the dry bone facts about his life.  He has to be a character, in order to be a man.

In other words, if you want people to remember you, even if you're telling nothing but the honest truth, you still have to organize all those facts into an entertaining story before anyone even pays attention, much less remembers who you are, or what you did.  Some may point out how unfair this seems, and I'll have to admit they're right.  It also doesn't change the fact that you can't really see anything or anyone unless you first believe there's a value in them.  For some odd reason, real life just doesn't seem to work any other way.  As a result, before I can even recite the facts about the life of the artist, I've got to make sure you remember who he is.  The best way to do that is to find out the Art in Real Life, and let it do the talking, at least to begin with.  With this goal in mind, the best place to start talking about the director of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly is through the lyrics of a song by Jackson Browne:

"He came 'round here with his camera and some of his American friends

Where the money is immortal and the killing never ends
He set out from Cinecittà through the ruined streets of Rome
To shoot in Almeria and bring the bodies home

He said
I'll be rich or I'll be dead
I've got it all here in my head

He could see the killers' faces and he heard the song they sang
Where he waited in the darkness with the Viale Glorioso gang
He could see the blood approaching and he knew what he would be
Since the days when he was first assisting The Force of Destiny

He worked for Walsh and Wyler with the chariot and sword
When he rode out in the desert he was quoting Hawks and Ford
He came to see the masters and he left with what he saw
What he stole from Kurosawa he bequeathed to Peckinpah

From the Via Tuscolana to the view from Miller Drive
He shot the eyes of bad men and kept their deaths alive
With the darkness and the anguish of a Goya or Van Cleef
He rescued truth from beauty and meaning from belief (source)".

You can hear the bare facts of Sergio Leone's life, and then forget anyone ever told you anything.  Couple all that with the legacy he's left behind to pop culture, and you're bound to remember at least something of the man.  As far as the actual memory of pop culture is concerned, there's just one question to ask.  Who the hell is this Sergio Leone guy, and what makes him so damn special anyway?  Everything I know of this filmmaker comes from the pages of Chris Frayling's Sergio Leone: Something to Do with Death.  So to summarize a long and rich personal history, this is what happened.  The child was born into and artistic family, to start with.  There seems to be very little doubt about that.  Whatever else may be said about Sergio Leone, the first significant factor that he slowly became aware of as a child, was that his parents were artists, and that they liked to cultivate a similar temperament in their only son.  To repeat, the lad grew up in an artistic household.  This fact must be kept clearly in mind, else the significance of what follows will not be apparent.  As Frayling lays it out in further detail:

"Sergio Leone was born on 3 January 1929, in Rome. Some sources state that he was born in Trastevere, others that he came from Naples. In fact, he was born in Via dei Lucchesi, in Palazzo Lucchesi, near the Trevi Fountain; but he spent most of his childhood and youth (from the age of two to twenty) in Trastevere. His father Vincenzo was nearly fifty years old, and his mother Edvige Valcarenghi- whose stage name was ‘Bice [short for Beatrice] Walerian’- had married him thirteen years previously. Sergio was the first and only child of the marriage, and as he recalled, ‘the event was treated by both of them as if it was a miracle’. His mother had almost given up hope.   Neither of Sergio’s parents originated in Rome. Vincenzo was born in Torella dei Lombardi, in the province of Avellino near Naples, on 5 April 1879. His family owned a small estate in the Irpinia. Sergio Leone liked to say that ‘my ancestors come from the campagna- the area around Naples’. Edvige’s family came from Friuli, and her father was proprietor of the Russian Hotel (no longer in existence) in the Piazza di Spagne, linked to the church of Trinita dei Monti by the Spanish Steps, part of the most elegant quarter of Rome. So she was Roman ‘by accident’, born there in 1886. She met Vincenzo in 1912, when they were both given contracts by Aquila Films of Turin: he as an ‘artistic director’ and actor, she as an actress. They married in 1916, and ‘Bice’ retired from the screen a year later to devote her energies to setting up home. She never worked as an actress again (25-6)".

Leone's father, Vincenzo, seems to have been from a reasonably well-to-do, if not wealthy family.  There was enough finances so that Leone's grandparents were able to send his father to what appears to have been some kind of prestigious educational setting, one that was run by "the Salesian Fathers at Cava dei Tirreni (26)".  From there, Vincenzo was sent to Naples to study for a career as a lawyer, yet he soon displayed the kind of rebellious temperament which would one go on to define his own son.  Leone the Elder soon put off his studies to be a legal eagle.  According to the Dollars Trilogy director, "In parallel with his legal studies, my father was drawn to the artistic milieu. He found many friends there. Important figures such as Eduardo Scarfoglio, the great- and powerful- writer and journalist and poets and playwrights such as Italo (Roberto) Bracco. He knew Gabriele d’Annunzio well- they had been to school together . . . While he studied for his degree in jurisprudence, he worked as an actor and director with an amateur theatre company...‘His family thought that my father was practicing as a barrister in Turin, but in fact he was a member of a touring theatre company ... it became difficult to work under his real name. The family would have learned the truth. And they would have disinherited him, broken off all contact. You must remember that at that time, the theatre was really taboo in a family such as his. If he’d said he wanted to be an artiste, they would have treated him like Pulcinella (ibid)".

From there, Vincenzo soon began to make his way into Italy's Pre-War film industry.  He never seems to have found quite the same level of fortune either in front or behind the camera like his son would later do.  However, he was able to make a living in the business of moving images.  By the time Sergio was born, his father had "graduated" from actor to cinematographer.  Coming of age as he did in such a family, the young boy found that his parents were always willing to encourage him to use his Imagination.  In this sense, the future director can be spoken of as having enjoyed, for however brief a span of time, something very close to a childhood idyll.  It makes Leone the beneficiary of a by now familiar setup up.  It's one that's not always typical of someone who is first born, and then grows up with an artistic temperament, yet it does seem to have happened often enough in the past so that it's possible to speak of a number of artists whose lives can be said to fall into a familiar pattern.  This is the one where all the right ingredients for the nurturing of a creative childhood somehow manage to fall into place, and whatever nascent artistic streak might lie hidden in the child's mind is given the room and space necessary for it grow and thrive.  It's a pattern which only a lucky handful have ever been able to experience and enjoy.  A list of names who belong to this illustrious category include the likes of Jane Austen, Edith Nesbit, C.S. Lewis, and Jim Henson.  Sergio Leone seems to have been one of them.

As always, however, there is a trick to the tale, and this includes the list of artists mentioned above.  Out of the four names listed, perhaps only two of them can be said to have enjoyed this childhood idyll to the fullest possible extent, whereas others found this Dream of Youth shattered by unforeseen events.  In the case of Nesbit and Lewis, this came about when his mother and her father all found an early death due to illness when their children were still beyond the reach of ages ten to twelve.  Even Henson might be spoken of as having experience a variation of this warped predicament in the pattern when an older brother of his became the victim of a tragic car accident, another young life full of promise, and therefore snatched away to become just another small town James Dean.  Out of that entire company, it seems as if only Austen was allowed to experience the fullness of the Idyll of Childhood.  The rest found their experiences to be a mixture of the sweet and sour.  The "good news" for young Sergio Leone is that his schism in the pattern didn't come in the form of any personal family tragedy.  All that happened was the world around him just lost its mind, is all.  It happened in the form of the outbreak of World War II.  Before that, Mussolini and his faction had risen to power, and the once cozy lifestyle that Leone, along with his family and friends had known wouldn't return for quite some time, afterwards.

To summarize a long story, whatever plans and hopes Sergio's parents might have had for their only child came to an abrupt and uncertain halt when the society around them all began to be shifted and controlled by a handful at the expense of the many.  As a result, the endurance of Italy under Fascism became one of the defining experiences of Leone's coming of age.  In later years, both critics and fans would point to this underlying theme of an ongoing skepticism of authority and the law running throughout the director's films.  It seems that a lot of this anti-establishment mindset found its roots in Leone's experiences during the war.  Anyone who wishes to gain a sense of how the advent and fallout of the Mussolini years left their impact on the growing mind of the artist would do well to hunt down a copy of Roberto Rossellini's 1945 masterpiece, Rome: Open City.  That is a picture made in the crumbling aftermath of Fascism's collapse.  Think of it as the Italian version of American Graffiti, except this time it's set right at the end of World War II, and the stakes are way higher.  Rossellini's film details how a group of disparate survivors of the War either find ways of making new lives for themselves in in this vaguely familiar, yet unknown landscape, or else fail entirely.  This is something that Leone and his whole extended family had to put up with as well.  They made it out alright, and yet it left the future director with an unbreakable sense of suspicion of politics and politicians ever after.

This can be seen in the countless portrayals of shady and shiftless lawmen who often can't be distinguished in any meaningful way from the various outlaws and badmen who populate Leone's larger than life version of his stylized American West.  The funny thing is how it was most likely during this very same time, when life was made difficult for all of Italy, that the creator of the Man with No Name encountered one of the underremarked upon influences that would go on to shape his Art.  It is also this same influence that forges a more direct connection between the Spaghetti Western and the fiction of Stephen King.  Frayling writes about how "In the prewar years there was a further form of year-round entertainment on offer to children, albeit in the open air of the Gianicolo Park, near the Piazzale Garibaldi.  On occasional weekends Sergio Leone was taken there by his parents to see the glove puppets known as the burattini, often operated by Neapolitan families of puppeteers. Their name was said to derive from buratto, the coarse cloth used by Southern peasants both for sifting flour and to make the hard-wearing sleeve of the puppets’ gloves. This brand of puppet theatre pre-dated the commedia dell’arte, but the stories usually enacted were in a line of descent from those of the commedia: the misfortunes of Pulcinella or Arlecchino or Gerolamo at the hands of the wily Brighella, as enacted by hand-waving puppets in masks.  To the young Leone, they were magic.

"Often his parents had to drag him away from repeated viewings of the same performance, or prevent him from slipping off to yet another glove-puppet theatre. ‘I remember late one afternoon’, Sergio Leone said in 1976, ‘as I was  returning home to Trastevere, I walked past one of the puppet theatres which was just closing . . . Behind the lowered curtain of the theatre, I could hear raised voices, and the sound of things being thrown about. Looking behind the theatre, I could see the puppeteer and his wife having a scrap. It was a friendly fight, and very Neapolitan. But just after the puppets had been hitting one another with wooden sticks on the stage, here was this couple hitting one another with the wood and cloth puppets, whose “gloves” by now had become all too visible. As I watched this bizarre event, I understood- in my childlike way- that there were things as they appeared, and things that went on behind the things as they appeared. Fiction and reality. The fables of the theatre, and the human theatre which was more serious, tougher, more shabby, and pitiful even. I had just grasped my first lesson in the meaning of the word “spectacle”. And it happened before I went to the cinema for the first time.’  

"The burattini were just one form of traditional puppet theatre on offer in Rome’s public spaces. Since Sergio’s father Vincenzo hailed from Naples and could speak the Neapolitan dialect, he had a particularly soft spot for them. But there were also occasional visits from the pupi Siciliani of the South. These were rod-puppets, of up to five feet in height, rather than small glove puppets. They were used to perform Sicilian variations on stories of heroism and bloodshed, originally dating back to the era of Charlemagne: the same stories that were collected in the Old French epic The Song of Roland (written shortly after the First Crusade and describing an actual military disaster of ad 778). But these had been updated and made even larger than life in the Renaissance by the Italian poet Ludovico Ariosto, as Orlando Furioso (8-9)".  It is at this exact point that any Tower Junkies out there will snap to attention and be, perhaps not just on the alert, but also stunned and amazed, and here's the reason why.  For all intents and purposes, it seems as if the maker of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, has given readers a more direct link between his work, and all the effort that Stephen King expended in the creation of the Gunslinger.  I'll admit this is something that jumped out a me the first time I read those paragraphs.

It was and remains interesting to know that in a case where one artist provides part of the initial inspiration for another, there was a still further, unnoticed level of influence that more or less provides a closer connection between a pair of otherwise unrelated works.  As Bev Vincent outlined, King drew his idea for Roland and his world in part from his first, influential viewing of TGTB&TU, way back in 67.  From that moment on, he decided to pattern his Dark Fantasy protagonist into a version of Clint Eastwood's Man with No Name.  The only major add-on was that King decided to christen his literary Gunslinger with the moniker of Roland.  Here's why that's important.  According to King's own testimony, he got the name off of an old Robert Browning poem that he was assigned in College English.  This seemed to have been all the writer ever knew when it came the initial outline of his hero.  It turned out to be one of those creative choices that stayed intact all the way to the final completed paragraph.  Now, however, with the addition of Frayling's information, it becomes possible to say that the influence more or less works both ways.  Not only was King not the only artist to take some of his ideas from the legends of Roland, the same also applies to one of his main inspirations, Sergio Leone.

It's something that's always lingered at the back of my mind for some time now.  How one of those simple seeming, tossed-off bits of trivia made in passing can sometimes be another vital piece of a long and complicated puzzle.  In my case, the riddle in question has less to do with the quality of the finished Dark Tower series, and more with what influences went into it.  Beyond that point, I'm not real sure what I'm after here.  I suppose it "could" be some sort of pointless hope that untangling the various strands and threads of the web that is the Tower series will maybe grant me some sort of clue as to why King would want to devote so much of his life and career to such an undertaking; especially when we're dealing with a such a patchwork, hodgepodge crazy quilt like the Roland's universe.  Then again, that sounds just like the sort of aimless goal that somehow managed to act as a lure for the author.  The only difference is I'm not a writer, just a critic.  So in a sense, I've got at least some excuse for what I'm about to do next.  I'd like to see how our picture of King's Dark Fantasy series changes when we add Leone's own Roland influences into the mix.  I don't know what that picture looks like just yet.  In order to find out how it might appear, the best course of action I can offer right now it to start with Leone's own Inspiration.  Who was Ludovico Ariosto, and what is the Orlando Furioso?  Here's what I know.

The funny thing about pairing Leone up with Ariosto is the remarkable number of similarities the film director has with this otherwise unconnected poet from the Italian Renaissance.  In order to figure out what these match points are, the background of yet another artist needs to be understood.  Much like with Leone, Ludovico Ariosto seems to have come from a family with claims to belonging to 15th century Italia's wealthy gentry class.  At least that's what the circumstances of his birth tell me.  His father was a military commander in the province of Reggio Emilia.  While this was where the poet was born, Ariosto would go on to share at least one other quality with Stephen King.  Ludovico chose, in a very haphazard kind of way, to settle on becoming a writer of place.  In other words, just as King is now considered a the key aspect of the landscape of Maine, so Ferrara, Italy has become for the reputation of Ariosto.  The major difference is that Ferrara still counts as one of the major metropolitan areas of Europe, whereas even the cities of Maine are surrounded on all sides by the wilderness of New England.  Getting back to the shared similarities between the author of the Orlando Furioso and Leone, recall what I said about Ariosto achieving his goals in a haphazard way.  It's a statement that can be taken literally, and the main reason for that has to do with the social life the poet grew up in as a boy.

There's a monologue that Orson Welles delivers in The Third Man that manages to act as a neat summation of the situation that Ariosto was born into.  "In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed. But they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love. They had 500 years of democracy and peace. And what did that produce? The cuckoo clock (web)".  For better or worse, that was the kind of experience Ariosto learned to familiarize himself with for most of his life.  It's an experience that manages to encode itself into the fabric of the Orlando Furioso.  We'll get to that in a minute.  For now, the best account of Ludovico's personality is given by Charles P. Brand, in his introductory text to the poem.  I'd argue that Brand gives us the best snapshot of who the poet was when we turn to a brief section of chapter 2 which focuses on a number of satires that Ariosto penned as part of his minor works.  According to Brand, "all have their point of departure in some contemporary situation in which the poet was involved and which he uses to explain his conduct or his views and to criticize his society.

"...Each of them, as I have said, is associated with some event or situation in the poet's life...Each of them supplies the biographer with significant information about the poet's activities and movements, but they are particularly revealing of his reactions and attitude to his environment; they show him considering the sort of practical problems which face most men - whether to accept promotion and increased responsibility or refuse it; to move elsewhere or to stay home; whether to take a wife or stay single; how to educate a child.  In discussing these personal problems the poet tries to establish a personal philosophy.  What are his guide-lines for taking decisions in this harassing world?  His philosophy, like his diet, is simple: knowing what he likes best:...[I understand my own affairs better than anyone else.]  It seems largely to coincide with that of Horace (whether consciously or by chance who can say?): a simple life, with a simple table and simple clothes: a quiet life without show or ambition, free from hazardous travelling, spent at home within sound of the bells of the Duomo; a humble life without pretentious titles and responsibilities; a free life not tied to capricious patrons and tyrannical rulers; a stable domestic life close to the woman he loves

'These being my tastes', Ariosto seems to say, 'how could I be expected to go suddenly off to Hungary with the Cardinal, or to govern the bandit-ridden Apennines, or to accept a permanent post in Rome?  It is, after all, reasonable and consistent, this attitude of mine.'  His attitude is determined by the way he is made, by the society he lives in and the people he meets, so many of whom he dislikes and, he shows us, dislikes with good reason.  So the strictly satirical components accompany the lyrical: he accuses others in excusing himself.  His targets are similar to Horace's: pretentious people, hypocrites, flatterers, materialists of all sorts, social climbers, shady business-men.  These are the people he dislikes at the courts, and in the Church, and he makes his dislikes known, sometimes with the smiling irony of Horace, sometimes with an invective worth of Juvenal (22-24)".  Earlier than this, Brand gives us an even neater summation of the kind of personality that Ariosto seems to have been.  "These letters seem to support the picture that has come down to us from his contemporaries of a kindly, well-meaning, conscientious man, certainly no saint, too conscious of his own as well as others weaknesses to be sanctimonious.  His morals are those of his age and he society: he lives as virtuously and as honestly as he reasonably can: he has...children, a long attachment to a married woman: he has to scramble like everyone for benefices and favours; he accepts...the dubious conduct of his patrons and superioris.

"But he is not malicious or grasping: he cares conscientiously for his dependent family, and he is widely liked for his wit and charm.  He is not ambitious for wealth or honours - he wants a quiet life, the company of his Alessandra and his friends, the familiar streets of Ferrara, the leisure to read and to write.  He lives his life as one might expect the author of the Furioso to live it (14)".  It's also possible that this is just the kind of life that a guy like Sergio Leone might have desired for himself.  He's known these days for creating an entire form of stylized cinema violence, one where the trappings of civilization can come off sounding like someone's idea of a sick joke.  It's true this has become the director's greatest legacy.  Yet it's also possible that, like Ariosto, it was because he knew what it was like to watch his civilization crumble around him that made Leone anxious to get whatever semblance of "normality" back for himself as much as possible.  In that way, a comparison between the filmmaker and the poet becomes somewhat revealing for the shared similarities and contrasts that exist between them.  Both men came of age in a period of national crisis; a time and place in which combat could break out at any moment, and blood could be spilled in the streets.  It's the kind of circumstance that tends to leave some kind of mark on those lucky enough to survive it, even if it's all just mental.

The irony comes in the form of the results of these crisis moments that each artist witnessed.  Ariosto arrived just in time to get a front row seat to the internal strife and warfare that would, paradoxically, become the birth pangs of Italy at its height of national glory.  Leone, meanwhile, came of age just in time to watch all of that legacy get reduced to near complete rubble by the country's second spasm of national crisis.  One artist got his start in an era when his country began to achieve a level of majestic grandeur for itself in terms of Art, Politics, Culture, and Social Living.  The other was in time to watch it all come to an end, and a new Bronze Age take its place.  It gives the detached viewer a sense of shared contrasts, with each artist confronting both the Red and the White aspects of human culture, respectively.  The interesting thing to note is how this polar opposite setup doesn't necessarily detract from the similarities between Leone and Ariosto.  For one thing, while the old and obscure poet was around to view the full flowering of the Renaissance, it's not the same as saying he was ever blind to the harsh realities that made it all possible.  The backstabbing of court intrigues (sometimes literal) of first the Borgias and then the Medicis, and how the abuse of power could contribute to cultural prosperity.

In that sense, one of the reasons Ariosto was so anxious to acquire a simple life for himself and his family was because he knew just how fragile and precarious a balance on which the entirety of the Renaissance rested.  He was a Renaissance Humanist who could take in and understand the various levels of duplicity and malice that hid itself behind the beauty of works by Leonardo and Michelangelo.  This included the ability to tell the difference between the genuine good will of artists and citizens like the two famous names just mentioned, and the high-priced criminals who acted as their patrons.  It was a situation he was caught up in himself, and there are plenty of indications he found this a less than satisfactory setup, no matter what scholars like Brand might think.  It's true he wished for nothing more than a normal, simple life.  What Brand fails to realize, I think, is that this is a desire born out of desperation, and much as it is founded on genuine hope.  Ariosto is best described as an Italian Humanist who took the outlook seriously, and therefore was always aware of the various threats that the Borgia-Medici society of his own day could pose to such an outlook.  It was this awareness which drove both his desire to keep his life and wants as simple as possible, and also for the longstanding streak of satire which runs through just about everything he ever wrote.  This is true for the Orlando Furioso.

A Poem That's Almost Impossible to Summarize.     

Here's where we come to the main text that inspired this whole article.  Out of all the possible source material that Stephen King could have drawn from in creating the Dark Tower mythos, Sergio Leone's Spaghetti Westerns stands as the most notable.  What I doubt anyone figured figured on was that even so much as a brief glance into the director's own work would reveal the one possible easter egg that would rival them all.  I'm talking about the possibility that the creator of some of the most stylish, and influential Oat Operas ever committed to celluloid, might also have taken a great deal of his own Inspiration from the same backdrop of myth as King.  The key piece of evidence for this surmise all has to do with Ariosto's poem, and the title character at the heart of it.  You see, the poem itself is called Orlando Furioso.  Now I'm not sure how many out there are aware of this, but the name Orlando is (in this case, anyway) just an Italian version of the name Roland.  That handle also happens to belong to the main character of King's Tower series.  King, in turn, was basing this character off of Leone's Man with No Name.  Leone, all this time, meanwhile, was drawing Inspiration for his own films (at least in part) from Ariosto's Orlando poem.  Which was, by the way, inspired by the various strands of myth surrounding this vague and enigmatic figure known as Roland.  It's the kind of six degrees of influence that you could make a neat little moebius strip out, with maybe just the slightest bit of good effort.  

It paints this picture of the secret and mysterious processes of creativity; a function of the Imagination that's so well hidden that even the artists involved don't have all that much of a clue its going on.  I like to think it's another bit of proof that the Romantic take on the workings of literary creativity is still more or less the correct interpretation.  What it says to me, in other words, is that guys like Jung were right when he claimed that the Imagination does its best work when it's dealing with Archetypes.  Those are the central building blocks that all the best stories are made out of.  Of course the ability to tell any kind of halfway decent story with any of them is still a gamble, even under the best of circumstances.  In Leone's case, at least, it's possible to say he was able to bottle lightning not just once, but three whole times.  King never seems to have been that lucky whenever it came to dealing with Roland and his world.  Yet at least now it might be possible to say this much in his favor.  He may very well have caught a glimpse of some kind of Archetype, however fleeting the moment may have been.  The only pity of the whole deal is he was never able to chase after and catch it down on the page.  Not in any sort of way that mattered, at least.  That almost never happens to him in his other books, yet it's what always occurs whenever he writes about the Tower.

The addition of the Orlando Furioso to the Well of Inspiration amounts to more than just another piece of the puzzle.  It's the sort of literary revelation that's able to establish and forge a genuine link between artistic mediums.  In this case, it joins King's and Leone's efforts into a closer relation than I think any Tower Junkie was aware of until now.  That raises an interesting question, though.  What is there to this Ariosto poem that Leone might have found fascinating from an artistic perspective, and what can the actual narrative within the rhyme scheme tell us about the Archetype the writer and the filmmaker were drawing from?  Well, the best place to start answering that question is to at least try and see if it's possible to provide some kind of workable synopsis for the newcomer to Ariosto's most notable work.  I think it's doable, for what it's worth.  I'm also pretty sure most readers are goin to be left wondering if I've just told some kind of elaborate joke, and if so, then where the hell's the punchline?  If I'm being honest, I think I'd better leave that up to whoever decides to read this.  Because trust me when I say, I've just stumbled upon one of the wildest, weirdest, and just plain nuts work of Fantasy ever written.  For what it's worth, it won't surprise me is most just give up, and decide it's best to skip this part.

Here's a good idea of the fair warning I'm about to dish out here.  I will be drawing from not one, nor two, but rather (count 'em) three sources.  These represent the best chance I'll have at ever being able to summarize this story to anything like a manageable level.  The first source comes in the form of a preamble introduction from an early translation provided by William Stewart Rose.  He's talking about a different poem than the one Ariosto wrote, by the way.  If that makes no sense, why would anyone need to talk about another poem if it's not the one under discussion?  Trust me, things are just getting started.  This is what Rose says happened.  "This work is a continuation of the "Orlando Innamorato" of Matteo Maria Boiardo, which was left unfinished upon the author's death in 1494. It begins more or less at the point where Boiardo left it.  This is a brief synopsis of Boiardo's work, omitting most of the numerous digressions and incidental episodes associated with these events:  To the court of King Charlemagne comes Angelica (daughter to the king of Cathay, or India) and her brother Argalia. Angelica is the most beautiful woman any of the Peers have ever seen, and all want her. However, in order to take her as wife they must first defeat Argalia in combat. The two most stricken by her are Orlando and Ranaldo.

"When Argalia falls to the heathen knight Ferrau, Angelica flees — with Orlando and Ranaldo in hot pursuit. Along the way, both Angelica and Ranaldo drink magic waters — Angelica is filled with a burning love for Ranaldo, but Ranaldo is now indifferent.  Eventually, Orlando and Ranaldo arrive at Angelica's castle.  Others also gather at Angelica's castle, including Agricane, King of Tartary; Sacripant, King of Circassia; Agramante, King of Africa and Marfisa, an Asian warrior-Queen.  Except for Orlando and Ranaldo, all are heathen.  Meanwhile, France is threatened by heathen invaders. Led by King Gradasso of Sericana (whose principal reason for going to war is to obtain Orlando's sword, Durindana) and King Rodomonte of Sarzia, a Holy War between Pagans and Christians ensues.  Ranaldo leaves Angelica's castle, and Angelica and a very love-sick (but very chaste and proper) Orlando, set out for France in search of him. Again the same waters as before are drunk from, but this time in reverse — Ranaldo now burns for Angelica, but Angelica is now indifferent. Ranaldo and Orlando now begin to fight over her, but King Charlemagne (fearing the consequences if his two best knights kill each other in combat) intervenes and promises Angelica to whichever of the two fights the best against the heathen; he leaves her in the care of Duke Namus. Orlando and Ranaldo arrive in Paris just in time to repulse an attack by Agramante.

"Namus' camp is overrun by the heathen. Angelica escapes, with Ranaldo in pursuit. Also in pursuit is Ferrau, who (because he had defeated Argalia) considers Angelica his. It is at this point that the poem breaks off.  While the Orlando-Ranaldo-Angelica triangle is going on, the stories of other knights and their loves are mixed in. Most important of these is that of the female knight Bradamante (sister of Ranaldo), who falls in love with a very noble heathen knight named Ruggiero ("Rogero" in Rose). Ruggiero, who is said to be a descendent of Alexander the Great and Hector, also falls in love with Bradamante, but because they are fighting on opposite sides it is felt that their love is hopeless. Nevertheless, it is prophecies that they shall wed and found the famous Este line, who shall rise to become one of the major families of Medieval and Renaissance Italy (it is worth noting that the Estes where the patrons of both Boiardo and Ariosto). Opposed to this prophecy is Atlantes, an African wizard who seeks to derail fate and keep Ruggiero from becoming a Christian. By the end of the poem, Ruggiero is imprisoned in Atlantes' castle. However, Bradamante (who has decided to follow her heart) is in pursuit of her love, and is not too far away. It is the Bradamante-Ruggiero story that eventually takes center stage in Ariosto's work.

Other characters of importance: Astolfo, a Peer and friend of Orlando, who is kidnaped by the evil witch Morgana and her sister Alcina; Mandricardo, a fierce but hot-headed heathen; and a young knight named Brandimarte, who falls in love with (and wins the heart of) the beautiful Fiordelisa ("Flordelice" in Rose). All play major or semi-major roles in the events of Ariosto's poem (web)".  Now, I think it's easy to tell what anyone who's gotten this far is thinking, and let me, not so much reassure you a guarantee that nope, I'm not high.  Nor did I make any of that up.  It's the synopsis of a poem by a previous writer.  Ariosto's work was written as a kind of satirical sequel, somehow, to every single piece of mixed up information you just read.  If the whole thing reads like a history report written in haste while on an acid high, then all I can do is quote from another of King's Inspirations.  "See or shut your eyes", said Nature peevishly, "I cannot help my case (web)".  It just is what it is, folks.  And we are still just getting started.  I haven't even gotten around to what Ariosto decided to do with all that!  For information on that whole affair, I think it's telling that the best source I could turn to is Wikipedia.

"The action of Orlando Furioso takes place against the background of the war between the Christian emperor Charlemagne and the Saracen king of Africa, Agramante, who has invaded Europe to avenge the death of his father Troiano. Agramante and his allies – who include Marsilio, the King of Spain, and the boastful warrior Rodomonte – besiege Charlemagne in Paris.  Meanwhile, Orlando, Charlemagne's most famous paladin, has been tempted to forget his duty to protect the emperor because of his love for the pagan princess Angelica. At the beginning of the poem, Angelica escapes from the castle of the Bavarian Duke Namo, and Orlando sets off in pursuit. The two meet with various adventures until Angelica comes across a wounded Saracen infantryman on the verge of death, Medoro. She nurses him back to health, falls in love, and elopes with him to Cathay.  When Orlando learns the truth, by finding the pair's secret garden of love, or Locus Amoenus, he goes mad with despair and rampages through Europe and Africa destroying everything in his path, and thus demonstrates the frenzy that the title suggests. The English knight Astolfo journeys to Ethiopia on the hippogriff to find a cure for Orlando's madness.

"Orlando joins with Brandimarte and Oliver to fight Agramante, Sobrino and Gradasso on the island of Lampedusa. There Orlando kills King Agramante.  Another important plotline involves the love between the female Christian warrior Bradamante and the Saracen Ruggiero. They too have to endure many vicissitudes.  Ruggiero is taken captive by the sorceress Alcina and has to be freed from her magic island. He then rescues Angelica from the orc. He also has to avoid the enchantments of his foster father, the wizard Atlante, who does not want him to fight or see the world outside of his iron castle, because looking into the stars it is revealed that if Ruggiero converts himself to Christianity, he will die. He does not know this, so when he finally gets the chance to marry Bradamante, as they had been looking for each other through the entire poem although something always separated them, he converts to Christianity and marries Bradamante.  Rodomonte appears at the wedding feast, nine days after the wedding, and accuses him of being a traitor to the Saracen cause, and the poem ends with a duel between Rodomonte and Ruggiero. Ruggiero kills Rodomonte (Canto XLVI, stanza 140^[12]) and the final lines of the poem describe Rodomonte's spirit leaving the world. Ruggiero and Bradamante are the ancestors of the House of Este, Ariosto's patrons, whose genealogy he gives at length in canto 3 of the poem.  The epic contains many other characters, including Orlando's cousin, the paladin Rinaldo, who is also in love with Angelica; the thief Brunello; the Saracen Ferraù; Sacripante, King of Circassia and a leading Saracen knight; and the tragic heroine Isabella (web)".  The fun ain't over just yet, though.

The resolution to the entire main plot of Ariosto's poem, the titular Madness of Roland, is best summarized in passing within the pages of an otherwise unrelated book, Into Other Worlds: Space Flight in Fiction from Lucian to Lewis.  It's there that another link might be established between Ariosto's poem and King's series.  Green does this by pointing out that the Orlando Furioso stands as part of a specific literary tradition, one that has its roots in what the author labels as Apocalyptic Literature.  This passing bit of insight is noteworthy as King's efforts with the Tower have often been labeled as an example of post-apocalyptic writing.  Finding out that Ariosto's own version of the Roland myth belongs, in some ways, to what might be termed an early version, or ancient strand of this sub-genre makes for some interesting further food for thought.  Even if that's the case, it doesn't erase the weirdness factor for what the poet has in store for any reader brave enough to venture onward.

According to Green, this is how it all rinses out.  "The Apocalyptic journey died hard, and when Ariosto came to send his brave and adventurous knight Astolpho to the Moon in his Orlando Furioso at the beginning of the sixteenth century, the influence was still strong - and St. John was still the Heavenly Guide.  Astolpho made his journey in search of the lost wits of the unfortunate Orlando who had been driven mad by his unlawful love for a Paynim maid.  Riding upon his hippogryph - a winged horse like Pegasus - Astolpho came to Paradise, on the summit of a great and unscalable mountain.  After stopping for a while to admire the beauties and the wonders of this other Eden, the jewels spread everywhere in rich profusion, the brightly coloured birds, the perfection of eternal Summer, he entered the great shining palace - glowing more crimson bright than any carbuncle - and found St. John waiting for him there.  The aged apostle told him that they must journey to the Moon, the nearest planet to this Earth, for there all things lost here were stored, Orlando's wits amongst them.  When evening came, accordingly, they entered into the very chariot which had carried Elias up to Heaven.  To it were harnessed four goodly coursers more red than flame, and as soon as St. John had gathered up the reins in his hands, away they flew, rising at a steep angle...up until they came to the Region of Fire which was popularly supposed to surround the Earth.  The properties of this belt were miraculously suspended for the saint and his companion to pass in safety.

"Through all this elemental flame they soar'd

And next the circle of the Moon explor'd

Whose spheric face in many a part outshin'd

The polish'd steel from spots and rust refin'd

Its orb increasing to their nearer eyes, 

Swell'd like the Earth, and seem'd an earth in size,

Astolpho wondering view'd what to our sight

Appears a narrow round of silver light:

Nor could he thence, but with a sharpen'd eye

And bending brow, our lands and seas descry,

The lands and seas, which, lost in vap'rous shade

So far remote, to viewless forms decay'd.

Far other lakes than ours this region yields,

Far other rivers, and far other fields;

Far other valleys, plains, and hills supplies,

Where stately cities, towns and castles rise;

Where lonely woods extensive tracts contain,

And sylvan nymphs pursue the savage train.

"Landed on the Moon, Astolpho followed his divine guide through the Lunar scenery, which was of a classical nature with wooded parkland 'where nymphs forever chased the panting prey'.  They came at last to a wide valley, stored in marvelous fashion with all things lost on Earth - from fame, fortune, empty desire, broken vows, to crowns, bribes, the 'lays of venal poets', women's wiles, and finally sense itself stored in vessels ranging from tiny vials to great vases.  There Astolpho came upon Orlando's missing wits, set carefully in a great heroic vase as became the lost senses of so great a paladin.  By them he found a smaller vial which held such senses of his own as he had already lost in the ordinary course of life; and this by the grace of the Saint who accompanied him.  Astolpho raised to his nostrils, and straighaway all wisdom returned to him, nor did he lose any of it again in after days.  Then carrying with difficulty the great vase which held Orlando's scattered wits, Astolpho followed his divine guide once more, and came next beneath 'a stately dome' where sit forever the Three Fates spinning the lives of all men, both living and to come; and in this House of Fortune, the knight saw many wonders to interest both him and Ariosto's contemporaries.  When these marvels were exhausted, St. John led Astolpho once more to the flying chariot, and they returned to Earth as swiftly and easily as they had come...and brought back sanity to the stricken Orlando (24-6)".  And that's all the poet gave us, folks.  

I think Rick Moranis said it better than I can.  "Everybody got that"?!  The answer, of course, is hell, no!  In fact, I'm pretty darn sure there's just a handful of question anyone can ask at this point.  First off, what the hell did I just read?  Second of all, what in the blue blazes does any of that even mean?!!

A Poem of Ironic Weaknesses and Surprising Strengths.

Well, here's the deal.  I think it's possible to dredge a clear enough answer as to what this poem is, and what it's up to.  I'm just not sure this will make it any easier to assimilate into the mindset of modern audiences, even if there's a case to be made for its overall quality as a good yarn.  To put it in the most basic terms, all that Ariosto has done here is to give his readers what has to be counted as one of the first examples of the Early Modern Fantasy novel, except that here its told in poetic verse.  Like all the most well known quest fantasies, the Orlando details the exploits of a band of heroes as they set out on a journey to achieve a goal which situates them within the confines of an inherently supernatural, and hence fantastical landscape.  In terms of the poem's main cast, I suppose it can be considered fitting that all the main characters are knights, princesses, soldiers, and warrior maidens.  As for the nature of the secondary world that Ariosto invites his readers into, the first thing to note is that it's not afraid to be bizarre.  The best description I've got on that score is to say that the author presents us with a world in which the typical setup of a Fantasy story is somewhat inverted, though by no means subverted.  Most stories of the Fantastic these days tend to run on one of two formulas.  The first is the typical quest narrative like that established by the likes of Tolkien and George R.R. Martin.  Where the setting is fantastic, and yet these are qualities that the cast of characters discover as they make their journeys.

A good example of what I mean is demonstrated by the layout of a book like The Hobbit.  It's a novel that sets up the nature and layout of its secondary world with care and precision.  With every chapter, Tolkien can be seen unraveling yet another part of the map of Middle Earth, and the various inhabitants and species that live there.  The whole affair may be set in a mythic realm, yet it's handled in such a way that even when the reader is presented with a trio of trolls straight out of Scandinavian folklore, by the time they've all shuffled on-stage, it already comes off as no more than a matter of course.  Tolkien is able to weave his spell so well that when the trolls do arrive, we just "know" that creatures like them have always been hanging around in this world.  The writer makes us see them as so much a part of Middle Earth that the landscape would seem somehow emptier without them.  This is the same strategy that Tolkien uses from one chapter of his book to the next.  After the trolls, we are introduced to the elves, and from there, the orcs (or goblins as they are called in this story).  From there, we meet Gollum, and after him, we are confronted by a type of wild wolf known as Wargs, followed by a tribe of sentient eagles, then monster spiders, more elves, and at last, human beings.  The entirety of The Hobbit is a masterclass in how to lay out the nature and contents of an imaginative, secondary world for readers.

It still stands as one of the great underrated feats of narrative craftsmanship.  Yet the rest of the practitioners of this format of the genre seem to have done their best to take Tolkien's methods to heart.  Even if you're story is set in the kind of realm that could never exist, the general approach is to try and lay out the nature of the settings and its characters in the same quasi-cartographic exploratory nature that Tolkien uses with Middle Earth.  The second type of approach used in the category of the Fantastic is what's come to be known as that of the Urban Fantasy.  In this setup, the basic story template is always the same.  Every situation stands as any and all possible number of variations on the idea of what can happen when the Fantastic encroaches on and into our mundane world.  There have been just as many tales told in this format as there have in the more standard, fairy tale approach utilized by Tolkien.  All that guys like Ray Bradbury and Rod Serling have done is to take those same fairy tale elements and apply them to modern day suburbia, and even the big city streets.  The question all this history is leading up to is where does Ariosto's poem fit in with either of these categories?  Which of these methods does he use in constructing his own version of Roland, and his Renaissance Mid World?

Well, that's sort of where the poet has a trick or two up his own sleeves.  So far as I can tell, Ariosto tends to follow the kind of formula laid out by Tolkien, more than any other approach.  In a way, this makes sense.  Ariosto was writing at a time when the idea of the modern suburb wouldn't even become a workable idea until the middle of the 1950s, and even then, it's still very much an American, as opposed to a European phenomenon.  So there's really no way he could have been a pioneer of the Urban Fantasy, not even long after the fact.  Instead, the poet makes do with the materials at hand.  Like the Brother's Grimm, he sets his epic quest in a fictionalized version of what appears to be our world as it was known or understood (for lack of a better word) during the height of the Renaissance.  Also like Grimm's Fairy Tales, the Furioso tells of a world which is fundamentally Enchanted by nature.  The writers spins his web of words into a realm populated by dragons, giants, ogres, and sea monsters, and our heroes take all of their encounters with these marvels in stride.  This is not the kind of standard that we would expect nowadays.  The way the typical Fantasy world set up tends to work for most people now goes something like this.  Even if it's a Fantasy world, the general approach of the moment is to treat the enchanted realm as the kind of place where the marvelous still isn't taken for granted.

What that means in practice is, in counter-distinction to the way the typical setup was handled by the likes of Ariosto or Thomas Malory, if a modern day Fantasy writer has this situation where a knight is traveling down the road on his way to somewhere, and he arrives at a bridge with a troll hiding under it, our current expectation for this setup demands that rather than take the whole thing in stride, and treat it as a matter of course, the protagonist instead will be framed as a modern, skeptical mindset in Medieval cloths  and appearance.  This allows the for the moment of contact with the Fantastic to have a note of both the Uncanny and/or Sublime to the hero's initial sense of shock and awe.  In this setup, St. George would be slack-jaw stunned to realize such things as dragons could even exist in his world.  This appears have become something of a standard, shared approach for both Enchanted Realm and Urban Fantasy works in recent years, and I think it's possible to see why this is.  This current "standard" approach represents not just a communal expectation on the part of the mass audience, but also what I can only describe as a kind of lingering sense of hope that always seems to reside somewhere in the back of the minds of all those faces in the aisles.  It's this same shared faculty that makes even newcomers to Steven Spielberg's E.T. look back on that moment when the young boy and the alien encounter each other for the first time with a great deal of nostalgic fondness and expectant delight.

They've been introduced to the idea that it's possible to encounter some sort of hole in the column of reality, some rift in the fabric of everyday life that can allow the extraordinary or for the wondrous to peep in from beyond the regular bounds of the mundane.  This is what we've come to expect from our Fantasy stories, and a great deal of the motivation behind it comes from a longing for the kind of Romantic outlook that might have been somewhat part and parcel even of Ariosto's period or early modernity.  For certain there is a sense that it was a key feature of the era that the poet was writing about, for a given amount of "factuality".  In other words, some of the sense of Enchantment of the Middle Ages was real, to a logical extent.  The rest, meanwhile, can be chalked up to us Moderns projecting our own Romantic longings back into an era and time period which (let's face it) none of us really know anything about.  Even Ariosto was writing of the Era of Charlemagne as an outsider looking in.  For all I know, that old timer might have been working from the same shared sense for an Enchanted Past that the rest of us still live with to this day. If so, then it counts as an early example of a very Modern imaginative phenomenon.  Romanticism we will always have with us, it seems.  There appears to be something ineradicable about it in our nature as human beings, for whatever reason.

I can't say I'm ever going to mind this Romantic streak, all that much.  I'm also going to be one of those guys who insist on keeping a level head about it all.  For my own part, I enjoy exploring the past, especially in relation to myth and the creation of stories.  However, you'll never get me to over-romanticize the whole deal.  Even Tolkien was smart enough to know the current life he lived was preferable to being even a well stipend clerk in the Age of Chaucer.  It can be seen in all the satirical jabs and barbs he hurls at the supposed heroic tradition associated with sagas like Beowulf, and other legends that followed in a similar train.  That's the part of Middle Earth that I think even die hard fans tend to overlook, that it's author can be just as critical as celebratory of it.  In that sense, it does make sense to me to claim that Tolkien might be working in the same satiric vein as that established by Ariosto.  The way the Orlando world works is that nobody in the entire cast bats an eye at learning that they live in a world of mythical creatures.  We insist on letting our own make-believe medievals have this recurrent moment of shock and awe because we are so outside the kind of mindset that Ariosto talks about, and hence, we are desperate to create and focus on any fictional scenario which would allow that moment of recognition and re-admittance into a more Enchanted frame of mind.  This must not have been as much of a problem for a writer like Ariosto, even if he was just as much of an outsider as us.

Instead, his own approach carries this straight, simple, and to the point, matter-of-fact quality that tends to create a jarring effect to modern audiences, whose expectation towards the Fantastic is to allow it all the space in the world, but never before the right amount of proper dramatic build-up.  In contrast to this "standard" setup, let's stop and unpack how Ariosto handles his introduction to what now seems to have become one of the most iconic creatures in the lexicon of modern Fantasy.  First, let's take the way the poet sets his scene.  It happens when we catch up with a girl named Bradamante.  She's one of the main heroes of this little saga, and in the scene where we're about to meet her in person, our heroine is currently on the road, journeying to meet up with the other lead knight of the story, a fellow by the name of Ruggiero in Italian.  In English, however, we just call him him Roger.  So for those keeping score.  We have a fearless maiden on a quest to find her true love, and all of it happens on account of some stuff she saw in a vision granted to her by none other than Merlin when she stumbled upon his cave (because...ya know, like ya do!).  At the start of the Fourth Canto, Bradamante is conferring about what to do next with a shady character named Brunello.  Ariosto proceeds to astound the contemporary reader by not only calling out the notion of inappropriate gazes, but also showing Brandy being smart about it.

Before this scene can go any further (and get really uncomfortable), some of the patrons of the tavern the two cast members are in raise a commotion that has everybody filing outside.  

"She saw the host and his family there,

Folk at the windows, folk out in the lane,

All gazing upwards at the heavens bare,

As if a comet or eclipse showed plain;

There flew a wondrous thing, high in the air,

She scarcely credited, nor could explain,

A winged steed, gliding, in clear daylight,

Across the sky, bearing an armoured knight.

"Broad, and of varied colours, was each wing,

And in the midst that figure shining bright,

Since his steel breastplate, a radiant thing,

Lit all around it; westward was his flight.

Yet the creature, now, did downward spring,

And midst the mountains there, was lost to sight.

This path, the host said, the sorcerer flew,

In raiding near and far, and he spoke true.

‘Sometimes he flies straight upwards to the sky,

Then sometimes seems to skim along the ground.

He bears away those pleasant to the eye,

From all the distant countryside around,  

So those who are, or think they are, all sigh,

(Though he in fact will steal what he has found)

And so, the maids are careful not to stray,

But hide their features from the light of day.

"A keep, in the Pyrenees, forms his lair,

Built on high, by spells and incantation,

All made of steel, and it shines bright and fair,

The whole world shows no finer creation;

And many a brave knight has ventured there,

Yet none return from that destination,

For I fear,’ the host said, ‘naught do they gain,

But they are all imprisoned there, or slain.’

"The warrior-maid thought on all he’d said,

Rejoicing, while believing that she would,

Without a doubt, strike the sorcerer dead,

Wielding the ring, and end his theft for good.

‘Find me a bold guide, host, to ride ahead,’

She cried, ‘who knows the way, by vale and wood;

For I must not delay, my heart beats so,

But find this enchanter, and destroy our foe' (web)".

This is by no means the most significant passage in the entirety of the poem.  However, it's also true that the vagaries of pop culture popularity have shaped the passage into the story's most notable one as a whole.  From what I'm able to tell, this seems to have been the first time that a new fictional creature was added to the halls of Fantasy.  It's this sequence above all others that has turned Ariosto and his writings into, not so much a household name, as this vague kind of underground buzz.  Like the faint heard notes of a tune that are just floating around somewhere at the back of your mind.  It means the poet has given us an accidentally ideal set of narratological bones to study out of the larger story fossil.  In terms of judging the overall quality of the passage, what hits the audience on a first read-through of the writer's stanzas is best described as a mixed combo reaction.  It's made up of intrigued interest, and the sense of something being just off-kilter enough to notice in equal parts.  The real bothersome question is, "Does any of this count as a necessarily bad thing"?  That's the part where it all gets very tricksy real fast.  Let's look at the elements we're given to work with before reaching for any rush to judgment.  The first thing we might notice concerns the prototypicality of the whole situation.

What we've got is one of the main cast in one of those quaint and cozy Ye Olde Taverns.  Everything starts out on a quiet note, yet the author is quick to introduce a blended element of world-weary knowing mixed with a slow-burn tenseness that comes from Bradamante's growing awareness that the person she's dealing with is the sort of fellow she'll have to keep up her guard around.  This tension, and the sense of potential lingering threat lying in wait for her sometime later on is then broken up by the commotion stirred by the arrival of the familiar winged beast.  Now, if by some miracle I have made this all sound like what could be an exciting read, then there's something the reader needs to pay closer attention to.  It's not just the events in themselves, it's also the way I've formatted and doled out the description of the initial meeting between Bradamante and Brunello.  In setting the scene for the modern reader, I've made ample use of the narrative tropes and verbal conventions of the modern day Thriller.  The reason I've done this is because it seemed the best possible approach needed to convey the kind of atmosphere the scene required to draw the audience in with the proper doses of danger.  Brunello is a shady character, and while Brandy has earned the title of warrior for herself by this point in the plot, the merest possibility that her new "ally" might pose a threat of violence is what makes the scene work.

Even when it comes to explaining the emotional logic of this sequence, I am relying strictly on the contemporary novelistic techniques that has defined literature since the middle of the 19th century onward, until it has developed into the dramatic shorthand utilized above.  In doing so, it is possible to say that I've altered the poet's original scheme more than just a tad.  For one thing, I can be accused of bringing the nascent subtext of Ariosto's words more into the foreground, if for no other reason than for the sake of drama, and therefore keeping the audience riveted to the action, even when it is just two people in a room talking.  It's all in the way you choose to use the character's dialogue, gestures, and glances that helps to ratchet up the tension in moments like this.  We as an audience are put on edge from the implied threat that this lug Brunello might try to take advantage of Bradamante at some point, and that sooner or later she will have to see how well she can defend herself against him.  In capable hands, this can all be the stuff that great writing is made of.  So it's therefore interesting to stop and look at the actual way Ariosto handles the inherent nature of the setup he's established for his audience:

"Though dissimulation often conceals

The inner workings of an evil mind,

Many a time some good it yet reveals,

And many a benefit therein we find,

Saving us from harm in life’s ordeals;

For those we meet with are not always kind,

In this our life, more clouded than serene,

Where envy bears many an ill, unseen.

"So, she dissimulated, twas fitting,

With one who was a master of the lie,

And held her position, ever glancing

At those rapacious hands that met her eye,

When, behold, a mighty noise, arising,

Filled their ears, as if from out the sky.

‘O Virgin Maid! O King, above!’ she cried,

And quickly ran to seek its source outside (ibid)".

If the modern Fantasy fan of today can find any compliment to pay to those words, then it might tend toward something like "Economy of Expression".  Ariosto has summarized an entire complex scene, along with an "implied" exchange, in just two short stanzas.  The best basis for comparison on offer would Tolkien's skills at brevity in summing up the Battle with the Balrog in a few short paragraphs.  Even there, however, it is somewhat telling that Peter Jackson found the need to take that moment, and turn it into its own epic set piece.  The reason the director of the adaptation did that was simple.  The necessity of the modern rules of drama demanded it, or at any rate, something like the final results was required, so far as modern audiences are concerned.  In the same way, I saw fit to take those two, short, line stanzas and turn them in the kind of descriptive prose that at the very least hints at the kind of dramatic expansion that would be required to get a contemporary reader to "buy into" the sort of conceit the poet was aiming for.  For another demonstration of the sort of dramatic expansion that I'm talking about, it's useful to check out the three part rewrite that Andrew Lang gave to Bradamante's part of the Furioso in his Red Book of Romance.  

The adaptor had to create and work in a greater number of lines of dialogue for all the characters order for the story to work its magic.  And the reason for that is pretty obvious.  Lang was smart enough to know that Ariosto's best strengths as a Renaissance poet might also translate into his greatest weakness in a new era where the format of the Modern Prose Novelistic approach reigns supreme.  In other words, there's no guarantee that what could set the public's Imagination on fire in an age when no one even knew that something like a novel could exist will be able to pull off the same narrative hat trick in an audience that has long since taught itself to read stories from the exact opposite end of the imaginative spectrum.  There was an imperceptible yet genuine shift in aesthetic sensibilities from the time when Ariosto breathed his last, to the truncated appearance of bits and pieces of his poem in Lang's own Red Book.  People had stopped thinking of Epic Fantasy in terms of verse, and had by then made a switchover to that of prose.  It's a mental transformation in the Art of Storytelling which has so far proven to be permanent, and do I even have to explain why?  Telling a story like this in prose makes so much sense for any number of reasons.  Plotting, pacing, development of characters and dialogue.  All of these benefits have allowed storytellers to expand their canvas beyond what was capable in Ariosto's day.  The discovery that prose could truly widen a secondary world has made a lot of difference.

That's the good news.  The unfortunate side of the coin is that all this arrived a great deal too late for it to make any difference to the Orlando Furioso.  The result places the critic in a very interesting sort of quandary.  How do you judge a canonical masterpiece when its format is considered out of date?  It's a hell of a challenge, and the best way to demonstrate what I mean is to give readers one more glimpse into the difficulty of trying to go in blind to a poem whose aesthetic resonances (for lack of a better word) are so darn different from our own.  Lets take one of the major highlights of Ariosto's myth for our example.  It's the scene where Bradamante goes to take on an evil sorcerer on a familiar looking flying steed.  Below is the relevant text from the poem, and Ariosto's style of narrative description:

"From wood to wood they rode, and hill to hill,

Until they reached a Pyrenean height

From which both France and Spain the view will fill,

If the air is clear, and the day is bright,

As from the Apennines, those same eyes will

Have both the Adriatic’s shores in sight,

From Camaldoli say; then, painfully,

And slowly, descended to a valley. 

"There, in its midst, a hill rose to the sky

Its summit circled by a wall of steel,

And towering, in its majesty, so high

That all the hills behind it did conceal,

And none could reach its top that could not fly,

And little to bring hope would that reveal.

‘Behold,’ Brunello cried, ‘the wizard there,

Both men and women prisons in his lair!’  

"Sheer on all four sides, the mountain gleamed,

As if smoothed with a file, by day and night,

Nor was there any path or stair it seemed,

Whereby a living soul might climb the height.

Built for a winged creature, such they deemed

That nest and lair, where naught else could alight.

And this, the warrior-maid knew, was the hour...

"...For she descended, filled with hope and fear,

To that small space within the tower’s shade,

At a snail’s pace, and then as she drew near,

Upon her horn she blew, and so conveyed

Her intent, to the mage above, outright;

With a loud cry, summoning him to fight.

"The enchanter waited not but, swiftly,

He issued from the gate, at her loud cry;

The winged creature bore him, steadily

Towards her, plunging earthwards from on high.

Ferocious the armed knight seemed to be,

And yet the maid was comforted thereby,

For he appeared to lack a lance or sword,

Or aught else that might some harm afford.

"He bore naught but a shield, on his left arm,

A scarlet cover hiding it from view;

He held a book in his right hand; a charm

He read aloud, to conjure wonders new.

And, now, a phantom lance caused her alarm,

While he scarce raised an eyelid; now, there flew

A club or mace that kept the maid at bay,

Without his touch, who glided far away.

"It was not formed by magic, his fell steed,

But born of a mare, quite naturally,

Though fathered by a griffin and, indeed,

Was winged as was its sire, quite splendidly.

While the forelegs, beak and crest agreed

With that creature, though all else, equally,

Conformed to the mother; such are found

Midst Riphaean hills, northern, and ice-bound.

"This ‘hippogriff’ he lured by incantation

From its far land, and waited not, but sought

To tame it and, with constant dedication

To the task, soon all he wished he wrought;

And in a month nigh made it his creation,

Such that it mastered every move he taught.

And then on earth, or through the air, he rode;

All else magic, but that which he bestrode.

"Though magic could indeed change its colour,

Making its hide seem yellow now, or red;

The maiden was undeceived however,

For the wearer of the ring, was not misled.

Yet all her blows but empty air did sever,

As here and there she rode, in fear and dread,

Labouring and striving, struggling there,
To demonstrate her skills in that affair.

"And when she’d exercised herself awhile

On horseback, she leapt, neatly, to the ground,

In order better to achieve, by guile,

Melissa’s tactics, ever wise and sound.

The mage to work his final spell, meanwhile

Not knowing of the ring, at last unbound

His shield and, sure of blinding all below,

Swooped, and veiled her in its baleful glow (ibid)".

I'll leave the fate of our brave heroine for those still curious enough to find out what happens to her there.  In the meantime, I can anticipate at least two reactions to all of those passages.  Both of these responses will find plenty of room to overlap with one another.  On the net positive side of things, there may be a few moments of genuine excitement, comingled with maybe a bit of surprised sense of recognition.  The two or three set pieces that might stand out the most to readers of today go as follows.  The concluding image that the poet draws of the flying creature making a swooping dive for Bradamante's head is one of those ideas that still carries a great deal of weight in the realm of Fantasy writing, even after all these years.  It's the kind of thing that first Tolkien and then Jackson drew upon in crafting Middle Earth on both the page and the screen.  The surprise sense of recognition comes from the second image Ariosto grants his readers.  This would be no more than the idea of a knight-like figure approaching a giant, dark edifice (whether it be a tower, castle, cave, or, in this case, a little of all three combined) and sounding a battle call by blowing on a horn.  We'll discuss the obvious significance of that this for King's series in a minute.  The final image the poem grants its readers might be considered as Ariosto's one moment of genuine artistic originality.  He really does seem to have been the writer with the single-handed responsibility of giving modern Fantasy the idea of the Hippogriff.

I'll confess this isn't a discovery I was expecting to make, and so here it is anyway.  At least I think that's how you sum up life in general, in a nutshell.  According to scholars like David Colbert, Ariosto took Inspiration from an otherwise unremarked upon passage from the Roman poet Virgil, and used it to craft one of the few mythical beasts that can trace its origin point to the mind of a single author (131).  It's what makes the Hippogriff such a rarity in a pantheon whose other inhabitants have to be considered as conglomerate creations, with no one artist, mythographer, or Old Wives being able to argue sole claim to ideas like elves, giants, cyclops, and the like.  The Hippogriff is is that rare exception to the rule which somehow stands as a testament to the Imaginative strengths of a single artist.  The negative side of the equation in all this, however, could remain as the same sense of frustrated expectation for most of modern readers.  It's the idea that the poet is giving us a lot of great ideas, but that he is merely describing them without fleshing any of it out like we are used to.  It should be pointed out that none of this can be considered Ariosto's own fault.  In the strictest sense, he has done nothing wrong in terms of composition.  Everything about the Furioso is written to the highest standards of the time period it was written in.  That's also sort of the problem.  Unless you're Shakespeare, the artistic gold standards of the Renaissance might very well have shifted over time to a mere dull bronze by our basic guidelines.

And the more I think that over, the more it sounds like one of the worst sorts of fate to ever befall a genuine artistic talent.  In fact, that does kind of sums up what's happened to Ariosto.  It's not a matter of a bad talent having a poor final result to show for his efforts.  Instead, what we've got is an honest good writer whose talent has been eclipsed by the passage of years, and the shifts in aesthetic taste that have come with it.  The overall story of Orlando Furioso is quite wonderful, in and of itself.  It's also written in a way that defines it as an acquired taste as far as modern audiences are concerned.  That's where the real crux and ironic pity of this poem lies.  It's narrative Inspiration is something that's best defined as off the charts, yet its method of communication now serves to dampen its original intended effects.  What we've got here is a rollicking Sword and Sorcery yarn that sounds like something out of Tolkien in one instance, and in the next comes off as a wild yet easy amalgamation of Lewis Carroll spliced in with Monty Python at their best.  I'm not making any of that up either.  As I kept reading along, while I often got lost and turned around in Ariosto's brilliant yet bonkers sense of plotting, I could tell at least tell that his ideas were real ones, and that this was a story worth telling, and that the author was at his creative peak.  It is a work of Epic that contains an easy mix of humor, thrills, and action all in one.

So of course the perfect irony is being aware that for all its strengths, there will always be readers who, even if they find something to like in it, will come away thinking something like this indefinable piece of the puzzle is missing.  A few of the smarter ones might find themselves thinking: "If only this idea could be given to someone like Terry Pratchett or Douglas Adams.  Imagine how much better it would be"!  That's a very understandable sentiment, nor is this an isolated reaction.  I've heard similar complaints made about Spenser's Faerie Queene.  It's the reader's dual realization that they've got a winner on their hands, and that the text still needs a translator in order to build up a contemporary fan base for itself.  The interesting development on that strand of thought is that there has been at least one attempt to take Spenser's words, and reiterate them in a manner and format that most of us today can understand.  This is what children's author Mary Hodges did when she decided to take Book I of The Faerie Queene and turned it into a still surprisingly effective picture book.  In addition, scholar Rebecca K. Reynolds has been busy completing not a translation of Spenser's original, so much as she has found all the right contemporary words to make his own unfinished poetic opus stand out in crystal clear English.  There was also a forgotten and overlooked Furioso translation done a long while back.

It was made by a guy called Richard Hodgens, and as is perhaps fitting, he made it for publication as part of the now classic Ballantine Adult Fantasy series line of books.  I reckon if Ariosto's poem is ever going to have another shot at being properly rediscovered by today's readers, then it might be a good idea to examine the contents of Hodgens' transliteration in order to get a starting idea of how to make the Orlando legible for the Twitter generation.  A good enough reason why this is a wise course of action can be found by taking a look at even a snippet of Hodgens' prosification of Ariosto's rhyme scheme.  Here, for instance, is how he handles the scene where Bradamante sets out to confront the evil wizard with the Hippogriff.  "The innkeeper had a horse that satisfied her.  It was good for the road, and good for fighting, too.  She bought it and set out as soon as the next morning's light appeared, up a narrow valley toward the sunlit peaks, with Brunello riding now ahead, now behind.  Through fields and woods, over hills, into thinner woodlands and up more open, higher hills again, they eventually came to a place where the height reveals, if the air is clear, both France and Spain and both the Mediterranean and the Atlantic shores.

"From there, they went down a rough, wearying road into a deep valley, and found a deeper one; a great rock rose in the middle of that barren place, and the summit of the rock was indeed encircled with a beautiful, mirrorlike wall of metal that rose so high that one had to look up to see the top, even from the outer ridges.  Obviously the castle could be reached only by flight...The walls were straight and tall and the gate was high on the peak.  The stone itself seemed to have been cut on all four sides perfectly - perpendicular as a good mason's plastered wall.  On no side could they see a path or stair in the stone, much less in the metal.  It was a good roost for a winged creature, a perfect prison for any other....Then she went riding down the slope at a slow pace to the plain under the castle.  From there, the whole castle on its high column of rock looked like a single tower, or a sword...The magician did not wait long before answering the call of her horn and her voice.  The beak, the head, and the neck of his steed appeared far, far above, the head cocked, eyeing her like a bird peering out of its nest in a tall tree.

"But there could be no bird as huge as this creature, and then the rest appeared, the cruel forelegs with their scales and claws, the shoulder of its folded wing, and peering over the edge of that, the wizard in armor.  She saw the whole body of a great stallion then, as its powerful hind legs launched it into the air, for it was part griffin, but part horse.  Its wings spread, its tail lashed, and it flapped down at her like a vulture (46-8)".  While I'm willing to acknowledge the power of the original poem in its own poetic voice, I can also see how most audiences will come away saying that Hodgens' rephrasing of the text is a vast improvement over Ariosto.  Whether such a reaction is merited or not, it is just possible that between the two of them, Hodgens and Lang show us how to deal with a work like this.  The rewrites of the former shown above owe a great deal to Tolkien, yet thankfully he manages not to make it too similar.  Part of the way Hodgens does this is by trading in Tolkien's ornate and quasi-baroque prose line in for a form of description that is more quick, glancing, and to-the-point in its delivery.  This makes for a quick sense of pacing that is true to the poem, while at the same time carrying just enough of the right stylistic hints as to the nature of the genre the text is set in.  Even the novice reader without a clue who Ariosto was would go into this adaptation and be able to tell right away that whatever story they're dealing with, it's clear as crystal that it's some kind of Fantasy Epic that they've got on their hands.

The one department where Andrew Lang seems to have a bit of an edge on Hodgens is that the former sometimes struggles with character dialogue.  There's nothing wrong with Ariosto's original exchanges between his cast, yet Hodgens efforts to try and find a complete and faithful paraphrase to the way everyone talks in the artificial language of poetry is proof enough that this sort of thing should never be tried by anyone who doesn't have the proper ear for it.  Unless you're an expert in conveying a proper sense of lyricism, such as Tolkien or Peter S. Beagle, then trying to maintain as much poetry in the prose is like continually walking into a brick wall.  It doesn't accomplish anything except more damage than is necessary.  What made Lang smart was the realization that here is a case where poetry could benefit from a good contrast in something as simple as having the entire cast speak in a manner approaching a solid, competent prose line.  Lang's intuition that prose can compliment rather than clash with Ariosto's poetic descriptions is one of those so obvious its invisible solutions that a lot of writers in the Fantasy trade can miss if they're not careful.  It's what happened in Hodgens otherwise solid effort.

Leone, King, and the Legacy of Ariosto.   

If anything of what I've written thus far makes Ariosto's poem sound like a story that's worth tackling on its own, then I'll have done my job on its part.  One of the main goals of this blog is to hunt through the dust bins and attics of literary history in order to see if any obscure name deserves its time in the spotlight.  Ariosto and the Orlando Furioso seem to fit that particular category to both the letter and couplet.  If I've done my part in giving the poem as a whole its day in the Sun, then there's still one element of its larger legacy that remains left to explore.  This would be to examine what (if any) impact it left not just on the work of Sergio Leone, but also of Stephen King?  It helps to recall that the best translation of Ariosto's Italian title is to render it in English as The Madness of Roland, and that the entire poem is itself based of an even older legendary poetic cycle known as The Song of Roland.  In other words, much like either Tom Malory , Will Shakespeare, or Steve King, Ariosto is deliberately drawing on a pre-established myth in order to tell a story.  The main difference is that the Italian poet was able to take the Inspiration behind his version of Roland and run with it.  That's what King wanted to do as well, yet it just never worked out in his case.  Finally, there's the question of how might a director of Leone's caliber have borrowed from Ariosto's artistry for his own cinematic efforts? 

I think it's obvious enough that what unites all three of these artists is their shared fascination, for a variety of reasons, with one particular myth that was spun off from the real life exploits of the historical Charlemagne.  It's like Bev Vincent says.  If you venture far enough, this whole long history of literary borrowings by multiple authors across time inevitably all leads back to "the original Roland, who was immortalized in the “Chanson de Roland,” an epic poem probably written by the Norman poet Turold around A.D. 1100. The historical Roland—Hruodlandus, governor of a borderland of Brittany—was killed by the Basques in the Pyrenees Mountains in 788 while leading the rear guard of future emperor Charlemagne’s forces returning from their invasion of Spain (283)".  It's the nature of this long forgotten poem, and its contents, that the poet, director, and novelist all seem to be reacting to, and which goes on to shape their adaptations in various ways.  What I don't think any critic has bothered to notice up to now is how this places all three individual talents within a tradition of transmission, inheritance, and reiteration.  Each writer finds themselves caught up in the fascination of the Roland legend, and various elements that go along with it.  Therefore each of their respective works chooses to highlight what stands out best about the legend in their minds.  One element unites all three of them.

This is the classic literary trope of the Hero with a Tragic Flaw.  It's something that's most often associated in our minds with writers like Shakespeare these days, yet the trope has had a longer shelf life than the Elizabethan stage, and it can be found as far back in works like Beowulf.  At the core of this idea rests an entire thematic structure centered not just on the flaws of a particular individual, but also how the literary portrayal of a character can be made to symbolize an entire way of life.  In the case of both Ariosto, Turold, and the Beowulf Poet, each writer seems to be tackling the same idea.  It's the conceit of a protagonist who represents an entire way of life that is fast becoming obsolete as the society and world cultures around him begin to evolve into a more civilized mode of living.  This is the core inner conflict which lies at the heart of the external struggles of Beowulf and Roland.  Both men are warriors at their core.  Even when they are capable of being placed into roles of leadership, they are still confronted with the same dilemma.  It's the one that Henry Fonda's character in Once Upon a Time in the West encounters, at first with surprise, and then with a rueful sense of understanding.  At one point, Fonda is given the chance of leaving the outlaw life behind, and becoming a gentlemen.  It's the same choice that Turold and Ariosto's Roland tries to make during the course of his own Epic legend.

Much like this earlier version of Roland, however, Fonda soon realizes that his own personal flaws will always negate this option for his chances.  So that the final result is very much like how Christopher Frayling describes it in his DVD commentary for OUATITW, "He's an old style guy whose got to settle things by shooting people.  There's no point in pretending anymore (web)".  This is telegraphed in the moment where Fonda's badman rides into the final scene to settle scores with Charles Bronson's iteration of the Man With No Name.  As Fonda rides in he takes in the scenery of a railroad being built, and with it the implication that his whole world is at an end, and that if he's not careful, he'll follow with it.  The tragic qualities of his character is emphasized in this moment, as Fonda looks on with a knowing sort of smile on his face.  It gives his final moments in the picture this kind of bittersweet elegiac quality, like he's already become something like a walking ghost, whose time ended long ago, even before the action started.  That's the same conflict that the original Roland finds himself faced with.  He thinks he can belong to the world of courtly chivalry exemplified by Charlemagne.  Yet the truth of the matter is he is always less civilized than the Saracens he's committed to opposing.  Even their own king, Marsile, has a better right to be counted as part of the future than him and his old warrior ways.  This is the meaning of the downfall of characters like Roland, or Beowulf, they can't adapt and so fade away.

It's a theme that's been around since Homer, and Ariosto seems to have known all about it.  What's interesting about the way he handles this material is that he takes what was once inherently tragic, and turns it all around in to a kind of farce.  The Orlando Furioso is more properly considered as a comedy, or a Mock Epic.  It's full of all these larger than life characters who straddle the line between being heroes, villains, and clowns all at once.  Ariosto is able to apply this light satirical touch to the traditional Tragic Epic and turn it into a comedy because he could never not be aware of the inherent ridiculous nature of the heroes at the heart of the Chanson.  He knew that a figure like Roland could be either tragic or comic, depending on how the reader chooses to view him and his choices.  For the author of the Orlando it is the ongoing note of humorous absurdity that predominates in his reception of the Turold saga, and that has gone on to shape his own poetic masterpiece.  Ariosto recognizes the flaws in Roland, and yet he also sees that these faults can be just as funny as tragic, and so that's how he ends up treating the whole affair.  Roland doesn't even die in Ludovico's version of the legend.  He just experiences a temporary lapse of reason, and then has his commonsense brought back to him at the end.  It's the simplest narrative arc in literature, and Ariosto uses it to comment on human nature.

It's this note of satiric comedy that Leone seems to have picked up from his experiences with the Furioso poem.  This is perhaps one of the most notable features of the director's films.  The popular perception of films like the Dollars Trilogy is one that finds them in a kind of ironic place.  They're still popular as ever, yet tend to be taken at a level of face value that I don't think the filmmaker ever meant.  The funny thing is how this unironic stance toward the Eastwood series counts as almost a complete 180 degree reversal from their initial reception back in the mid-60s.  Back then, a movie like Fistful of Dollars was seen as part and parcel of the social movements that were a staple of that era.  Leone made a name for himself at the height of the Vietnam years, and the worldwide reaction to that conflict.  It's kind of funny to look back in retrospect, as you can't quite tell if the release of Eastwood's breakout performance was a matter of chance or otherwise (a fact which might have helped set the mind a young Steve King on fire).  What can't be denied is that it did count as serendipitous.  The Man with No Name counts as a modern archetype that was able to arrive in the right place with perfect timing.  I think this character might even be one of the few 60s counterculture icons that has been able to keep up a reputation long after the 20th century became the 21st.  Yet as pointed out, there's an irony to it all.

Nor would the punchline have been lost on Leone, who was reputed to have the kind of sardonic outlook that could appreciate having the joke turned round on himself.  Eli Wallach, Clint Eastwood's co-star, once said that what made him willing to go to Italy and work on the The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly was being shown a rough cut of that film's title sequence, and seeing an animated Civil War canon being used on the director's own name.  It told the actor that the man had an ego, yet he was willing to be shot down.  It's the same kind of approach and outlook that Ariosto utilized in the Furioso.  Much like the satirical Chivalric poem, the landscape of Leone's own Mock Westerns is one that runs on the rule of what might be called ironic heroics.  His stories can be spoken of as containing people who do the right thing.  The joke just rests in the fact that very few if any of them ever start out that way.  In A Fistful of Dollars, for instance, the Man ends up saving the life of a family, yet he's just looking for a chance to make a bit of profit for himself to begin with.  If it means pitting a pair of warring outlaw gangs against each other, then so be it.  It's not until the family comes into the picture that he finds himself taking action against the villains in a more traditional way.  With the world of Orlando, the situation is almost inverted.  Roland and the various other knights of the poem set out with an initial, lofty goal of waging (in their minds) a just war.  So it never takes long for the unforeseen to happen.

Two fighters on opposite sides of a conflict turn out to be lovers, thus highlighting the senseless of most wars.  Or, as in the case of Tuco and "Blondie", many of the participants in the battle are only in it for themselves.  The main character, the titular Orlando, even loses his mind over a girl he can't get over,  thus necessitating that surreal trip to the moon that Green summarizes above.  It's all part of the theme that emerges from the finished poem.  Ariosto is concerned with cutting away all of stated pretense and false facades that everyone puts up as a mask or buffer between their true nature and others.  The story (or rather the series of intricate, interconnected narratives that make up the totality) of the Furioso is one where a large cast of characters find themselves in situations that rip off the masks they like to wear, and thus, like the best satire, shines a light on Human Folly, and allows all the poems major heroes, from Roland, Roger, and most of all Bradamante to put aside their own personal illusions, and learn how to live a better form of life.  One that would allow them to become actual heroes, as opposed to a collection of false faces that have that title applied to them.  This same strategy seems to be at work with Leone's films in a modified form.  The action always opens in a world where the viewer gets the sense that the mask of respectability has already been ripped clean off, and all that's left is the dark secrets hiding underneath.  Every film has the sense of taking place in the aftermath of a social crisis.

This sense of social fallout is real, and much like his Renaissance predecessor, Leone is using the conventions of the Western in a similar manner to how Ariosto used the tropes of Heroic Epic.  Their approach is not deconstructive but rather transfigurative.  Both artists are playing with the conventions of their chosen formats, and for similar reasons.  The first is the obvious one of not so much turning either the Western or the Heroic Fantasy on its head, or throwing out the contents of the tub, baby and all.  It's instead more of finding ways to use the Codes of Chivalry or the Noble Outlaw to point out how the culture that holds these values up as the highest of ideals is also in the mind numbing habit of either not caring to live up to them, or else they pay the merest lip service to it in public, and use it to cover the usual round of vices and price tags.  Both Leone and Ariosto create secondary worlds that allow Vice, Folly, and their various agents no place to hide.  In Orlando Furioso, morality is what catches up with you while you're making other plans.  The same principle holds true for Leone's West.  Various knights set off on quests thinking their journey means one thing, only to achieve their original goals by altering themselves for the better.  Likewise, anti-heroes surprise themselves by doing the right thing in trying to chase after as much vice as they can get their hands on, only to end up as various folk icons.

What Leone and Ariosto accomplish is a satirical transformation of their receptive genre conventions that are achieved with a level of creative intelligence and ingenuity that is of a radically different kind from the current of Tinseltown aimlessness that makes up the current pop culture landscape.  Perhaps the fact that this same current setup appears to be in a state of disintegration is part of what accounts for people watching films like The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, and treating it all with a straight face, when the full meaning was able to be both simple and complex at the same time.  As for what King might have taken away from the Orlando Furioso, that's proven a more difficult question to answer, if I'm being honest.  Out of all the possible sources I've searched through, I've found just two pieces of critical discourse that come anywhere near to connecting the Tower series with Ariosto's poem.  The punchline there is that just one of them deals with the idea of King as an individual talent inheriting his materials from any kind of literary tradition.  The first is a Retro-Review of the Tower books as a whole, by King scholar Michael R. Collings.  The second is an essay entitled Roland the Gunslinger's Generic Transformations, by Michele Braun.  It forms part of an edited collection of scholarly articles on Stephen King's Modern Macabre, compiled by Patrick McAleer.  It's the second essay by Braun that has proven to be the most helpful in figuring out what, if any debt King's novels owe to the Orlando.

Like the title of her essay says, her main focus is on the various transformations the figure of Roland has gone through over the years.  It's to Braun's credit that she does make at least the initial efforts at a connection between King's writings on the Tower, and those of Ariosto.  For her, the key connection is the idea that both incarnations of this archetype center around an internal conflict of inner madness.  This is an interesting angle to begin establishing the various possible thematic affinities between the poem and the novels in King's series.  Her major problem is that a lot of what she says runs the risk of being generic and repetitive.  Her biggest flaw is that she fails to note the biggest distinction between the madness of King's Roland is that it differs from his 16th century counterpart.  It's pretty clear after just a few passages that Ariosto's Orlando is just as much a clown as he is a traditional, chivalric knight.  It is true, as Braun points out, that the Gunslinger and the Paladin both fall under a spell of insanity, yet the key difference is the effect toward which each writer is working towards in their respective uses of the character.  In King's hands, the ongoing question of Roland's mental equilibrium leads to what can only be described as a portrait of the classical Romantic Gothic hero.  Here is where Braun does give us one helpful insight.  "Roland begins the tale resembling Eastwood's lone hero, but by the end of the story, he is transformed into someone who can identify with and value his companions (73)".  She doesn't bother to notice that doing so makes Leone's outlaw into this Wordsworthian Romantic figure.

Ariosto's entire approach, by contrast, remains one of comic satire.  The narrative device of Orlando's madness becomes the vehicle which allows the author to serve up a running commentary on the flaws of his society.  Much like with Swift or Twain, Ariosto applies the comic form to the world of Medieval Romance because he's aware that doing so will allow him the chance to let his Imagination take over and have as much fun with the possibilities this affords as he can manage.  The result is this brilliant topsy-turvy world that Lewis Carroll would have been proud of.  All throughout the poem's runtime, Ariosto's allows these nonsensical encounters to poke fun not so much as the genre of Heroic Fantasy, but rather of how the men and women of have a nasty habit of trying to leech off the conventions and tropes of the Epic for their own selfish ends.  In doing so, the poet signals his awareness of what was once a commonplace in "civilized" society, but has since become an obscure and forgotten practice.  The flowering of the Renaissance meant that you had all these warring factions of the nobility going around looting, pillaging, and violating the people, laws, mores, and customs of those under their care.  They would then add insult to an entire catalogue of various injuries by claiming that they and their illustrious households where descended from the line of famous heroes from the world of mythology.

I wish I could tell you I was making this part up, however a brief look through the pages of studies like Jean Seznec's Survival of the Pagan Gods will give you all the documentary proof needed to demonstrate that this was an actual practice that even the Royals of Shakespeare's day got caught up in.  These days fan bases are still mocked for holding a particular movie or comic close as something important to them.  Well, back in Ariosto's time, the upper classes would go out of their way to convince you that they were the great grand ancestors of figures like Hercules and Athena, of all the damn things.  For British practitioners of this illogical past time, the chosen favorite ancestor was, of course, none other than King Arthur.  I think this last factoid sort of reveals the not so hidden logic of these odd choices.  The fact that not just the Royal Household, but also those of the nobility would have family trees drawn up connecting their bloodlines all the way back to Camelot all points for Seznec to the idea that the ruling classes all believed this particular tactic might be a way of convincing the masses of the authority to rule them all as monarchs.  It's a very selfish and simple-minded thing to do, and my basic impression is that part of the point of Orlando Furioso is to poke holes in this sort of co-option.  It means that while Orlando is often the biggest punchline bag of the poem, none of it is meant to serve as a condemnatory deconstruction of the Heroic Epic genres in and of itself, as critics have suggested.

Instead, Ariosto seems concerned with all of the various ways that certain members of the audience might be driven to take a metaphorical treasure chest of tropes, and twist the contents into something that contradicts what they originally stand for.  For better or worse, this version of Roland is chosen as the one to personify all of these negative aspects of society that Ariosto wants to satirize.  As a result, while this might count as the most amusing version of the character, he also counts as the most pathetic.  It was also the last appearance of this archetype until first Robert Browning, and then King himself either found or tried to create one more role that was fitting for the character.  Without either or their later efforts, you would be hard pressed to consider Ariosto's Orlando as someone with the makings of either the Man with No Name, or else the postapocalyptic Gunslinger in him at all.  So does this mean that there's no chance that King borrowed anything from Ariosto?  That the American author might not have even heard of the Italian poet's work at all?  Well, bear in mind this is all speculation.  However, I'd like to argue that there are at least three aspects of the poem that might have found their way into the later Dark Fantasy novels.  The first comes from the appearance a very specific trope found in the works of both Ariosto and King.  The second is the shared nature of their fictional worlds.  The third is down to the possibility of one, specific, shared theme between the poem and the novels.

The shared trope that exists across the literal generations that exists between the first published edition of the the poem in the Renaissance, and The Gunslinger in the early 80s is the one contained in Ariosto's title.  The idea that the main character of a story is insane in some fundamental way is by no means an original concept.  Long before Ariosto added his own modifications to Roland's legend, The Epic of Gilgamesh features a moment where the title character snaps after the murder of his friend, and the rest of that saga is concerned, at least in part, with finding out whether the world's first literary hero can come to terms with his own lapse of reason.  Braun herself even posits that the pride of the original Chanson Roland is best considered as a loss of wits.  And long after Ariosto took that idea and ran with it as a method of comic satire, writers who came later, such as Poe, Dostoyevsky, and Ken Kesey penned various works of literature in which it's clear the main lead is never quite right in the head.  Sometimes these protagonists are villains ("The Tell-Tale Heart"), at other times they can manage to be heroic in spite of their imbalanced minds (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest), and much like with the Furioso doing the right thing is what they need in order to help push them back towards sanity.  The point is that none of this makes the idea of the hero of a Fantasy series suffering from a loss of his or her own mind all that far out of the norm.  Instead, it's one of the more obscure traditions in fiction

Hell, even before Roland made his hardcover debut, comic book heroes like the Punisher and even Batman all the way in the 1930s proved there was a market for hero figures whose grasp on rational thought was typified as precarious at best.  Therefore it is just possible to go with part of Braun's thesis that Roland fits into this category of unhinged main characters.  What I think she fails to do is go further with this notion by seeing just how it is explored in Tower books proper.  She's back and forth on the notion of where the madness of King's Roland begins, yet she gets close to the truth when she wonders if it's possible that the character has always been a few beers shy of a full sixpack before the first line of The Gunslinger is even read out loud?  Here is where a closer examination of a still essential essay by Robin Furth would have been of greater assistance.  While I still maintain that The Dark Tower as a whole is never quite able to be a complete or successful creative idea, I believe that the themes that Furth discusses in Roland, the Tower, and the Quest still remain as a valid reading of the essential point that King was trying to approach.  I will go even further and say that the themes discussed by Furth are capable of a validity outside of the Mid-World books.  That they are a palimpsest of a running theme throughout the entirety of King's fictional oeuvre.  It's concerns all the lessons that society teaches.

Furth posits Roland as the product of a toxic environment.  It's the basic concept of how the ruling passions of any given society tends to nurture human nature, and whether this can be deemed as either a good or a bad thing.  A healthy culture will nourish and produce a well-adjusted child.  A decadent and backwards social community that only pays lip service to the demands of morality in public, while indulging in all manner of vice and violence, is bound to produce offspring that will grow up idolizing the ways of the gun and the sword, as opposed to the bonds of trust and fellowship.  King's Roland is meant to be seen as the final product of just such a skewed social order.  In a later essay, Regret and Redemption, written for a collection of critical pieces assembled by Stephen Spignesi, Furth posits that Roland's ultimate fate is meant to function as a form of judgement, combined with a strange, merciful form of punishment.  His character is being forced to undergo a constant molding process, one that still isn't complete by the time the final line of the last book in his adventure ends.  Again, it seems not just a possible, but a probable interpretation of the actions of the series.  The character's ultimate struggle is not just to protect a gothic edifice which symbolizes the Order of Things, but even more so the need to unlearn all he's ever known about what it means to be a true hero.  In Roland's case, this means having to find a different way of being from just about every lesson he's ever learned.  It's a daunting task for most of us here in real life.  Yet it's the real journey that the Gunslinger is on from start to finish.

The true goal for King's Man with No Name is to see what it means to be a normal human being.  It's a lesson that fictional characters have been learning all the way back to the Age of Shakespeare, and Ariosto's version of the archetype is no different.  The madness that Orlando undergoes is ultimately meant as a learning experience.  The loss of the character's wits in the poem is portrayed as a sign of a weakness in the knight's moral character.  The basic thrust of the concept is the same as King's, yet the Renaissance poet frames everything in a comic, rather than a Gothic masque.  As such, the tonal contrast might be enough to throw even knowledgeable Tower Junkies off balance, as most of us aren't all that used to seeing one of the icons of modern Horror portrayed in a light that wouldn't be out of place in a Monty Python film.  The version of Roland that Ariosto gives us in his poetry stands out from all his other iterations by being the most lighthearted incarnation.  It's a tonal contrast that is matched not just by the Chivalric version of the Gunslinger, but also by the overall nature of the world of the poem.  This is where a look at Stephen King's own secondary world can help show the similarities.

In an earlier piece I did on the Tower mythos, I described the fictional cosmos King created for his cast

of characters as something akin to this ultimate, living library.  If I'm being honest, that's still the best description I've got.  Roland's Mid-World is nothing less than an amalgamation of different eras, pasts, and landscapes from a veritable cornucopia of some of the greatest and most well known books and films of not just the 20th century as King knew it, but also from the written literature of earlier eras.  One minute, a book can start out as this seemingly straightforward sounding Oat Opera.  A compound brew of Sergio Leone and Louis L'Amour.  Then, as the action goes on, things start to get a bit more trippy.  The reader begins to notice details that you normally don't see in your typical sage brush saga.  If you you open your story with a shot of Clint Eastwood riding through the desert on a donkey, and then have him pass through what looks like the ruins of a modern gas station, complete with hallowed out, antique cars, and old, rusted, modern day mechanical equipment, then even the most inattentive reader or viewer is going to notice something's amiss.  That sort of detail is bound to strike an off note to most audiences.  This goes double for an age that tends to like their stories streamlined and neatly delineated.  If you're going to mix and match genre elements, then the writer has one of two options.

You can either try and provide the best damn good reason possible for why the setting of the story looks and acts the way it does.  Or else you can go the more perilous route of taking refuge in stylistic audacity.  This is where the artist decides to just focus in on wherever they think the story is taking them, and questions of feasibility be damned.  What matters more is the Inspiration and the potential Art that might be contained in any part of it.  Believe or not, and no matter how strange this must sound, there have been times when this sort of imaginative tightrope walk has been able to succeed.  The best example I have of an artist committing to the inherent surreality of the creative idea would have to be Jim Henson's Labyrinth.  That entire movie is just the director asking if his audience will go along with him for what turns out to be just one, off-the-wall mind trip, with a soundtrack provided by Ziggy Stardust for good measure.  The fun part about all that is in the way Henson proves that his own quirky brand of artistry is enough to carry the day right up to the finish line.  To his credit, King seems to be trying to do at least something of a similar nature with the world of the Gunslinger.  The sad part about that is while he counts as a definite talent, it just doesn't run in the same stream as Henson's.  Or at least it's never capable of going there in quite the same way.  King's Muse works best when he's given the modern, contemporary world as his main stage, and then allowed to toss things going bump in the night into the mix.  That's all.  It's what he remains the best at.  Stepping outside this stage is a risk, at best.

And it shows in how the entire Tower series is one big chronicle of the writer's struggle to make the pictures in his head cooperate like they normally do when writing about night terrors paying visits to any number of small New England towns.  With the Towerverse, King finds himself confronted with much the same idea as the one Ariosto had.  It's this vision of a wild and wonderous crazy-quilt world.  One that is capable of harboring innumerable chances for wonder and enchantment, as well as fear and terror.  I get the impression that Mid-World is meant to be something equivalent to the psychological landscapes of Williams Blake.  That guy made paintings that believe in the possibility of monsters and marvels all wrapped up in to one.  At the same time, I think it might be telling that the reason Blake was able to succeed as well as he did was because he seems to have had this instinctive understanding that the worlds he saw in his head could never truly be captured in the novelistic format.  It had to be either poem or paint. It could never translate into solid prose.  Perhaps that's the real tragedy of Roland's secondary world.  It wants to be Blakean, and perhaps not even the scope of Tolkien's mental prowess is capable of pulling it off.  Most likely no one can, and hence the final product has no choice except to suffer for the lack of such human capabilities.  Whatever the case, that crazy-quilt remark was honest.

In describing King's main Tower setting as a living library, I mean that if you go on long enough, you'll soon find yourself in a setting and situation straight out of John Sturges' The Magnificent Seven, and confronting villains that fight with lightsabers, and modified, deadly version's of Quidditch Sneetches.  I'm not even making up any of that.  You can read all about it in Book 5, Wolves of the Calla.  That's the kind of world King cooks up for his readers.  It's a patchwork hodgepodge of various texts and films that have either made up the history of Literature in general, and the Horror and Fantasy genre in particular.  Along with this, King also finds plenty of room to include the minutia of classic Westerns of cinema past.  These and other ingredients keep cropping up throughout the page count of each novel in the series, whether as a structural element of the plot, or else as a litany of references; some of them popular, others obscure.  Perhaps the most remarkable thing about King's approach is that it is nothing new.  It's possible to see Ariosto operating on what appears to be more or less the same strategy over the course of the Furioso.  Much like with Roland's Mid-World, the fanciful Medieval landscape that Orlando must make his way through in search of his own mind is also reflective of what were the then most popular literary, artistic, and historical references of Ariosto's own social milieu.  The major difference is that all the reference points that the poem alludes to have all disappeared into the past.

When we read this poem, the reader finds themselves confronted with what is essentially an antique, Baroque version of the same kind of setting as that which King evokes within the Tower's pages.  It is the concept of a secondary world as one great big, Babelian library.  A grand universe of allusion, where even a simple walk through a well lighted woods can never quite remain just that.  The characters in either setting are simultaneously having an adventure of their own, all while sharing stage space with the bold explorers, wandering minstrels, lost children, and numerous fantastical creatures and beings that make up the Great Woods of Literature, all of which finds itself compacted into one and the same imaginative space.  It is the approach that King uses, and more or less the exact same technique that Ariosto relied on in order to tell his Epic in verse.  Even Leone can be said to have copied the notion from his Renaissance predecessor.  For the longest time now, literal generations of cinema buffs have made a cottage industry of pointing all the various allusions and nods the director makes to all the Westerns that are his Inspiration.  Frayling's own biography of the director is perhaps the most informative demonstration of this pastime.  The biographer's casual mention of the Ariosto connection, however, reveals an extra layer of potential intertextuality, one not even Frayling seems aware of.

It hints at the possibility that Leone learned all about the art of hidden narrative quotation from deciding to hunt down a copy of the poem whose contents used to delight him as a child watching a truncated version of Ariosto's story on a puppet stage.  If this surmise is true, then Ariosto's seemingly typical practice of narrative allusion with respect to both action, dialogue, plotting, and general world building amounts to a literary convention that has managed one of the most successful and undetected translations from the page to screen in the history of world Literature and Cinema.  Assuming that King is being honest in his fandom for Leone's films, there's no reason to doubt that he might have picked up the same allusive inclination and technique when crafting his own version of Roland and his world.  In addition to this, there is one aspect to the Furioso that makes me think King has at least some kind of greater familiarity with this early modern piece of storytelling than has been regularly assumed.  At one point in the proceedings, Ariosto makes mention of the Three Fates who create the web and pattern of all human life.  For those who are unaware, King has made ample use of this same trio of characters before.  Once in a direct fashion, while the other times he utilizes the concept behind the Fates in a more symbolic way.  Nor is this an element confined to the Tower series proper.  In his 1994 novel Insomnia, King introduces his readers to a triad of creepy little bastards known as the Bald Doctors.  He imagines them as these invisible, spectral entities that start to hang around every time someone's number is up.

Think the conceit of Final Destination if it was executed by someone with an English Major degree and you're there.  A bit further on in this book, the reader learns that the Doctors are really just the Fates of classical mythology.  They are, in fact, the same trio of life management overseers that we meet in the pages of Ariosto's Orlando.  There's even an added bit of shared thematics in that King's version of the Classical Fates are also concerned with the birth of a child by the name of Roland.  It's part of their job, in the novel, to see that the hero of the Tower can grow up to be just that.  Even King's dramatic device of imaginatively situating these Doctor Fates as aethereal beings who are normally invisible to ordinary perception turns out to be something of an unoriginal borrowing on the author's part.  This can be demonstrated when we turn to a study of the Furioso, written by Peter Marinelli.  He traces the Renaissance poet's use of the Fates back to allegorical explorations of "Hopes and fears (169)".  Much like King, Ariosto appears to have been fascinated with the nature of Fate and Free Will, even going so far as to try and see if he could explore it in his own Roland myth.  Also, just as with the modern New England writer, the old Italian poet uses an assortment of figures and topoi from the world of myth as a means of exploring these ideas within a fantastical fiction setting.  The results are very familiar.

Marinelli sums up the poet's use of these various mythic topos when he points out that, "They come in bizarre Ariostan forms, but they are not totally unfamiliar. They are comic variants of images we have noted in numerous museum pictures, the broken things under the chariot of the Triumph of Time, the melancholy leavings and spilth of shattered glasses and insect-depredated bouquets in many a Vanitas picture of the Dutch moralists. Implicitly, all the desired and hunted things of the Innamorato and Furioso are in this lunar dustbin-the beauty of women, fabulous armor, kingdoms, and power; "implicitly" because all these earthly prizes are here in an emblematic guise, as Platonic types of their true nature...presented with withering laughter in their essential decadence...At this point the poet's posture and tone more than ever suggest" both a philosophic and somewhat existential "withdrawal into a Minerva's tower of wisdom to watch the furious scavenging for booty below (170)".  Marinelli is quick to note, however, that the overall direction of the poem is not one of futility and resignation, but rather more akin to a sense of ethical admonishment.  This aspect of the work comes to the fore when the critic explores Ariosto's use of the Roman poet Lucian as a partial aspect of his satirical models.

"Though Ariosto occasionally borrows Lucian's ironic voice, his is a very particular use of Lucian for his own purposes, one in which the concept of Fate with its clumsily tangled strings is adapted to his own conception of Providence. Like More and Erasmus, he obviously rejoiced in the satirist's skeptical scrutiny of human folly, but just as obviously he ignores another aspect of Lucian's art, mockery of the synod of gods and cynicism about all philosophical systems. In contrast to his model, Ariosto looks up as well as down, considering the source of order against the sources of disorder. Where Lucian is concerned solely with life on earth, under the gaze of a confused and harried Zeus who is not really in control of the Fates and is all too human himself in his desire and his rage, Ariosto sees life on earth in dependent counterpoint with supernal direction: Fortune is the shadow of Providence, in no way a competitor. The endless folly of man is a delightful endpoint for Lucian; for Ariosto, even madness is subsumed under a divine organizing principle and has its uses in achieving a total design. 

"The poet's stance is philosophic rather than merely satiric, asserting an ultimate power overarching the...earthly confusion, even if often dark and inscrutable itself. Lucian may mock wayward Zeus, shrewish Hera, seductive Aphrodite, and perpetually adolescent Apollo-an unruly many incapable of functioning as one-but to his own deity Ariosto repeatedly attributes something like a sense of humor as well as a mysterious kind of benevolence as "Gran Motor" and "Superno Amore." More than that, the "All-Mover" has a definite end in mind and will not stay forever to watch it impeded (188)".  This all jibes surprisingly well with the themes King explores in Insomnia.  It's there, in this now somewhat obscure text that he posits the idea that life is something like a contest between the concepts of the Random and the Purpose.  In other texts, as early as Salem's Lot, we find King falling back on these twin ideas.  There he refers to them as the Red and the White, in what is meant as a clear reference to the game of Chess.  The idea of life as a Chess match between Apollonian (White) and Dionysian (Red) forces seems to have been a lifelong fascination for the Master of Horror.  With the help of scholars like Marinelli, we can see that this is something of a shared interest, one that goes all the way to Ariosto.

Which brings me to the third and final link between the Renaissance poet, the 60s counterculture filmmaker, and the American Gothic writer from Maine.  If there's anything that The Dark Tower shares with the Orlando Furioso, then the best way to sum it all up is provided, I believe, by the words of literary critic Peter Wiggins.  Something that he says in his book, Figures in Ariosto's Tapestry, is what probably gets as close as anyone's ever going to come in terms of providing the ultimate meaning between the various layers of each work with something like a good one word summary.  I'd like to first preface the terms Wiggins chooses to describe Ariosto's ruling theme by bringing up the closest analogue for the idea that can be found through use of the nearest similar phrases in King's series.  Just a bit of fair warning on this part.  We will be dealing with what happens when an artist tries to come up with a make-believe vocabulary for the sake of creating the idea of a "lived-in" secondary world.  To give an sense of how perilous this approach can be, Tolkien still remains the undisputed champion of this method.  Even when the words chosen for the languages of Middle Earth are so ornate as to feel like the reader has stumbled upon a long forgotten offshoot of Medieval Latin, the author's attention to the poetic detail that can exist in the very sound of the words is enough to carry over all the heavy freight he wants his made up vocabulary to have with a flawless seamlessness as to amount to magic.

It's a testament to Tolkien's talent that he can grant an invented language something close to actual dignity.  He's also, so far as I can tell, the only one who ever did it all that well.  It's an achievement that every other fantasist afterwards has had to live and struggle in the shadow of.  No other story or franchise I'm aware of has ever come close.  It means that when most authors try to create a made-up vocabulary for their fantasy realms, then the results will always be on a sliding scale of hit and miss.  This is nowhere more apparent than with the various terms that King has conjured up to summarize the main themes of the Tower Universe.  He will rummage through the dead tongue of Ancient Egypt for a word like Ka.  In it' original context, it means something close to Soul, or Mind and/or Mentation.  King uses it as a catch-all term for Fate or Destiny.  Then there's the author's chosen riff on the above creative decision: ka-tet.  It's a made up portmanteau meant to signify the varying levels of social bonds which tend to exist in any culture on both a personal and collective level.  This sense of interconnectedness is carried over to King's final made up word for the evening: khef.  If you're thinking what I am, then don't worry.  No need to say gesundheit.  I didn't sneeze, that's just the best term that popped into the writer's mind for some reason.  Like I say, only Tolkien ever managed to turn this practice into a kind of poetry.

The rest of this notion has no real choice except to exist on a ladder containing various levels of mediocrity, with maybe a few motes of skill scattered in here and there.  The last fictional phrase that King gives us (the one that sounds like a cough) is the one with the greatest amount of weight assigned to it.  No matter how awkward it is, this verbal equivalent of a hacking Flue symptom is supposed to symbolize, in Robin Furth's description, "many different things, including water, birth, and life force. It implies all that is essential to existence (12)".  She further asserts that "Behind the multiple meanings of this term lies a philosophy of interconnectedness, a sense that all individuals, all events, are part of a greater pattern (ibid)".  To cut through both the awkward and fancy vocabulary, the meanings that King is trying to assign to these words all seem to point to just one origin.  The writer of The Dark Tower seems to possess a lifelong fascination for an old idea known as the Doctrine of Correspondences.  It counts as a literary term, of sorts, though its usage can extend beyond the boundaries of art.  In strictly creative terms, however, this idea saw its closest heights in works of fiction reached during the Renaissance, and in the plays and poetry of writers like Shakespeare, Marlowe, Spenser, and Sidney.  It also happens to be a fascination that King shares with none other than Ludovico Ariosto.  The Orlando is a poem shot through with this notion of "As Above, So Below".

If we posit the theory that King might be aware of the Furioso, and it's connections to the collective mythology of the Roland character, then (again) it might be possible to speculate that all the American author is doing with the series is trying his damnedest to honor the themes of the earlier Italian source material.  To be fair, this idea of King trying to live up to Ariosto as a literary model makes a great deal of sense once you tie in not just the complexity of themes, but also the commonality between recurring characters and figures such as the Fates, combined with the topsy-turvy hodge-podge nature that the worlds of each Roland is presented with.  If King can be spoken of as writing an Orlando for the modern age...then I'm afraid Ariosto still does it a whole lot better.  No offense, it's just...there it is.  What this hypothesis allows us to do is pinpoint the final shared connection between Orlando and the Tower by turning at last to Wiggins' summary term that explains what the Renaissance poem, and by extension the American book series, really means at their shared core.  The important word that Wiggins zeroes in on is called: Fede.  It's not a made up term.  It's a real word.  In fact, it's Latin; ancient Greco-Roman, to be exact.  It can also be written out as Fidei, or Fedelis.  From there, the meaning of the word becomes more graspable, yet that's a topic others have to make up their own mind's about, not me.

The point is that it is this concept of Fede that seems to explain what King was trying to reach for with the Tower books, and which Ariosto simply found in his own poem.  According to Wiggins, the way it's used by Ariosto spells out yet another interesting coincidence between the world of the poem, and those of King's books.  "In the Furioso's world of instability and uncertainty, fede, - whether it be translated as faith, trust, loyalty, or commitment - is essential, or else human relations deteriorate (26)".  What we have here is the basic crux of of Furth's aforementioned essay (and perhaps the entirety of King's Mid World) summed up within the space of just a sentence.  The only difference is Wiggins saw fit to go and write a complete, book-length, English 101 study, and he wasn't thinking of King's fiction the whole time he did it.  Putting the two together, however, accomplishes the remarkable feat of tying a lot of the loose ends that the Tower as a finished product can leave even its most fervent fans with.  While I can't count myself among their number, I do admit to a fascination with the themes King kept trying to juggle with the saga of the Gunslinger.  Stumbling upon an overlooked piece of potential connective tissue in a book about Sergio Leone may be counted as at least one avenue to a solution for all of the meanings that keep just slipping from the author's grasp.  Not for a lack of understanding, so much as the curse of having to find out where one's otherwise formidable creative strengths end.  As the ironic fact turns out, one of the greatest lessons of The Dark Tower is summed up by none other than Clint Eastwood.

"A man's got to know his limitations".  As for the director of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, where does he fit in?  What's the significance of any part that Sergio Leone might play in this discovery of cinematic and literary intertextuality?  This is where the efforts of Christopher Frayling comes in handy once more.  In his biography of the director, he's able to trace the line of influence from the auteur's childhood exposure to Ariosto's myth, and how bits and pieces of this quirky yet obscure poem filtered their way into his own work as an artist.  "Sergio Leone liked to say that Orlando was an excellent example of the ability of Italian culture to absorb outside influences, and turn them into a distinctive form of entertainment. Performances by the pupi Siciliani consisted of one from a repertoire of about 500 plays drawn from incidents in Orlando. Roland (or Orlando) would do battle against the Saracens, with help from his magic sword and his cousin Renaud (Rinaldo). But Rinaldo had mistakenly drunk from the fountain of hate, and declared that he, like Orlando, was in love with the fair Angelica.

"Consequently, there would be a great deal of gore, much clattering, shouting and decapitation, long interludes of courtly love, a complex language of puppet gestures, and (perhaps the most distinctive feature) the stiff-legged ‘Orlando walk’ which younger members of the audience became adept at imitating. This was the result of the two puppeteers moving two iron rods (one to the head, one to the right hand) to make a rigid five-foot puppet in metal armour traverse the stage. The action took place in front of brightly coloured fairground backdrops, over which the busy puppeteers would lean, yelling, impro vising, and stamping their feet to create sound effects.  Depending on the audience, performances could also consist of noisy, down-to-earth humour, and crude pastiches of ‘high culture’ from further north, as well as contemporary twists on the age-old stories. If the pupi Siciliani were on form, the audience wouldn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Such was the magnificent confusion they evoked in Don Quixote.  When the thirty-five-year-old Sergio Leone was preparing Fistful of Dollars, he cast his mind back to the performances of the pupi Siciliani he saw as an adolescent in Rome’s Pincio Park, south of the Borghese Gardens, where the puppet theatre was surrounded by merry-go rounds, and statues of the great authors of Italian literature. "He recalled: ‘When I started my first Western, I had to find a psychological reason in myself- not being a person who ever lived in that environment.

"And a thought came to me spontaneously: it was like being a puppeteer for the pupi Siciliani  . . . . . . They perform shows which we can call legendary and historical. However, the skill of the puppeteers consists of one thing: to give each of the characters an extra dimension, which will interest the particular village the pupi are visiting; to adapt the legend to the particular locality. That is, Rolando takes on the faults- and the virtues- of the village mayor. He’s the good guy in the legend. His enemy, the bad guy, becomes- say- the local chemist.  The puppeteers take a legend or fable, and mix it with the local reality. The relationship with everyday life is a symbiotic one. You get the parallels? As a film-maker, my job was to make a fable for adults, a fairy-tale for grown-ups, and in relation to the cinema I felt like a puppeteer with his puppets. (By then, Leone was also aware of the parallels between the pupi Siciliani and the bunraku tradition in Japan, where the puppeteers ‘shadow’ their puppets on the stage, and the vocalists sit in a line beside it; as well as the cut-out shadow puppets of Java, which perform against a white screen. All three traditions would have an influence on his work.) (9-10)".

There are a number of things about what the director has to say about his relationship to the puppet shows of his youth.  Another way top put it is that Leone has crafted a Tower of his own.  One that's meant more as a storehouse for his Inspirations, rather than a goal for its own sake.  So what I'm going to have to do is unpack the contents of this other Tower in order to showcase the significance of Leone's statements, and how they tie together with the work of Ariosto and King.  The first and most central detail is that he does acknowledge the Orlando poem had an influence on him.  It's something that's obvious by the fact the director singled out this play adaptation of the poem out of all the others.  And that the traveling puppet shows of his youth seemed to specialize in Ariosto's Fantasy above all others.  This can be demonstrated by the detail Leone goes into in describing how the figure of Orlando was adapted to the local customs of each village, town, or city wherever it went.  It was this idea of taking the content of a foreign myth and adapting it in a way that other cultures could understand which is one of the guiding principles of the Dollars Trilogy.  King is right when he refers to them as gonzo films.  Leone's Western setting always gives off the impression of an ancient memory being recalled in larger than life terms, by a mind dipped in peyote, and it gives the whole deal this fantastic, surreal vibe.

To paraphrase another of King's terms, it's as if we're looking at an idea of the Wild West if it were set on the planet Mars.  The landscape through which Leone has the Man with No Name travel through is what I like to think of as the best exercise of localized dislocation.  The action takes place in a definable setting, and yet everything looks just unfamiliar enough to grant the images this alien quality that always manages to say with you, even after the credits have finished rolling.  Maybe that explains why later directors like George Lucas would take inspiration from the Eastwood flicks when making his own space opera.  Whatever the case, the key point to bear in mind is here we can see Leone confessing that the noble if sometimes unheroic protagonist of Ariosto's poem was one his mind when he was crafting the nature of his own Gunslinger.  That idea of the work amounting to a form of craftsmanship is perhaps the most fitting word for what the Dollars director was up to, considering he viewed his approach as a form of puppeteering.  What it says to me is that the levels of peculiar serendipity that exist between the Furioso, A Fistful, and the Tower are made stronger, and perhaps  all the better for being able to say none of the artists could have had any way of knowing that they would be passing on an Inspiration containing the same archetype to some other creative mind somewhere down the line.

As far as Leone was concerned, he was just having fun taking the character of Roland and translating him into a distinctly American Romance idiom.  The second aspect of Leone's description of his Inspiration is that he sees his job as that of a teller of fairy tales, as opposed to Westerns in the proper sense of that word.  And I find that fascinating.  Granted that I just admitted that perhaps one of the defining traits of the director's cinema is that it is deliberately stylized, I still don't recall how many out there tend to view the Dollar pictures as just as much works of Fantasy as the Orlando.  From what I can tell, most of the fan base tends to take the genre tropes in those movies at face value.  The critical consensus is that these are the same kinds of pictures as those made by the likes of John Ford and "Duke" Wayne.  To be fair, Leone has also gone on  record admitting how much of a Ford/Wayne fanboy he is in his own right.  When he got the chance to shoot a project in Monument Valley, he sort of had to be corralled back to the job, because he kept wandering off just to see where "Pappy" and the "Duke" made certain shots for The Searchers, and the like.  Nevertheless, Leone also insists that what he does is more a work of cultural translation, rather than outright mimicry.  His films have plenty of homage moments to go around.

Yet to hear him tell it, all he's done is take the tropes and trappings of the American Realist Movement, and transmogrified it all into a form myth, and even an amalgamation of various myths.  The trick is that not all of them come from American shores, and that it's just possible the Man with No Name owes just as much to Ariosto's Roland as he does to an inversion of all the mannerisms, actions, and values of the typical John Wayne hero.  As for the overarching concept of fede that Ariosto was working with.  How on Earth is a guy like Leone capable of handling an idea like that, even if he is drawing from the Furioso poem?  The interesting part about the answer the director gives us is that it comes from a closing monologue in one of this lesser known films.  It comes in the form of a voiceover performed by none other than Henry Fonda, as he's composing a letter to one of his fans.  The letters goes like this:

"Dear Nobody, dying is not the worst thing that can happen to a man. Look at me... I've been dead for three days now, and have finally found my peace. You used to say that my life was hanging by a thread. Maybe so, but I'm afraid it's your life that's hanging by a thread now. And there's quite a few people who'd like to cut that thread. Yeah, I guess it's your way of feeling alive. See, there's a whole difference between you and me: I always try to steer away from trouble, while you seem to be looking for it all the time. But I must admit, you've been able to solve your share, even if you like others to take the credit. This way, you can remain a "nobody." You got it all nicely figured out. But you gambled too big this time, and there's too many people who know you're "somebody" after all. And you won't have much time left for playing your funny games. They'll make life harder and harder for you, until you too will meet somebody who wants to put you down in history. And so you'll find out that the only way to become a nobody again is to die. Anyhow, from now on, you'll be walking in my boots, and maybe you won't be laughing so loud anymore. But you can still do one thing: you can preserve a little of that illusion that made my generation tick. 

"Maybe you'll do it in your own funny way, but you'll be grateful just the same. I guess looking back, it seems we were all a bunch of romantic fools. We still believed that a good pistol and a quick showdown could solve everything. But then, the West used to be wide-open spaces with lots of elbow room, and you never ran into the same person twice. By the time you came along, it was changed. It got smaller and crowded, and I kept bumping into the same people all the time. But if you're able to run around in the West peacefully catching flies, it's only 'cause fellows like me were there first. Yeah, the same fellow you want to see written up in history books, 'cause people need something to believe in, like you say. But you won't be able to have it your own way much longer, 'cause the country ain't the same anymore, and I'm already feeling a stranger myself. But, what's worse, violence has changed, too. It's grown, and got organized, and a good pistol don't mean a damn thing anymore. But I guess you must know all this, 'cause it's... your kind of time, not mine.  And I also figured out the moral to your grandpa's story...

"Folks that throw dirt on you aren't always trying to hurt you, and folks who pull you out of a jam aren't always trying to help you. But the main point is, when you're up to your nose in shit, keep your mouth shut. This is why people like me gotta' go, and this is why you faked that gunfight to get me out of the West clean. Anyhow, I was getting to be one more old-timer, and the years don't make wisdom, they just make old age. One can be young in years and old in hours, like you. I guess I'm talking like a damn preacher, but it's your fault; what can you expect of a national monument? Well, keep your mind and your heart open, and if you ever meet one of those men you almost never meet, you can keep each other company, and it won't be so lonely for you. They say distance makes friendship grow stronger. Maybe so, 'cause after three days without you dogging my tracks, I kinda' miss you. I really gotta' sign off now, so even if you've been a stinkin' nosy troublemaker all the time, thanks for everything just the same. P.S.: Just one more piece of advice from an old-timer: When you're getting a shave and a cut, be sure the right man's wearing a jacket (web)"!  That's from an overlooked film called, My Name is Nobody.

It was made and released in 1973, and the title, like the rest of the film in general, counts as one long, shared in-joke between Leone and his by then new generation of fans.  By the time Nobody hit theaters, he was already achieved the Grand Master reputation that he still enjoys today.  As result, this little Comedy Western was doing a number of things at once.  On the one hand, it was the last major project that Leone had hand in before he left the genre behind.  His next major film afterwards would be Once Upon a Time in America.  So he seems to have been in a bit of a self-reflective mood when he produced this picture, and hence the unusual presence of a closing benediction.  It's not something he does for any of his other films, and the reason why seems to be because he wasn't done with the Western at that point.  He was by the time he helped get Nobody off the ground, and so he felt he owed his loyal viewers some parting words of wisdom and thanks.  As usual, the filmmaker is saying several things at once in the script.

At the simplest level it's just Leone saying, "Thank you for being with me through this long, strange trip.  I hope everyone had as much fun as I have, etc.".  On another level, Leone is addressing any and all future artists who might come after him.  He's telling them that his work in this genre is done, yet there's no reason why others can't take up where he leaves off, and perhaps even plough a furrow greater than his own.  It's also an admission that, at its core, all of his work in the Western genre has been fueled by the kind of Romanticism that would have been familiar not just to the likes of John Ford, but also to writers like Ariosto and Stephen King.  In this way, we have an example of the artist encouraging his public to try and retain their own Fede to the stories that he also loved, and the lessons he took from Hawkes and Ford.  It's also worth noting that just like the Renaissance poem, My Name is Nobody counts as an allusive, intertextual work that showcases the artist clearly having fun with a genre and its elements that mean a lot to him.  Not only did Nobody beat Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles onto cinema screens by about a year, it also shares that more influential film's sense of comic anarchism and reverent irreverence.  The funny thing is how Leone's comments reveal that his film's sense of humor came just as much the pen of Ludovico Ariosto, as it did from folks like William Wyler.

Come to think of it, how much a Spaghetti Western fan is a humorist like Brooks?  If the creator of Young Frankenstein is as much an enjoyer of Clint Eastwood as he is of Jimmy Stewart, then whose to say?  For all we know, catching a viewing of My Name is Nobody might have been enough of a spur to give Brooks the confidence that his own plans for a similar idea could work.  Granted, this is all just speculation.  What's not is that Blazing Saddles has gone on to eclipse the last Spaghetti Western of Sergio Leone.  In managing to uncover it from history's dustbin, however, it is just possible to say that those who are looking for some kind of insight into the sort of humor and satire that takes place in the Orlando Furioso should first check out My Name is Nobody.  It's a good lens through which to retroactively view the writings of Ariosto.  So, that just leaves us with an archetype, a wonderfully batshit poem, and the legacy it left on two other artists.  If I had to suggest one other element that ties these three artists and some of their work together, then it might be to go back to yet another image tossed up in passing.  It was suggested a few paragraphs back in the commentary by Marinelli, where he speaks of Minerva's Tower.

It's not a line I was expecting to find, or to jump out at me I was studying for this article.  At the same time, when discussing a number of works that center in and around Stephen King's Mid World series, it's kind of hard for either a phrase or a picture like that not to lodge somewhere in the memory.  It think the best reason I've got to end this piece with that idea is because it does help to serve as a final focal point, of sorts.  It's not just the fixed point that might help explain the meaning of King's Tower, but also as a functioning Emblem for the ideas that Ariosto and Leone also grappled with.  Marinelli's image paints the Tower as a symbol of wisdom.  The topmost point of a ladder or chain on which all the characters in their otherwise separate works find themselves going up and down on from one bad or good choice to the next.  I can't answer for anyone else, yet that about sums up life for me.  It seems to have been what King was always reaching for with his attempt at a Fantasy series, and which Ariosto knocks out of the park with his own version of it in his poem.  The same work that Inspired Sergio Leone, along with the works of Ford and Wayne.  I've said that the Orlando Furioso works as a successful acquired taste, and the passage of time hasn't altered any of that.  There's a trick with tales like this.

It involves finding out how possible it is for a modern mind to tune itself in to the kind of wavelength necessary in order to get the full experience of Ariosto's words.  He's written a poem that has managed a very impressive feat.  All he did was somehow manage to stick around when almost every other piece of Italy's Renaissance has more or less vanished into the sands of time.  The same thing goes for poems like The Faerie Queene and the plays of Shakespeare.  What I'm getting at is that no act is ever able to hang around that long without some kind of permanence to the talent in the narrative.  Apparently, that's why people still know who Charles Dickens is.  Ariosto seems to belong to the same illustrious company, yet he's suffered the same fate as a lot of them for two reasons.  One, he had the bad luck to become a Classic.  Two, is the aforementioned shift in audience tastes.  It's a real shame, because there's no inherent reason not to try and enter the fun-loving mindset of this poem.  It's got everything in it that Peter Falk mentions in the opening of The Princess Bride: "Fencing, fighting, torture, true love...the works"!  It also seems to have been the unsung pioneer in the brand of humor that the Bride, and similar works such as Discworld specialize in, as well as the Dollar Trilogy and The Dark Tower.  I'd argue that's enough reason to consider giving the Orlando Furioso a worthy shot.