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 Orlando furioso: sources and narrative structure
The ‘critique of the sources’ of the Furioso is a subject of considerable importance as testified to by the fundamental study by Pio Rajna, Le fonti dell’ “Orlando furioso” [1875]. The principle sources of Ariosto’s romance are to be sought in medieval French romance, folk song, short stories and Latin literature such as Virgil, Ovid, and Horace but also Stazio and Lucan. One needs also to add geographical indications drawn from the encyclopaedic treatises of antiquity such as the Naturalis historia by Pliny the Elder, the Corografia by Pomponius Mela and Strabone’s Geografia. The closest ties are of course with the inventive repertoire of the Orlando innamorato by Boiardo, even though this XV century poet’s name is never mentioned. The events that take place in Ariosto’s narrative in canto I are linked to the events recounted in the Innamorato, II, 21-22 and in III, 4. As of Furioso, I,10, there begins the narration of Angelica’s flight from the Christian encampment and her meeting with Rinaldo in the wilds. The narrative structure of the book is defined as centripetal with moments in which the story distances itself from the central theme, then to return to the general narrative flow of the book. At the centre of this mechanism of apparent structural disorder there is the technique of interlacement, that leads to repeated suspensions of the thread of the story that are subsequently picked up again, creating superimpositions and fusions between situations and characters. In this way there is the possibility of continually deferring action, a remitting of events to a later phase of the story that gives the romance a sense of continued dilation. In the poetical parts of the cantos Ludovico addresses the public or his beloved in the first person, utilising the proem as a ‘window’ with which to analyse current reality. He often introduces encomiums or elements of history and politics, focusing on contemporary court life. At times in the narrative we meet allegorical figures tied to the world of symbolism. In particular, there are allegorical inserts in cantos VI-VIII, in the episode of the island of Alcina, where Ruggiero is held prisoner, and the liberation on the part of Logistilla.
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