2 - Space, Place, and Location: Inside and Outside the Poem

Summary

But sith my web so diuerse now doth grow,

To weave with many threads I must deuise.

Sir John Harington, Orlando Furioso in English Heroical Verse

In l. sprague de camp and Fletcher Pratt's story, ‘The Mathematics of Magic’, a pair of time-travelling scientist-adventurers by the names of Harold Shea and Reed Chalmers make use of a fantastical machine to transport themselves into The Faerie Queene. The poem, according to Chalmers, provides a ‘brilliant and interesting world, and one in which I personally might have some place’, and although the two men acknowledge the dangers of participating in the later parts of the poem, ‘where Queen Gloriana's knights are having a harder and harder time, as though Spenser were growing discouraged, or the narrative for some reason were escaping from his hands, taking on a life of its own’, they decide that they would like to help to solve this confusion: ‘why shouldn't we jump right into that last part of the Faerie Queene and help Gloriana's knights straighten things out?’ The story alludes to the events of Spenser's poem, but it generally goes beyond the bounds of the poem's narrative; the two scientists don't tend to participate in the events of the poem itself, but they witness and take part in encounters between its characters (and other characters, such as Sir Hardimour, invented for the purposes of the story) and wander through a generally Spenserian-looking country of forests and castles and tournaments.