The opening lines of Jerusalem Delivered. Sp Coll Hunterian Cd.2.1., Special Collections, University of Glasgow Library
“I sing of war, of holy war, and him / Captain who freed the Sepulchre of Christ.”1 The opening lines of Jerusalem Delivered have a familiar ring to them: epic poets don’t mince their words and go straight to the point, stating plainly what this is all about. Virgil does this in the Aeneid (“Arms, and the man I sing…”2); so does Ludovico Ariosto in Orlando Furioso (“Of loves and Ladies, Knights and Arms, I sing, of courtesies, and many a daring feat.”3). Homer, the archetype of them all, sums up the content and introduces his heroes Achilles and Odysseus within the first two lines of his many-thousand-lined Iliad and Odyssey respectively. Life was too short back then – no time for elaborate Prologues and Prefaces!
1. Unless otherwise stated, I am using the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Torquato Tasso’s The Liberation of Jerusalem (Gerusalemme Liberata), translated by Max Wickert, with an Introduction and Notes by Mark Davie (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2. The Aeneid, classics.mit.edu/Virgil/aeneid.1.i.html
3. Orlando Furioso, The Online Medieval & Classical Library, omacl.org/Orlando/1-2canto.html
First Crusade Fictions 