Dante Homer Machiavelli Beowulf Grendel Gilgamesh

Dante's Inferno And The Heroic Quest

Like Homer's "The Odyssey," and "The Iliad," Dante's "The Inferno" begins with a kind of god's eye view of the world. However, rather than the gods looking down and squabbling about the morality of humans they see, Dante begins with his hero's face-to-face encounter with the divine, or at least a representative of the divine, the pagan poet Virgil. Virgil will be the poet's first guide through the world of the dead. Virgil is a pagan and thus cannot enter the Christian version of heaven, so he will guide Dante through "The Inferno." Virgil cannot enter heaven even though he is a 'good' pagan because he is being punished for being born before Jesus came to teach and suffer upon the earth. The good pagans are punished for being able to envision nothing beyond the existence of Homer's gods, essentially.

The hero of Dante's quest, however, is not an abstract 'he' but the poet himself.

Unlike Virgil's own "Aeneid," and Homer's epics, where the poet appears mainly to invoke the muse, it is the poet's own soul and view of the world that form the narrative core of the poem, rather than a nationalist epic where the poet talks about the gods and heroes of old. There is a geographical meandering as occurs in Homer's "Odyssey," but the protagonist's own spiritual development, after being in a wood, wandering and lost, is the ultimate focus of interest in "The Inferno." Although both Odysseus and Dante strive homeward, and have a divine intermediary (for Dante in the form of Virgil and for Odysseus, Athena) to help them in their quest, Dante does not experience a physical reward at the end, of a wife and a kingdom. Rather the benefits for Dante are spiritual in nature and comes to his heart and mind through understanding.

Like the titular, nationalist hero of the anonymous author of "Beowulf," thus Dante as a poet must slay a kind of beast. But the beast that must be slain exists within the poet's own spirit and mind, rather than anything that exists in the outside world. The monsters Dante sees as he descends lower and lower into the meandering gulf of "The Inferno" might be as horrible as the face of Grendel, but their ultimate horrors are that the suffering individuals brought such a plight upon themselves, according to the system of Christian ethics of the poem. Of course, in John Gardner's later rendering of the Beowulf epic through the point-of-view of the monster "Grendel," the monster's physical ugliness motivates and creates the impetus for Grendel's ugly outer actions against the world. In "Beowulf," the early Anglo-Saxon epic, physical ugliness and moral ugliness in the heroic, epic quest are synonymous. This is true, incidentally, in Homer as well, as Theresities, the lame man in the "Iliad" is a coward who wants to go home and renege on the Grecian pledge to protect Helen.

But if in "Beowulf," the monster's ugliness and outer violence motivates the quest of the hero, in Dante's Christian vision, internal ugliness creates the form of outer ugliness and horror. In Dante, the monster within provokes the need for the quest for human, moral goodness. Later still in a modern rendering, of the world of "Grendel" the interior and the exterior worlds of the monster are bifurcated almost entirely, as the monster's physical ugliness actually produces Grendel's internal suffering and thus forces him upon his violent quest against humanity.