Selections from The Faerie Queene

By: Edmund Spenser

Narrated by: John Moffatt

Length: 3 hrs and 58 mins

Publisher's summary

This remarkable poem, dedicated to Queen Elizabeth I, was Spenser's finest achievement: the first epic poem in modern English. The Faerie Queene combines dramatic narratives of chivalrous adventure with exquisite and picturesque episodes of pageantry. At the same time, Spenser is expounding a deeply-felt allegory of the eternal struggle between Truth and Error.

Download the accompanying reference guide.

Public Domain (P)1998 NAXOS AudioBooks Ltd.

missing portions

This is an extremely interesting story, the narration is wonderful, and I am glad that I downloaded it. There are, however, some serious problems with this recording! Read the earlier reviewer for details.

playfully metered in rhyme and free verse

classic poetic crows from a well educated and imaginative author. I just writing like this from which evolved even Shakespeare and later Tolkien CS Lewis and others.

Fine performance, haphazard selection

Where does The Faerie Queene rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

It took me a while to warm up to Moffat's reading, which at first struck me as a bit stodgy, but after 20 minutes or so I found it very capable indeed, certainly in the top 20% of audiobook performances I've heard. Given the limitations of the original 3-CD set, however, I thought a better selection from the vast riches of "The Faerie Queene" could have been made.

What did you like best about this story?

While the poem is better known for gripping atmosphere than gripping action, Moffat certainly brings the action to life when the occasion arises.

If you were to make a film of this book, what would the tag line be?

Epic fantasy from Shakespeare's time.

Any additional comments?

Now that audiobooks are no longer purchased chiefly as LPs or CDs but rather as downloads, it is surely time for an unabridged audio edition of "The Faerie Queene," professionally narrated and produced.

Missing and repeated portions

Following on the other reviews, the reading is excellent and the introductory summaries of the cantos are useful. However, my copy seems to repeat some sections of canto 3. At 4 hours I knew this reading couldn't include the whole work, but that a significant section of what's here is the same thing twice is not a pleasant surprise.

Great Performance Nonetheless

Would you recommend this book to a friend? Why or why not?

Recommended by a literature professor-friend, this abridged edition of The Faerie Queene was the first Audible book I purchased and the reason I joined Audible.com. I was aware the story had been significantly truncated. As other reviewers noted, however, even the chosen sections were chopped, so it was hard to follow with a printed text. Still, for anyone who has four hours to spare and has never appreciated Spenser's classic, this is a great introduction for one compelling reason: the narration.

John Moffatt's read is lucid, well-paced and empathetic, the best one could hope for in rendering a historically distant story for a modern audience. Of course, I "studied" FQ in high school. then promptly flushed it from my consciousness. It was C.S. Lewis whose appreciation of and influence from Spenser sparked the desire to know this personally unappreciated work. So, even this abridged edition served to illuminate not only its author's original work, but also Milton's Paradise Lost, Lewis's stories and a whole bunch of English literature in-between.

Fragmentary

The description of this Audiobook should have mentioned that this recording only covers the FIRST of the six books of the Faerie Queene. Specifically: It only contains the story of the Redcrosse Knight. (Yes, in hindsight, I now see hints of trouble: i.e., the running time of the recording and the reference in the description to an allegory of truth and error.) Nevertheless, because it was billed as the FAERIE QUEENE (and not just one-sixth of it), I ordered the darned thing. To make matters worse, I burned it to CD, and for some reason Audible's conversion program skips not just words but whole stanzas so that I now have a bunch of fragments of one book of the FAERIE QUEENE, rather than the whole thing. I have fragments of a fragment. Joy, joy. Case in point: The CD I ended up with contains, nowhere in it, the most famous line of the poem -- the first one ("A gentle knight was pricking on the plain..."). It reads off the first three words of that line and then jumps down seven lines; the two parts don't connect at all. Several stanzas latter, there's another skip. Then another. All the way through the entire book. All four of the CDs I ran off in my attempts to make this work do the same thing, and no CDs I burn through other programs do this, so I'm pretty sure this one's Audible's responsibility. I will be trying to get a refund, but am not optimistic. This buyer didn't beware; you should.