Dante, Inferno
Farinata in the Open Tomb
The upright Florentine shade who debates family rivalry and the city’s fate.
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Stories give ideas characters, places and events. These entries open particular episodes in folklore, sacred narrative and visionary literature, connecting each explanation to its source passage.
331 entries · A–Z
Dante, Inferno
The upright Florentine shade who debates family rivalry and the city’s fate.
Goethe’s Faust, Part One
The bargain whose decisive condition concerns a moment of complete satisfaction.
Goethe’s Faust, Part One
The crowded Gothic room from which the scholar seeks escape.
Goethe’s Faust, Part One
The incomplete sign that admits Mephistopheles but prevents his departure.
Dante, Inferno
The Florentine spirit rejected from the boat during the Stygian crossing.
Celtic fairy traditions
Leader of the Fenians whose adventures connect hunting, fairy halls, and rebirth.
Welsh folklore, Wirt Sikes
A wood whose central tree shelters the Dancing Place of the Goblin.
Dante, Inferno
Virgil’s account of the appointed power that distributes changing earthly advantages.
Buddhist traditions, Nivedita and Coomaraswamy
The encounters with age, illness, death and a mendicant that unsettle the prince’s protected life.
Dante, Inferno
The speaking soul who recalls a shared death and a romance read with her companion.
Dante, Purgatory and Paradise
The saint whose marriage to Poverty exemplifies a renewal of the Church.
Dante, Purgatory and Paradise
The power to admit or reject an affection despite its first arising.
John Milton, Paradise Lost
The guardian who organises the night watch around Eden.
The Mabinogion, Guest’s 1877 edition
The knight whose victory restores an injured household and brings Enid to Arthur’s court.
Dante, Inferno
A reassuring human face joined to a dangerous composite body at the descent into fraud.
Dante, Purgatorio
A speaker recalls a fatal escape through marshes and asks for prayer in Fano.
Dante, Inferno
The impersonator named as he seizes and drags Capocchio.
Buddhist legend, Davis retelling
The eight-petalled flower formed from a dragon's jaws at the end of Davis's Golden Lotus legend.
Dante, Inferno
The hypocrites’ bright garments conceal a burden that slows every step.
William Blake, Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion; retained monochrome facsimile
A fourfold city built by Los in London from pity, affection and forgiveness.
Dante, Inferno
The Sardinian official described by another inhabitant of the pitch.
The Mabinogion, Guest’s 1877 edition
The mound where the promise of injury or wonder introduces Rhiannon’s arrival.
Japanese legends, Davis retelling
The sword given to Yamato that cuts a path through burning grass.
Buddhist traditions, Nivedita and Coomaraswamy
The night journey that leaves palace, family and expected kingship behind.