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Book I: Canto XII
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Faerie Queene, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Virtue, Allegory, and Symbolism
British Identity and Nationalism
Protestantism
Deception and Lies
Love and Friendship
The Role of Women
Summary
Analysis
The narrator admits that he doesn’t know where faerie land is exactly, but he talks about other regions that were recently discovered like Peru, the Amazon, and Virginia. He says that he’ll now tell the story of a good Faerie knight called Sir Guyon.
The setting of the poem is deliberately a little obscure, mixing elements of fantasy and history. Here, the narrator basically just tells the reader not to worry about it, since lots of new places get discovered all the time.
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