Is the Divine comedy a self inset fanfiction?

[S@tanicoaldo]

I mean he hangs out with his idol Virgil.



He meets a lot of famous people from history and myth, and ends up with the girl he loved but didn't have the courage to confess living in heaven.

[Blackhawk748]

Thats largely what Overly Sarcastic Productions said and having heard it, i come to much the same conclusion.

[S@tanicoaldo]

I love the themes but I hate the type language he used. :/

[Psyren]

I think Yahtzee made a crack along those lines as well, during his review of Dante's Inferno.

[Bohandas]

Yes. Yes it is.

[Dienekes]

I love the themes but I hate the type language he used. :/

Yeah. I also hate Tuscan Italian. He should have used Sicilian. Or Latin like a normal poet.

[Ramza00]

I argue that Dante is depressed at his age of 35 and he falls into a dream and in this dream he is chased by 3 monsters till he finds Virgo his guide who will now direct him through a surreal quest. Aka he is slept through all it and it is not real but the product of the human mind untethered to reality set free merely to imagine.

[Rogar Demonblud]

Not Inferno. It's less fanfic and more revenge porn. Surprise surprise, it's also the popular part.

[Vinyadan]

Is the OP a fanfiction about the Comedy? Because it doesn't really resemble the original.

[Pit of Shades]

Sounds about right.

[DavidSh]

I would think to be fanfiction it should be derivative of something. What would that be for the Divine Comedy? The Bible?

[Rogar Demonblud]

The Inferno is an expanded version of The Apocalypse of Saint Peter, which was part of Holy Writ until replaced by the Gnostic Apocalypse of Saint John (aka Revelations). Purgatorio and Paradisio are based on the then current cosmology of the Catholic Church. So the Comedy is derivative of all that.

It may, however, be easier to scan as satire than fanfic.

[Vinyadan]

Assuming this isn't tongue-in-cheek, how would Dante have had that Apocalypse available?

[Rogar Demonblud]

Go to a library, monastery or otherwise. You can also find about a dozen extra Gospels, a few different Acts (Acts of Thecla is good reading, but you know why the Church Fathers cut her out) and more epistles that you can shake a crozier at. All of this was getting rediscovered during Dante's lifetime, leading to the Renaissance and later the Reformation. Biblical Exegesis is an interesting field if you're into world building, but doesn't help you keep your faith.

[Vinyadan]

What I am saying is that, when contact between an author and a certain work is proposed, it is normally accompanied by an effort towards explaining how and where that contact happened. While I have not read this apocalypse, I am aware of the fact that it was lost in the West, and that it is attested in Africa in Greek and Coptic, both languages which Dante couldn't read.
To make a comparison, Dante was certainly aware of another apocryphal apocalypse, that of Paul, because he explicitly refers to its content (I think in Inferno 2). A Latin translation of this work was well-known and successful, so that it was widely copied and read, which explains how Dante had access to it.
But the chances that Dante could just find the Apocalypse of Peter in a library nearby, in a version he could read, are really, really low.
There's also the fact that descriptions of the world beyond weren't rare. You can find e.g. a poem describing Hell in 13th century Milan, before Dante's Comedy.
What are the elements that make you think that the Apocalypse of Peter in particular was important as a source for the Comedy?

[Rogar Demonblud]

Before the Apoc/Peter, Hell is depicted as a generic 'fiery pit' (you also see this in Apoc/John and Apoc/James and I think in Apoc/Paul). The Peter changes this to a tiered system with nine layers, places different sins in specific layers, uses the same punishments for those souls as Dante later would and places the fallen angel Lucifer at the bottom of the pit as the greatest of traitors (and thus furthest from God*). There are no pagan Romans at the bottom of Hell, though; just Judas Iscariot.

As for what was where, we know it was a rule of the Cluniacs and later the Benedictines to have a Latin copy of all these scriptures and pseudo-Scriptures in every monastery. Initially, it was a plan to combat heresy, later it became more about internal political struggles in the Church (this forms the backdrop for Eco's The Name of the Rose, if you haven't read it). One wonders how they viewed the Apocrypha Book of Judith, where the titular woman, instead of sleeping with a guy and then manipulating him (Esther, Ruth) heads out and hacks Holofernes' head off.




*Also, this is the first time that Lucifer, Satan and the Devil are all wrapped up into a single individual.

[Vinyadan]

This is interesting and I will take a look. Paul already has a varied Hell, with both ice and fire (although it likely is derivative of Peter). There remains the question of how the monks could have a copy of a work that isn't attested anywhere in the West, and whose Greek version disappeared from circulation before Cluny was founded. I think it more likely that elements from Peter's reached Dante through one or more intermediate works. Lately there has been a hypothesis that Dante inserted elements from Arabic culture into the Comedy, and the Coptic version of Peter was derived from the Greek through an Arabic reelaboration of Peter. So it's possible that Dante somehow gained contact with this Arabic tradition, but I really would need to check.

Judith wasn't considered apocryphal though, just part of a "second canon" (it still is outside Reformed churches), with Esther and some other works. The main problems with the text were related to coherence: Olofernes is described as a general of the Assyrian king Nebuchadnezzar II, who actually was Babylonian, as described in other Bible books.

[Nerd-o-rama]

Yes.

Doesn't make it bad, although it doesn't make it canon, either.

[Psyren]

Yes.

Doesn't make it bad, although it doesn't make it canon, either.

Divine Comedy was filler because we caught up with the manga.

[Nerd-o-rama]

Divine Comedy was filler because we caught up with the manga.

It was even by a different studio.

Honestly though "fanfic that everyone treats like canon in adaptations" is the closest parallel I can think to describe both it and Paradise Lost.

[Vinyadan]

There was an attempt to make the DC canon, but it was rejected. I can't remember who that friar was.