Dissertation on Birds of Prey and the Sport - the Falconry Heritage ...

crane" among poets, Dante feels a further responsibility to be sure his poetry is pure
and sound of purpose.7
Dante's descriptions of the behavior and appearance of birds of prey demonstrate
a certain amount of detailed knowledge of the sport on his part, whether gleaned through
books or through first hand experience. The particular birds that appear in the Cornmedia
are the astore, spawiero, falcone, girfalco, and spawier grifagno. This list of birds of
prey corresponds to those in common use in poetry in his time. Unlike most poets, he
makes distinctions between the hunting styles of the different birds, and uses the
appropriate one for each image. Those that he uses most often are the falcons. This
choice may reflect their use in hunting: falcons, rather than hawks, are typically used to
hunt cranes. While falcons and cranes are used similarly throughout the Cornmedia, in
Paradiso XVIII and XIX, their association culminates when they meld into the formation
of a single image, the divine imperial eagle, thus rising above their earthly predatorlprey
relationship.
In Inferno we find two instances of a simple metaphor of a "sparvier grifagno."
These have been noted in chapter 1 in the comments about Brunetto Latini's Tresor. In
Inferno, Canto IV, he sees Julius Caesar as "Cesare armato con gli occhi grifagni" (123)
among other virtuous pagans, and the comedy of the devils fighting in Canto XXII finds
one of them described as a "sparvier grifagno": "ma l'altro fu bene sparvier grifagno I ad
artigliar ben lui, ed amendue I cadder nel mezzo del bollente stagno." (139-141) While
' See also Kenneth Knoespel, "When the Sky Was Paper: Dante's Cranes and Reading as Migration," in
Lectura Dantis Newberryiana, Vol. 2 (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1990), pp. 121-46.
Knoespel argues that Dante uses the image of the crane to instruct readers how to proceed in negotiating
their way through his text, and "to view the very process of their reading as a migration toward
illumination" (123).