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

hitless.* Like the other servants of hell that are forced to cooperate with Dante and
Virgil by the will of God, Geryon gets nothing out of it. Indeed, Geryon is,
appropriately, a falcon sent on a fraudulent flight. As the falcon, he is used, fatigued
(lasso), and unrewarded, unworthy of the divine lure. It might be suggested, however,
that Geryon is shown a lure: when Virgil throws Dante's cord-belt down into the abyss at
the end of the previous canto to summon him. It is not a proper lure, swung in a circle
with food on the end of it; it is a hellish lure, with no reward, and no caring falconer
holding on to the other end of it. When Geryon responds, he finds no reward, only the
humiliating work of letting Dante and Virgil ride on his back. A true lure is to be found
in the Commedia, but it is in heaven, being shown by God to his faithful.
The motif of frustrated hunts continues, and in a real rather than metaphorical
manner, in the episode of the devils that runs from Cantos XXI to XXIII which starts
with the hunting of sinners in the pitch and ends with the enraged devils hunting Virgil
and Dante. At the end of Canto XXII is the fight between Alichino and Calcabrina which
begins when the Navarrese sinner escapes the devils and plunges back in the pitch like a
duck escaping a falcon:
. . . quelli ando sotto,
e quei drizzo volando suso il petto:
non altrimenti l'anitra di botto,
quando '1 falcon s'appressa, giu s'attuffa,
ed ei ritorna su crucciato e rotto.
(Inferno XXII, 128-132)
Richard Holbrook has described what happens here from a falconry point of view:9
Though a hungry falcon might stoop for a swimming duck, her action would be a
misdemeanour, for it was a rule of falconry not to fly the falcon until her quarry
Boccassini (359-360) sees Geryon as the opposite of Dante, both of them in a hunt for knowledge, one
infernal anh one heavenly.
Richard Thayer Holbrook, Dante and the Animal Kingdom (New York: AMS Press, Inc., 1966), 25 1-252.