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A Survey Of The Monsters In Dante's Inferno

1241 Words5 Pages

Tristan Barefoot
Mrs. Pugh
CRW B5
9 May 2023
A Survey of the Monsters in Dante’s Inferno and Their Resemblance to Other Monsters in Various Depictions
In Dante Ahligheri’s Inferno, there are a varied and horrific plethora of monsters, demons, and folk characters depicted in the depths of Hell. From your average flying monkey-esque demons with bat wings and horns atop their head to more niche mythic characters like the beautifully scaled yet monstrous Geryon and Cerberus the three-headed dog, there are many monsters taken from the other literary works of and before the 14th century period of Dante Ahligheri. As a staple representation of Hell in literature, Dante’s Inferno has been a jumping off point for much of the works in the following centuries …show more content…

This means, simply, that Satan is gigantic. Almost too big to comprehend, as Dante struggles to compare it to anything else he had seen before. Satan is also described with three heads, each of a different color and chewing a different sinner. He has two large bat wings which blow a cold air that freezes his tears and entraps him in ice, in which he is frozen to his waist. Satan is often described as a pointy tailed devil with horns and of an average to slightly larger-than-human size. While there are definitely descriptions similar to this rendition in terms of size and with large wings, they generally don’t describe satan as being frozen in ice either. Satan is often seen as the “King of Hell,” and this is likely due to the often opposing nature of Hell and Heaven in most modern literature, as opposed to the structure of Hell being ordained by God in Inferno. Even in the Bible Satan is portrayed as a trickster always trying to steer the righteous off their holy path and corrupt the good, doing so outside of Hell and in the realm of the living. This conflicts with Dante’s portrayal of Satan being trapped at the bottom of Hell, in a constant state of torment and …show more content…

The Centaurs were most often seen as a representation of the wild and barbaric urges of man, or the midway between mankind and nature. The job of the Centaurs to shoot and attack any damned soul climbing out of the boiling-blood Phlegethon river mimics this brutal and violent nature of the Centaurs. Another character borrowed from other literature is Cerberus. The three headed demon is a common sight in most depictions of hell as its “guard dog”, most notably in the series Percy Jackson or Disney’s

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