“Midway through the journey of our life/ I found myself within a dark wood,” opens Dante’s Inferno.

In the first episode of our series on the forest in the Western imagination, Peter Olson and I explore the two principal forests of the first book of the Divine Comedy: the dark wood, in which the pilgrim finds himself at the opening of the Inferno, and the forest of the suicides in Canto XIII.

My guest, Peter Olson, the Provost of North Central Michigan College, has a Ph.D. in Comparative from the University of Michigan and is the former chair of the Department of English at Hillsdale College where he frequently taught Dante.

Together, we enter the two tangled woods of Dante’s Inferno paying attention at once to the landscape itself and to the allegorical meanings at play.

For further explorations of Dante, here are some links that you might find helpful:

The translation by Stanley Lombardo that Pete Olson and I use for our discussion

BBC’s In Our Time, introduction to Dante’s Inferno

A Yale University Course on Dante’s Divine Comedy via podcast