I never imagined I’d read a 14th-century epic poem as a prelude to a modern fantasy novel, but that’s exactly what happened. A friend recommended Ninth House (book one of a contemporary dark academia trilogy by Leigh Bardugo) and mentioned it was laced with references to Dante’s Inferno. 

Being the curious reader I am, I decided to tackle Inferno first, hoping to catch those allusions. Despite being a lover of the classics, I’d never read any part of The Divine Comedy before. A medieval classic is a far cry from Anne of Green Gables, or Pride and Prejudice, or the other Classics I collect.

Would I even understand it? 

But I needn’t have worried, as I rapidly discovered that diving into Dante’s vision of Hell was surprisingly heavenly.

Entering The Inferno

From the moment I opened Dante’s Inferno, I was struck by how accessible and narrative it felt for a centuries-old poem. 

I’ve slogged through Beowulf, and as much as it fascinated me, I wasn’t really in the mood for that level of thought requirement. Now, I’m not a masochist. I read the Inferno in a modern English translation, which made the story flow more like an adventure tale. 

The famous opening cantos pulled me in quickly: Dante, midway through his life, finds himself lost in a dark wood and is soon confronted with the ominous warning on Hell’s gate, “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.” 

I’ve heard that quote in pop culture, and knew where it came from, but seeing it in context honestly gave me chills. It set the perfect eerie tone. Dante’s journey isn’t exactly a walk in the park.

When the Roman poet Virgil appeared to guide Dante, I realised I was essentially reading a self-insert fanfic (in the best way possible): Dante the character gets to meet his literary idol and tour the afterlife with him. 

This mentor-mentee setup made the story surprisingly relatable. Kinda like a buddy-cop trip through Hell, albeit a very philosophical and sobering one.

It did take a bit to adjust to the style in the early sections. The poem is divided into cantos (like chapters), and each presents a vignette of souls and sins. There’s a lot of Dante name-dropping historical and mythical figures which, if you’re not well up on your history and mythology, I imagine would drive you to the footnotes every two minutes to learn why a guy named Farinata or a lady named Francesca mattered. 

Despite the name soup (which at times rivalled Tolkien IYKYK), the emotional core of each scene still came through. As a character, Dante is a bit of an audience surrogate. He’s frequently confused, often awed, and periodically horrified. 

Which is exactly how I felt.

When Dante reacts with fear, pity, or anger at what he sees, I empathised. As if audience reactions to this story function on such a primal level that even a seven hundred year gap doesn’t change how it makes the human brain feel.

A Vivid Tour Of The Circles Of Hell

Dante and Virgil wading through a river of blood in Hell, surrounded by the souls of the violent.

One of the things that surprised me most about Inferno was how gruesome and visually striking its depictions of Hell are. Dante doesn’t do anything by half-measures. Every circle of Hell is a carefully crafted nightmare. 

As I descended with Dante and Virgil through the nine circles, I encountered one unforgettable scene after another. In the second circle, the souls of the lustful are blown about endlessly by a hellish storm. 

Passion, sweeping them away in life. 

Deeper down, the violent are literally boiling in blood, forced to stand in a river of the innocent blood they shed. That image (as gruesome as it is) really stuck with me: poetic justice in the most twisted sense. 

Contrapasso

In fact, Dante’s entire Hell runs on this principle of contrapasso: the punishment always fits the crime in an ironically apt way. 

Those who tried to tell the future on Earth have their heads twisted backward so they can never look forward. 

Traitors who betrayed friends are encased in ice, forever frozen in the coldness of their deceit. 

As a modern reader used to horror movies and dark fantasy, I was still taken aback that a medieval poem could paint such cinematic horror. The grotesque details (demons wielding pitchforks, sinners morphing into snakes, rivers of filth and fire) were as vivid as anything in today’s graphic novels or films. 

In fact, there’s a similar level of recognition here to reading Lovecraft and realising where so many modern horror conventions originally came from. It’s no wonder Dante’s Inferno has shaped so much of how we imagine Hell. 

Even if you’ve never read it, you’ve seen its shadow in modern books, games, and movies.

It’s not all horror though. There are eerily beautiful moments of deep human poignancy. In one circle, Dante meets Francesca da Rimini, a woman punished for adultery, who tells the tragic tale of how a book about Lancelot led her and her lover, Paolo, to sin. Ultimately, it led to their death. 

I was surprised by how moved I was during Francesca’s story. Dante writes her as such a sympathetic character, speaking of love and sorrow in a way that made me almost forget she’s condemned in Hell. 

In one line, she says, “There is no greater sorrow than to recall our time of joy in wretchedness,” and honestly, that line hit hard. 

Despite Dante’s firm moral framework, he allowed me to feel for a ‘sinner’. That wouldn’t surprise me in a modern story, empathising with someone socially ostracised for an affair isn’t easy.

But this isn’t a modern tale. 

Punishments for adultery in the 1300s were brutal. It’s frowned upon these days, but I’ve written entire articles in defence of characters who cheat. One of my own novels centres on a woman who falls hard for a married man and the very fine line they walk. 

Most people in modern times (in the Western world at least) don’t have to face anything more than judgemental friends, and potentially public humiliation. In Dante’s era adulterers had to contend with religious penance, fines, corporal punishments. Naturally women faced harsher consequences than men, and could expect to be stripped, paraded, and flogged, or forced to join a convent. 

In extremes, they might even be stoned or burned to death. 

Francesca’s portrayal from the perspective of a man raised in that world is incredibly compassionate. And that was a recurring theme I noticed throughout Dante’s Inferno: even though Dante (the author) believes these souls are justly punished, Dante (the traveller) often weeps or faints out of empathy. 

That complex mix of judgment and mercy gives the poem emotional depth. It isn’t just gruesome for shock value; it forces you to think about sin and suffering, and even to question the fairness of it all.

A Modern Reader’s Reflections

Finishing Dante’s Inferno left me with a lot to chew on. 

Dante’s imaginative scope and the sheer ambition of mapping the moral universe is genuinely awesome. This is a work that marries medieval theology with personal commentary, blending classical mythology with Christian doctrine. 

It blew my mind to learn that Dante wrote this epic in the Italian vernacular (not Latin), essentially pioneering a whole literary tradition. The fact that an ordinary man (not a legendary hero) is the protagonist on this divine journey was also ground-breaking for its time. 

Reading Dante’s Inferno, I get it now. 

Why it’s hailed as a cornerstone of literature. 

This tale is rich in meaning, layered with allegory, and utterly unflinching in its exploration of the darkest human impulses.

That said, reading it in 2025, I also found myself grappling with Dante’s more antiquated aspects. The poem reflects a medieval Catholic worldview, with a very rigid sense of justice. Dante’s moral universe is starkly black-and-white: souls are either saved or damned with no middle ground. 

His Hell doesn’t make exceptions for good intentions or personal circumstance. 

Even virtuous pagans (like Virgil himself) are stuck in Limbo forever, simply because they weren’t baptized. 

As a modern reader with perhaps a more pluralistic mindset, and certainly as an atheist, I struggled with that. 

It seemed harsh and jarring that great souls like Homer, Socrates, and yes, Virgil, whose only sin was to be born in the wrong place and time. 

They are are denied Heaven. 

On the plus side, they were mostly Greek and didn’t believe in heaven, so probably wouldn’t have cared much. But Dante, of course, was a man of his era, and his concept of divine justice made sense to him. The thought of being locked out of heaven is genuinely heinous to him

I, on the other hand, had to remind myself of the historical context whenever I felt put off by some of the religious rhetoric.

And I won’t lie, there were parts of Dante’s Inferno that dragged for me (much like reading Lord of the Rings and slogging through the Council of Elrond and the endless songs and poems). 

Some cantos are heavy on 14th-century Italian political gossip. Dante meets someone who explains Florence has gone to the dogs since he died, is a very thinly veiled way for Dante (the author) to throw a ton of shade at his enemies by damning them in his story.

These bits were less resonant simply because I lacked the backstory. I have nothing against these people, or even particularly know what Dante had against them, but it’s fascinating to see how personal Dante made his epic. 

He wasn’t shy about weaving in his own life and grudges. In an odd way, that made the text feel alive. Like peeking into Dante’s mind and the issues of his day. 

Once I read some endnotes to understand his references, I appreciated the bold move of turning real people into characters in your cosmic moral drama, and not even bothering to try and hide it. 

It’s the ultimate power move for a writer. Dante literally immortalised the people he wrote about, whether they liked it or not.

Dante’s intention with The Divine Comedy was that the reader go through Hell. Come out the other side. Progress into Purgatory and eventually Heaven. Having only read the Hell section (for now), it’s a bloody dark place to stop. 

And kind of the worst comedy ever. Like, even worse than Mrs Brown’s Boys (IYKYK).

Dante’s Inferno by itself ends with Dante and Virgil climbing out of the pit of Hell, with only a faint hope implied by the stars glimpsed at the surface. It was a bit of a heavy ending, even knowing it’s not really the ending.

There’s a lot of darkness, and punishment, and no immediate catharsis. 

Like getting to the end of the second book of a slow burn trilogy and finding they still haven’t kissed yet.

Still, even without the Paradiso payoff, Inferno stands on its own as a powerful exploration of human sin and the question of justice. 

It left me pondering. 

Is true justice punishment, or is it mercy? 

The fact that a medieval text can still make me ask that in the modern day really says all you need to know about the enduring impact of Dante’s Inferno.

Dante’s Legacy In Ninth House

Reading Inferno before Ninth House was an unexpectedly clever move on my part. (Okay…I have to give credit to my friend here, because she’s the one who suggested it…and lent me her copy of The Divine Comedy). 

Bardugo’s Dante references aren’t subtle, but they are smart. If you want my full thoughts on the novel you can check out my review here.

But for the purpose of this discussion, suffice to say that FMC Alex literally takes the title ‘Dante’, while MMC Darlington functions as her ‘Virgil’. The entire series reframes Dante’s Inferno as a modern descent into an occult underworld. 

Having Dante fresh in my mind made those choices land with real weight rather than reading as clever-but-random literary flair. By the time I reached Hell Bent (I’m getting to my review of that one, don’t worry!), where the story explicitly inverts the Dante-Virgil dynamic, the payoff felt deliberate and earned rather than gimmicky. 

I’ll go into this in much more detail elsewhere, but in short: reading Dante’s Inferno first didn’t just help me spot references, it deepened how I understood the emotional and thematic architecture of Bardugo’s series.

In other words, if you’ve not read Ninth House and Hell Bent yet, I highly recommend Dante’s Inferno first. 

Why Classics Become Classics

Reading Dante’s Inferno wasn’t just an exercise in ticking off a literary landmark. It recalibrated how I think about classics altogether.

There’s a strange myth that foundational texts are only valuable in an academic, reverential sense. That they’re important, but not necessarily enjoyable. Inferno quietly dismantled that assumption for me. 

It’s dramatic. 

It’s petty. 

It’s imaginative in a way that feels almost unhinged at times. 

And for something written seven hundred years ago, about the afterlife, it is startlingly alive.

What surprised me most wasn’t the horror or the theology, but how human it all felt. Dante isn’t a distant, godlike narrator passing judgment from on high. He’s emotional, frightened, vindictive, compassionate, and occasionally overwhelmed by the very system he believes in. 

That tension, between belief and empathy, certainty and doubt, is what gives Inferno its staying power. 

You don’t have to agree with Dante to be compelled by him. 

Arguing with him as you read is kinda half the fun.

It also reminded me why stories endure. Not because they’re flawless, but because they offer a framework other stories can push against, reinterpret, or outright rebel from. Dante’s Inferno isn’t frozen in time. It’s in conversation with everything that came after it. Including the books sitting on my shelf right now.

I went into this expecting a historical curiosity. What I got instead was a reminder that classics become classics because every new reader experienced some kind of power from it, and kept it alive a little longer.

Like my friend, who lent it to me and insisted I read it. And now me, explaining it to you, and telling you to do the same.

Classics don’t die because they haunt their readers.