Occasion: The Hag in The Faerie Queene

Occasion is a character/creature from book 2 of The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser. She teams up with Furor, and is able to keep him from losing as long as she can talk.

Occasion represents how we, as human beings, can actually create the circumstances in which our anger can get out of control.

It is only after Guyon is able to stop up the mouth of Occasion, that he is able to defeat Furor, suggesting that if you want to control your anger, you must control the occasion in which it sprung.

This is consistent with the theme of temperance in book 2, where Occasion and Furor represent the extremes that must be controlled in order to have self-mastery.

See our complete list of Arthurian characters for more entries like this one.

Arthurian Bibliography

• Norris Lacy, Geoffrey Ashe, Debra Mancoff – The Arthurian Handbook (Second Edition)
• Alan Lupack – The Oxford Guide to Arthurian Literature and Legend
• Ronan Coghlan – The Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Arthurian Legends
• Anonymous – Lancelot-Grail, the French Vulgate
• Sir Thomas Malory – Le Morte d’Arthur