"Dante's Inferno" | ||||
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Song by Iced Earth from the album Burnt Offerings | ||||
Released | April 14, 1995 | |||
Recorded | 1994 at Morrisound Recording, Tampa, Florida |
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Genre | Heavy metal | |||
Length | 16:26 | |||
Label | Century Media | |||
Writer(s) | Jon Schaffer | |||
Composer(s) | Jon Schaffer | |||
Producer(s) | Jim Morris Jon Schaffer |
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Burnt Offerings track listing | ||||
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"Dante's Inferno 2011" | ||||
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Single by Iced Earth | ||||
B-side | Dante's Inferno (Raw version) | |||
Released | September 5, 2011 | |||
Format | Digital download, CD | |||
Recorded | July and August 2011 at Morrisound Recording, Tampa, Florida |
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Genre | Heavy metal | |||
Length | 17:28 | |||
Writer(s) | Jon Schaffer | |||
Producer(s) | Jim Morris Jon Schaffer |
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Iced Earth singles chronology | ||||
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"Dante's Inferno" is a song by the American heavy metal band Iced Earth. The song was originally released on the group's 1995 album Burnt Offerings, and was re-recorded in 2011, with the current line-up of the band. "Dante's Inferno" is also one of the longest songs the band has ever recorded, with the original clocking in at sixteen minutes and twenty-six seconds and the re-recorded version clocking in at seventeen minutes and twenty-eight seconds.
The song is based on the Inferno -segment of Dante Alighieri's epic poem the Divine Comedy. In it, Dante travels through the nine circles of Hell, guided by the Roman poet Virgil. The circles are concentric, representing a gradual increase in wickedness, and culminating at the centre of the earth, where Satan is held in bondage. Each circle's sinners are punished in a fashion fitting their crimes: each sinner is afflicted for all of eternity by the chief sin they committed.
The first circle is Limbo, where reside the unbaptized and the virtuous pagans, who, though not sinful, did not accept Christ. Beyond the first circle, all of those condemned for active, deliberately willed sin are judged by the serpentine Minos, who sentences each soul to one of the lower eight circles. In the second circle are those overcome by lust. These souls are blown back and forth by the terrible winds of a violent storm, without hope of rest. The third circle is gluttony, where the gluttons, guarded by Cerberus, are forced to lie in a vile slush produced by ceaseless foul, icy rain. Those whose attitude toward material goods deviated from the appropriate mean are punished in the fourth circle, avarice. They include the avaricious or miserly, who hoarded possessions, and the prodigal, who squandered them. The two groups are guarded by a figure Dante names as Pluto. The two groups joust, using as weapons great weights which they push with their chests. In the fifth circle, anger, in the swamp-like water of the river Styx, the wrathful fight each other on the surface, and the sullen lie gurgling beneath the water, withdrawn "into a black sulkiness which can find no joy in God or man or the universe."