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Sir Orfeo is an Anonymous work Middle English Breton lai dating from the late 13th or early 14th century. It retells the story of Orpheus as a king who rescues his wife from the fairy king. The folk song Orfeo (Roud 136, Child ballads) is based on this poem.
The story contains a mixture of the Greek mythology of Orpheus with Celtic mythology and folklore concerning fairy, introduced into English via the Old French of poets like Marie de France. The Wooing of Etain bears particular resemblance to the romance and was a probable influence.
The fragmentary Child Ballad 19, "King Orfeo", is closely related to this poem, the surviving text containing only portions of the known story.Francis James Child, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, v 1, p 216, Dover Publications, New York 1965
Orfeo, distraught by this, leaves his court and wanders alone in a forest. He has left his steward in charge of the kingdom and seems to have no intention of returning to his capital city of Winchester (in southern England, the old capital of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex). Winchester was called Thrace in those days, the reader is assured. Sir Orfeo leaves instructions that when they learn of his death, they should convene a parliament and choose a new king.
Sir Orfeo wanders in the forest for many years, sleeping on the bare earth and living on berries and fruits in summer, roots and the bark of trees in winter. After ten years, he sees Heurodis riding past in the company of a fairy host. She is riding with sixty ladies, with not a man among them, hawking by a river. He follows these ladies into a cliff and travels for three miles through the rock until he emerges into a fairy kingdom, a flat expanse of countryside presided over by a magnificent castle, built from gold and crystal and glass. He is allowed into the castle by the gatekeeper and looking all about, he sees, lying inside these castle walls, people who had been thought to be dead, but who were not:
Some were headless, others had been drowned or burned:
Amongst these bodies he sees his dear wife Heurodis, asleep again. Despite suffering a rebuke by the king for being the only person ever to have entered this castle without having been summoned, Sir Orfeo entertains the fairy king by playing his harp and the fairy king, pleased with Orfeo's music, offers him the chance to choose a reward: he chooses Heurodis. Despite initial protestations by the king, Sir Orfeo reminds him that he gave him his word and Sir Orfeo returns with Heurodis to Winchester:
Sir Orfeo arrives in Winchester, his own city, but nobody knows who he is. He takes lodgings with a beggar and, leaving Heurodis safely there, travels into the city wearing the beggar's clothes, where he is insulted by many people for his unkempt looks. The steward, however, for the love of Sir Orfeo, invites this unknown musician into the castle to play his harp. The final action of the story is the testing of the steward's loyalty upon Sir Orfeo's return with Heurodis to reclaim his throne. Quickly, the harp is recognized and Sir Orfeo explains that he found it ten years ago beside the mutilated body of a man who had been eaten by a lion. Upon hearing this, the steward faints in distress and grief. The beggar then reveals to the court that it is Sir Orfeo himself who is speaking to them and when the steward recovers, he is assured by Sir Orfeo that, if he had been pleased to learn of his death, he would have had him thrown out of his kingdom. As it is, however, he will make him his heir. Heurodis is brought to the castle and all the people weep for joy that their king and queen are alive and well.
The Auchinleck manuscript was originally written on 332 vellum leaves. Most of this manuscript has been mutilated, and a large number of leaves have been cut away. Eight of these missing leaves have been recovered, and the present contents of the volume originally consisted of 52 gatherings. This manuscript is the closest to the presumed original version and is often known as the "base" text of 604 lines.
The Harley 3180 manuscript was composed of 34 paper folios and contained only six works: Sir Orfeo and moral and religious pieces being two of them. The verse on the last folio is written in sixteenth-century hand with an inscription being: Hic liber olim fuit liber Wil’mi Shawcler’ et Cur de Badesly Clinton: Eccl’a. The Harleian Collection version of Sir Orfeo has only been printed once. It contains only 509 lines, about 100 shorter than the Auchinleck version. Using that as the base text this Harleian version omits lines 49–50, 166–7, 206–7, 241–2, 247–50, 293–6, 391–404, 411–12, 439–42, 445–6, 458, 481–2, 485–6, 501–8, 521–2, 527–8, 539–40, 545–52, 555–6, 559–62, 565–82, 585–6, 589–94, 597–602. Passages are also added to this manuscript: two lines after line 280, two lines after line 468, two lines after 518 and four lines added at the end.
The last manuscript is Ashmole 61, which is a tall narrow folio containing 162 paper folios. This manuscript contained 41 articles of romance, saints' lives, and various moral and religious pieces. Sir Orfeo was the 39th article in this manuscript. Using Auchnileck as the base text, Ashmole omits lines 19–22, 39–46, 59–60, 67–68, 92–98, 123–4, 177–8, 299–302, 367–79, 394, 397–400, 402–4, 409–10, 481–2, 591–2. Passages are also added: six lines in the beginning, two after line 104, two after line 120, one before and after line 132, nine after line 134, one after line 159, two after line 180, two after line 190, two after line 270, two after line 274, one after line 356, three after line 296, two after line 416, two after line 468, two after line 476, one before and after line 550, two after line 558, and six at the end.
Katharine Briggs sees the tale as related in British folk narratives as being equally influenced by Celtic stories such as The Wooing of Etain as it is from Classical sources, in particular the version of the story in Ovid’s Metamorphoses which would have been the most widely available source in Britain in the Middle Ages and for some time afterBriggs, Katherine, 1977 A Dictionary of Fairies, s
The poem's unique innovation, in comparison to the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, may be that the underworld is not a world of the dead, but rather a world of people who have been taken away when on the point of death. In "The Faery World of Sir Orfeo", Bruce Mitchell suggested that the passage was an interpolation. However, in a seminal article "The Dead and the Taken" Allen, D. "Orpheus and Orfeo: The Dead and the Taken." Medium Aevum, 33 (1964), 102-11. D. Allen demonstrated that the theme of another world of people who are taken at the point of death (but who are not dead) is a well-established element in folklore, and thereby shows the complete folklorisation of the Orpheus story.
Ruth Evans views the lai of Sir Orfeo to be not just a medieval retelling of Orpheus, but also a work influenced by the politics of the time; Orfeo has been criticized as a rex inutilis ('useless king'/roi faneant) a medieval literary motif that links Orfeo with several late thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century sovereigns, including Edward II and, in his role as a harpist, as a type of David, the royal figure upon whom many medieval kings modeled themselves. When Orfeo outcasts himself from society, he is bringing in the idea of a king being an isolated man. He leaves his kingdom in the hands of his steward, upsetting the order of things. Orfeo himself is upset when his wife his taken, and Evans says in her essay that the poem's narrative syntax, by doubling social order with the classic romance structure of exile, risk and then reintegration suggests an emotional link to the loss and recovery of a wife with the loss and recovery of a kingdom. Evans argues that even if it was not the intention of the author, when read in a cultural context this interpretation is possible through the concept of the "political unconscious"Evans, Ruth. "Sir Orfeo and Bare Life." Medieval Cultural Studies. Ed. Ruth Evans, Helen Fulton, David Matthews. Wales: University of Wales, 2006 198-212. Print.
Patricia Vicari, in her essay Sparagmos: Orpheus Among the Christians, says that in Sir Orfeo Orpheus the hero is very Celticized, and says that the fate of Queen Heurodis is similar to the fates of other Celtic heroines. Instead of having a Christian take on the myth, Vicari says, Sir Orfeo sticks to a rather pantheistic view, where the fairy king of Celtic literature rules over the underworld as neither good nor bad - as opposed to J. Friedman, who argues that Christian undertones relate Heurodis to Eve taken away by Satan in the form of a fairy king. This Christian reading does not translate well overall, however: the Otherworld is described as attractive as well as menacing, and the fairy king is more a force of nature than an evil villain. Heurodis is also not being punished for any kind of sin or transgression, nor is she necessarily the victim of a targeted attack, but was merely in the wrong place at the wrong time.Vicari, Patricia. "Sparagmos: Orpheus Among Christians." Orpheus, The Metamorphoses of a Myth. Ed. John Warden. Canada: University of Toronto Press, 1982 61-83. Print.
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