Sir Orfeo is a short ROMANCE in a southeastern dialect
of MIDDLE ENGLISH, composed in the very
early 14th century. The poem consists of 603 lines
in octosyllabic couplets and survives in three manuscripts,
two of which contain a short prologue
categorizing the poem as a Breton LAI and defining
the genre as a short verse romance characterized
by the central element of ferly or the
marvelous, and told originally in the Briton language.
Since the same prologue begins the LAY LE
FREINE in the famous Auchenlick manuscript,
some scholars believe that the same author may
have written both poems. No Breton source is
known for Sir Orfeo (although there are references
in Old French to a non-extant romance called the
Lai d’Orphey). The ultimate source for the story is
the tale of Orpheus, as told in books 10 and 11 of
Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
The tale turns Ovid’s Orpheus and Eurydice
into Sir Orfeo and his wife Heurodis. Orfeo, a
magnificent harper, is king of Thrace (which the
poet identifies with Winchester) and Heurodis is
his queen. In a dream the king of Fairy appears to
Heurodis and tells her he will abduct her despite
anything she or Orfeo can do. Orfeo and 1,000 of
his troops guard the queen, but she magically disappears
from under a grafted tree notwithstanding
their efforts. Orfeo, in despair over the loss of his
wife and his inability to protect her, leaves his kingdom
in the charge of his Steward.He shoulders his
harp and wanders off into the wilderness in beggar’s
rags, where he lives as a wild man—a conventional
medieval depiction of madness.
For 10 years he wanders in the forest, playing
his harp in a way that charms the beasts, until one
day he happens to catch sight of Heurodis herself,
among 60 ladies who are out hawking in the
woods. He follows the ladies right through a
mountainside into a level, green land with a castle.
Pretending to be a minstrel, he gains entrance to
the castle, where he sees people who had been
drowned, burned,wounded, all thought to be dead
but actually snatched by the king of Fairy. There,
too, he sees Heurodis sleeping beneath the grafted
tree. Orfeo comes before the king and entertains
him with his harp. The king is so moved that he
grants Orfeo any boon he asks for, and he asks for
Heurodis. The two are allowed to leave.
The English poet omits the tragic ending of
Ovid’s story, in which Orpheus loses Eurydice
when he looks back at her. Instead, the two arrive
back in Winchester, where Orfeo, still in disguise,
meets his Steward on the street. The Steward, believing
him to be a minstrel, invites Orfeo to the
castle, where he says all harpers are welcome for his
lord’s sake.At the castle, Orfeo takes out his harp to
play, and the Steward instantly recognizes the harp.
He asks Orfeo where he obtained it, and Orfeo tells
him he took it off a man who had been torn in
pieces by lions. The Steward swoons in sorrow
when he hears this, after which Orfeo reveals his
true identity, and rewards the Steward for his loyalty
by making him heir to the throne.
It is likely that one of the poet’s sources for his
story was BOETHIUS’s brief summary of Ovid’s tale
in book 3 of his CONSOLATION OF PHILOSOPHY. Here,
Boethius uses the story as an ALLEGORY of how humankind’s
desire for God’s light is thwarted by our
attachment to earthly things that draw our
thoughts toward hell. Some modern critics of the
poem have used Boethius’s ideas to justify an allegorical
reading of Sir Orfeo, suggesting that Orfeo’s
rescue of Heurodis depicts human reason saving
the flesh from hell. But it seems clear that the poet
resisted the Boethian interpretation of the tale
when he omitted the tragic ending, and specifically
resisted identifying fairyland with hell—depicting
it, in fact, like Orfeo’s own Winchester.
A more pertinent question for the poem is why
the poet chose to change the end of the story, and
why he added the test of the Steward. Perhaps the
point is a reinforcement of the main tale’s theme of
long-term devotion rewarded. One thing that
seems clear is the poet’s emphasis on the importance
of treating minstrels well: In what was probably
a poem in the repertoire of traveling
minstrels, there is almost certainly some selfinterest
evident in the text.
Bibliography
Bliss, A. J., ed. Sir Orfeo. 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1966.
Dorena, Allen.“Opheus and Orfeo: The Dead and the
Taken,”Medium Aevum 33 (1964): 102–111.
Friedman, John Block. Orpheus in the Middle Ages.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1970.
Gros Louis, Kenneth R. R. “The Significance of Sir
Orfeo’s Self-Exile,”Review of English Studies n.s. 18
(1967): 245–252.
Hanson, Thomas B. “Sir Orfeo, Romance as Exemplum,”
Annuale Mediaevale 13 (1972): 135–154.
Hill, D. M. “The Structure of Sir Orfeo,” Medieval
Studies 23 (1961): 136–153.
Lerer, Seth. “Artifice and Artistry in Sir Orfeo,” Speculum
60 (1985): 92–109.
Liuzza, Roy Michael. “Sir Orfeo: Sources, Traditions,
and the Poetics of Performance,” Journal of Medieval
and Renaissance Studies 21 (1991):
269–284.
O’Brien, Timothy D. “The Shadow and Anima in Sir
Orfeo,”Mediaevalia 10 (1984): 235–254.