Sir Orfeo
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Sir Orfeo is an anonymous Middle English narrative poem. It retells the story of Orpheus as a king rescuing his wife from the fairy king.
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[edit] History and Manuscripts
Dated to the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century, it represents a mixture of the Greek myth of Orpheus with Celtic mythology and folklore concerning fairies, introduced into the English culture via the Old French Breton lais of poets like Marie de France. Sir Orfeo is preserved in three manuscripts, Advocates 19.2.1 known as the Auchinleck MS. and dated at about 1330, the oldest. The next oldest manuscript, Harley 3810, is from about the beginning of the fifteenth century. The third, Ashmole 61, was compiled over the course of several years; the portion of the MS. containing Sir Orfeo is c. 1488. The beginning of the poem describes itself as a Breton lai, and says it is derived from a no longer extant text, the Lai d'Orphey.
The fragmentary Child Ballad 19 "King Orfeo" is closely related to this poem, the surviving text containing only portions of the known story.
Following J.R.R. Tolkien's death, his son Christopher Tolkien found an unpolished translation of Sir Orfeo and published it in edited form with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Pearl.
[edit] Synopsis
In the poem, Sir Orfeo, king of Thrace, loses his wife Heurodis (i.e. Eurydice) to the fairy king, who steals her away from under an apple tree, an imp tree that happened to be haunted by the fairies, and takes her to his underworld kingdom. Orfeo, distraught by this, leaves his court and wanders in a forest. After ten years, he sees Heurodis riding past in the company of the fairy host. He follows them to the realm of the fairy king, where he entertains the fairy king by playing his harp. The fairy king, pleased with Orfeo's music, offers him the chance to choose a reward; he chooses Heurodis. Orfeo returns with Heurodis and reclaims his throne.
[edit] Commentary
While this is not the classical myth of Orpheus, the poet shows substantial ingenuity in merging the Orpheus of mythology, who tries and fails to obtain the return of his wife Eurydice from Hades, the underworld, with the traditional Celtic fairy motifs of the fairy rade or hunt, the fairies' otherworldly kingdom, their attempts to abduct mortals, and the magical transformations endured by those who are captured by them. These motifs are shared by both Sir Orfeo and later-collected versions of Celtic ballad fairy-lore in such works as the ballads of Thomas the Rhymer and Tam Lin.
Thrace is identified at the beginning of the poem as "the old name for Winchester", which effectively announces that the well-known Greek myth is to be transposed into a British context:
- "This king sojournd in Traciens,
- That was a cité of noble defens -
- For Winchester was cleped tho
- Traciens, withouten no. [1]
The poem's unique innovation, in comparison to the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, is 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. [2]. However, in a seminal article "The Dead and the Taken" [3] D. Allen demonstrated that the theme of an other world of people who are taken at the point of death (but who are not dead) is a well-established element in Celtic folklore, and thereby shows the complete Celticisation of the Orpheus story.
[edit] Notes
[edit] References
- Bliss, A. J. Sir Orfeo. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1966.
- Briggs, Katharine, "King Orfeo", p249, An Encyclopedia of Fairies, Hobgoblins, Brownies, Boogies, and Other Supernatural Creatures,. ISBN 0-394-73467-X
- Brouland, Marie-Therese. Le Substrat celtique du lai breton anglais : Sir Orfeo. Paris: Didier Erudition. 1990.
- Shuldham-Shaw, Patrick, The Ballad King Orfeo. In: Scottish Studie 20: 124*26. 1976.
- Sisam, Kenneth, Sir Orfeo. In: Fourteenth Century Verse and Prose. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1921.
- Tolkien, J.R.R. , Sir Orfeo. In: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Sir Orfeo. Translated by J.R.R. Tolkien. New York, Ballantine, 2003.
- Mitchell, B., "The Faery World of Sir Orfeo." Neophilologus, 48 (1964), 156-9.
- Allen, D., "Orpheus and Orfeo: The Dead and the Taken." Medium Aevum, 33 (1964), 102-11.
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
- Sir Orfeo, edited by Edward Eyre Hunt, Cambridge : Harvard Co-operative Society, 1909.
- Sir Orfeo, from The Middle English Breton Lays, edited by Anne Laskaya and Eve Salisbury, Kalamazoo, Michigan: Medieval Institute Publications, 1995.
| J. R. R. Tolkien |
|---|
| Bibliography |
| Fiction: Songs for the Philologists (1936) • The Hobbit or There and Back Again (1937) • Leaf by Niggle (1945) • The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun (1945) • Farmer Giles of Ham (1949) • The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm's Son (1953) • The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (1954), The Two Towers (1954), The Return of the King (1955) • The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Verses from the Red Book (1962) • The Road Goes Ever On (1967) • Tree and Leaf (1964) • The Tolkien Reader (1966) • Smith of Wootton Major (1967) |
| Posthumous publications : The Silmarillion (1977) • Unfinished Tales (1980) • Bilbo's Last Song (1990) • The History of Middle-earth (12 Volumes) (1983–1996) • Roverandom (1998) • The Children of Húrin (2007) • The History of The Hobbit (2007) |
| Academic Works : A Middle English Vocabulary (1922) • Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (1925) • Some Contributions to Middle-English Lexicography (1925) • The Devil's Coach Horses (1925) • Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiðhad (1929) • The Name 'Nodens' (1932) • Sigelwara Land parts I and II, in Medium Aevum (1932-34) • Chaucer as a Philologist: The Reeve's Tale (1934) • Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics (1937) • The Reeve's Tale: version prepared for recitation at the 'summer diversions' (1939) • On Fairy-Stories (1939) • Sir Orfeo (1944) • Ofermod and Beorhtnoth's Death (1953) • Middle English "Losenger": Sketch of an etymological and semantic enquiry (1953) • Ancrene Wisse: The English Text of the Ancrene Riwle (1962) • English and Welsh (1963) • Introduction to Tree and Leaf (1964) • Contributions to the Jerusalem Bible (as translator and lexicographer) (1966) • Tolkien on Tolkien (autobiographical) (1966) |
