Sir Orfeo

Information about Sir Orfeo

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.

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.[1]

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.

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.

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. [2]


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. [3]. However, in a seminal article "The Dead and the Taken" [4] 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 Celtic folklore, and thereby shows the complete Celticisation of the Orpheus story.

Similarity with "The Matter of Rome"

This treatment of elements from Greek mythology is similar to that of the Old French literary cycle known as the Matter of Rome, which was made up of Greek and Roman mythology, together with episodes from the history of classical antiquity, focusing on military heroes like Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar - where the protagonists were anachronistically treated as knights of chivalry, not much different from the heroes of the chansons de geste.

Notes

1. ^ Francis James Child, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, v 1, p 216, Dover Publications, New York 1965
2. ^ Lines 47-50"
3. ^ Mitchell, B. "The Faery World of Sir Orfeo." Neophilologus, 48 (1964), 156-9.
4. ^ Allen, D. "Orpheus and Orfeo: The Dead and the Taken." Medium Aevum, 33 (1964), 102-11.

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.

See also

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.
  • King Orfeo

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 Father Christmas Letters (1976) • 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 Hrin (2007) • The History of The Hobbit (2007)
Academic works : A Middle English Vocabulary (1922) • Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (trans. 1925) • Some Contributions to Middle-English Lexicography (1925) • The Devil's Coach Horses (1925) • Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meihad (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) • (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)
Posthumous publications : Finn and Hengest (1982) • The Monsters and the Critics (1983) • Beowulf and the Critics (2002)
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Anonymity is derived from the Greek word ανωνυμία, meaning "without a name" or "namelessness". In colloquial use, the term typically refers to a person, and often means that the personal identity, or personally identifiable information
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Middle English}}}
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ISO 639-1: none
ISO 639-2: enm
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Middle English is the name given by historical linguistics to the diverse forms of the English language spoken between the Norman invasion of 1066
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Narrative poetry is poetry that tells a story. The poems may be short or long, and the story it relates to may be simple or complex. It is usually nondramatic, with objective verse and regular rhyme scheme and meter.
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Orpheus (Greek: Ορφεύς; pronounced in English as ['ɔ(ɹ).fi.əs] (ohr'-fee-uhs) or ['ɔ(ɹ).
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fairy (fey or fae or faerie; collectively wee folk, good folk, people of peace, and other euphemisms)[1] is the name given to alleged benevolent metaphysical spirit or supernatural being.
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As a means of recording the passage of time, the 13th century was that century which lasted from 1201 to 1300. In the history of European culture, this period is considered part of the High Middle Ages, and after its conquests in Asia the Mongol Empire stretched from Korea to
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14th century was that century which lasted from 1301 to 1400.

Events

  • The transition from the Medieval Warm Period to the Little Ice Age
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Greek mythology is the body of stories belonging to the Ancient Greeks concerning their gods and heroes, the nature of the world and the origins and significance of their own cult and ritual practices.
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Orpheus (Greek: Ορφεύς; pronounced in English as ['ɔ(ɹ).fi.əs] (ohr'-fee-uhs) or ['ɔ(ɹ).
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Celtic mythology is the mythology of Celtic polytheism, apparently the religion of the Iron Age Celts. Like other Iron Age Europeans, the early Celts maintained a polytheistic mythology and religious structure.
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Folklore is the body of expressive culture, including tales, music, dance, legends, oral history, proverbs, jokes, popular beliefs, customs, and so forth within a particular population comprising the traditions (including oral traditions) of that culture, subculture, or group.
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fairy (fey or fae or faerie; collectively wee folk, good folk, people of peace, and other euphemisms)[1] is the name given to alleged benevolent metaphysical spirit or supernatural being.
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Motto
Dieu et mon droit   (French)
"God and my right"
Anthem
No official anthem specific to England — the anthem of the United Kingdom is "God Save the Queen".
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Old French was the Romance dialect continuum spoken in territories corresponding roughly to the northern half of modern France and parts of modern Belgium and Switzerland from around 1000 to 1300.
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Brittany (Breton: Breizh pronounced /bʁejs/; French: Bretagne, pronounced ?· i
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A Breton lai, also known as a narrative lay or simply a lay, is a form of medieval French and English romance literature. Lais are short (typically 600–1000 lines), rhymed tales of love and chivalry, often involving supernatural and fairy-world Celtic motifs.
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Marie de France ("Mary of France") was a poet evidently born in France and living in England during the late 12th century. Virtually nothing is known of her early life, though she wrote a form of continental French that was copied by Anglo-Norman scribes.
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The Auchinleck Manuscript is currently contained in the National Library of Scotland. The exact date of its creation is ambiguous, though it most likely was written in the 1330s in London.
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Child Ballads are a collection of 305 ballads from England and Scotland, and their American variants, collected by Francis James Child in the late 19th century. The collection was published as The English and Scottish Popular Ballads between 1882 and 1898.
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John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

Tolkien in 1972, in his study at Merton Street, Oxford. Source: J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography, by Humphrey Carpenter.
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Christopher John Reuel Tolkien (born 21 November 1924) is the youngest son of the author J. R. R. Tolkien (1892–1973), and is best known as the editor of much of his father's posthumously published work.
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Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a late 14th century alliterative chivalric romance outlining an adventure of Sir Gawain, a knight of King Arthur's Round Table. The poem survives on a single manuscript, the Cotton Nero A.x.
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Pearl is a Middle English alliterative poem written in the late 14th century. Its unknown author, designated the "Pearl poet" or "Gawain poet", is generally assumed, on the basis of dialect and stylistic evidence, to be the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
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Thrace, (Turkish: Trakya, Romanian: Tracia, Bulgarian: Тракия or Trakiya, Greek:
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Eurydice (Eurydíkê, Ευρυδίκη) was a woman or nymph, and was the wife of Orpheus. While fleeing from Aristaeus, she was bitten by a serpent and died.
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underworld is a generic term approximately equivalent to the lay term afterlife, referring to any place to which newly dead souls go.

See also:  and


Aztec mythology Mictlan
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The harp is a stringed instrument which has the plane of its strings positioned perpendicular to the soundboard. All harps have a neck, resonator and strings. Some, known as frame harps, also have a forepillar; those lacking the forepillar are referred to as
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Classical antiquity (also the classical era or classical period) is a broad term for a long period of cultural history centered on the Mediterranean Sea, comprising the interlocking civilizations of Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome.
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Hades (from Greek Άδης, Hadēs, originally Άιδης, Haidēs or Άΐδης
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Celts, normally pronounced /kɛlts/ (see article on pronunciation), is widely used to refer to the members of any of the peoples in Europe using the Celtic languages or descended from those who did.
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