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Lines 1-56
These lines serve as the exposition. Lines 1-24 establish the tradition of the Breton lai (lay) or song and hint that this lay will be about romance and adventure; it will be sung by a harper. Lines 25-56 set the scene in England and introduce the two main characters: Sir Orfeo, an English king, and his queen, Heurodis. Orfeo’s skill with the harp immediately associates him with Orpheus in Greek myth, the legendary singer whose music, which he played on the lyre, had the power to tame wild beasts (although unlike Sir Orfeo, Orpheus was not a king). It also aligns Sir Orfeo with the biblical king David, who was also a musician and harpist.
Sir Orfeo is quickly sketched as a great and worthy king. The word “courteous” (Line 28) had a stronger meaning in medieval times than today, meaning not only polite but also generous, refined, and cultured. His line of descent is from Pluto, the god of the underworld in Greek mythology (also known as Hades), and Juno, the Roman queen of the gods and wife of Jupiter. (The author of the poem mistakenly refers to Juno as a king, although that might be a transcription error in the manuscript.) To distinguish his own time from the classical period, the poet adds that Pluto and Juno were once, because of their great deeds, thought of as gods.
Lines 47-50 allude to Thrace, the region from which Orpheus came, but since the setting of the lay is England, the poet claims that Winchester, an important city in the south, was known as “Tracience” at that time, or Thrace: “[F]or Winchester, ‘tis certain, then / as Tracience was known to men” (Lines 49-50). (In the original Middle English, the town is named Traciens; in Tolkien’s translation, it becomes Tracience.) Orfeo’s queen, Heurodis, is the equivalent of Orpheus’s wife, Eurydice. She is presented as virtuous and beautiful, a worthy partner for Orfeo. In this introduction, they seem like the perfect couple, but their tranquility will not last for long.
Lines 57-174
The story now begins, and these lines describe the first abduction of Heurodis. All begins serenely, though, with no hint of the coming catastrophe. In the springtime, Heurodis and her maids go for a walk in the garden at noon. Noon is a significant hour that will be mentioned several times in the poem, as it appears to be the time when the boundary between the human world and the otherworld of the fairy kingdom is most porous. Heurodis first experiences this in a dream vision that comes to her as she sleeps beneath the grafted tree. The story is told with suspense, since the reason for Heurodis’s wild behavior when she wakes—she claws at her face until blood runs, and she tears her clothes—is not immediately explained. Heurodis appears to have simply gone “mad” (Line 86). Her behavior, as Sir Orfeo states when he hears about it, is quite out of character. Normally, she is “quiet” and “sweet” (Line 103), he says, but now, she stares at him as if he were an enemy (Line 112).
When Heurodis finally speaks to Orfeo, however, she expresses how much they have always loved each other, but that must end now, as she must depart. Orfeo immediately expresses his loyalty to her: “But where thou goest, I come with thee, / and where I go, thou shalt with me” (Lines 129-30). These lines are a clear echo of a passage from the biblical book of Ruth: “[W]hither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge” (1:16 King James Version). The theme of love and loyalty is thus struck, but it is about to meet its most severe test.
In Heurodis’s dream vision, the first attempt by the fairy kingdom to abduct her is a failure. Heurodis simply refuses to go with the fairy knights to meet their king, and they depart. When they return, however, they come with the king himself, and this time she is powerless to resist. She also gets a glimpse of the splendor of the fairy kingdom, with its palace and castles and woods and pastures. The fairy king himself is an enigmatic figure. Although he is not to be identified with evil—he has a crown of light that shines brightly—he is certainly ruthless, and when he brings Heurodis back to the orchard, he tells her that he will come for her the next day, and if she resists, he will take her by force “and all thy limbs shall rend and tear” (Line 174). He offers no explanation for this abduction, however.
This dream vision prefigures in miniature Heurodis’s journey from orchard to otherworld and back again. It also reveals her link with another figure from Greek mythology: Persephone. Persephone is the goddess of spring; she is abducted by Hades, the god of the underworld, where she spends four months of every year. Heurodis too is linked to spring, flowers, and orchards (noticeable in Lines 57-68), and she too is abducted and taken to another world, although the fairy kingdom has many differences from the underworld in Greek myth, as seen in Lines 343-408.
Lines 175-226
Orfeo is beside himself as he faces the prospect of losing his beloved wife, but there is nothing he can do about it. He tries to prevent the abduction by taking 1,000 armed knights to the grafted tree at noon the next day, but the fairies are invulnerable because they occupy a different dimension of existence, and the queen is suddenly taken: “[B]y magic was she from them caught, / and none knew whither she was brought” (Lines 193-94). In other words, the queen just disappears; she passes out of the human world into an unknown realm.
Grief-stricken, the king says his life has come to an end, and he commits himself to a drastic course of action. Handing over power in the kingdom to his steward, he says he will go and live in the wilderness for the rest of his life. He also says, “I wish not woman more to see” (Line 211). At this point, the story diverges from the source myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Eurydice dies, whereas Heurodis is abducted. Moreover, as soon as Orpheus hears of Eurydice’s death, he vows to go to the underworld and bring her back. He knows exactly how to get there: He descends into the underworld via the entrance at Taenarum. On the other hand, Sir Orfeo appears to have no such option. It is not Hades who has claimed his wife but the king of the fairy world, and Orfeo does not know how or where to find her, so his plan to live in the wilderness does not include searching for his wife.
Lines 227-280
To match his changed circumstances, Orfeo alters his identity almost completely, renouncing his comfortable, respected life as king and going into voluntary exile. He swaps his kingly robes for a “beggar’s cloak” (Line 228) and does not even wear shoes, walking barefoot in the wilderness. He eats what he can find, such as roots, berries, and wild fruit, and he becomes very thin, with cracked skin. Orfeo is now like a wandering ascetic who has renounced the world. He likely does this for a combination of reasons: grief at the loss of his wife, and perhaps some guilt too that he was unable to prevent it. He willingly embraces deprivation and suffering, as if this offers atonement for some perceived failure on his part.
There is one thing, however, that Orfeo does not renounce, and that is his harp. He takes it with him into the wilderness. Playing the harp is so central to Orfeo’s identity that it has to remain with him. It is an inextricable part of who he is, a kind of divine gift. It is in this that he most resembles the Orpheus of Greek legend. In wood and wilderness, when the weather is fair, Orfeo plays his harp, and bird and beast listen, enchanted. Even wild animals approach him joyfully from a distance (Lines 272-80). This power of music is a central motif of the poem; without it, there would be no happy ending.
Lines 281-342
Often during Orfeo’s years in the wilderness, at the significant hour of noon, the otherworld becomes visible, and Orfeo sees the fairy king and his retinue. These episodes reveal many similarities between the two worlds, human and fairy, as if they are somehow copies of each other, yet existing in two different dimensions. This has already been hinted at in two earlier passages. When Orfeo goes into the wilderness, the poet reflects that “[Orfeo] once had castles owned and towers, / water and wild, and woods, and flowers” (Lines 245-46), which echoes Heurodis’s earlier description of her brief trip to the fairy kingdom, during which “[h]e [the fairy king] castles showed me there and towers, / Water and wild, and woods, and flowers” (Lines 159-60). The descriptions are almost identical. Other parallels between the human and fairy kingdom are that the fairies come to the wilderness with dogs to hunt, and Orfeo also on occasion observes them dancing skillfully, accompanied by tabours (small drums) and trumpets. The latter seems like it could be a scene from Orfeo’s court, back when he was king; so too when Orfeo sees 60 fairy ladies on horseback using falcons that catch cormorants and other prey by the river. Orfeo is delighted because he has seen this sport practiced before.
Yet there is also something strange about some of the sights that Orfeo beholds. There are mysterious elements that cannot be rationally explained. For example, the fairy knights may hunt in the woods, but they never capture or kill any animals, and “where they went he never knew” (Line 288), as if they would suddenly disappear. It sometimes “seemed” (Line 290) to Orfeo that 1,000 armed knights were passing by, but “they were marching on he knew not where” (Line 296). Thus, to human eyes, the fairy world combines the familiar and the strange.
Orfeo’s life changes dramatically one day when he recognizes among the 60 fairy ladies his own Heurodis. They stare intensely at each other, but neither has the courage to speak, although Heurodis weeps. In this recognition scene, Orfeo forgets his earlier vow that he never wants to see a woman again. His old love for his wife reawakens, and he decides that he will follow her wherever she goes and whatever the consequences. The theme of love and loyalty thus resurfaces after Orfeo’s long sojourn in the wilderness, and his real adventure is about to begin.
Lines 343-408
Orfeo enters the fairy kingdom, which is situated under and inside a rocky hill. Through this entryway into the otherworld, Orfeo walks for more than three miles as he follows Heurodis and the other ladies, and eventually he comes upon the fairy kingdom. He now resembles the hero in what Joseph Campbell, in his popular book The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), describes as the “monomyth,” an archetypal pattern that occurs in many mythological stories and folktales (Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. New World Library, 2008). It begins with the hero’s “call to adventure,” in which he leaves his familiar world and takes on a difficult challenge that involves entering the unknown “zone of magnified power” (Campbell). In Sir Orfeo, this is the fairy kingdom, which is described as a place of great and dazzling splendor, full of light as bright as the sun, and with castle towers made of gold.
In the monomyth, the hero encounters a threshold guardian who may try to obstruct his further progress into the unknown. In the case of Orfeo, the threshold guardian is the porter who comes when Orfeo bangs on the castle gate. Orfeo manages to persuade the porter to grant him entry with a cunning half-truth: He says he is a minstrel who wishes to entertain the king. He thus disguises his true purpose, which is to win back Heurodis. He certainly knows that his harp has the power to charm those who hear it, so he has reason to be optimistic about the outcome.
The hero of the monomyth then faces tests and trials on his journey. For Orfeo, the first sight to greet him in the fairy castle is the parade of other people who have been taken by the fairies at various dire moments in their lives. As if in suspended animation, they appear to still be suffering: Some are dismembered, others are choking on their food, some are drowning, others are mad, and some women are in childbirth. Orfeo is clearly in a place of great danger, and he must keep his nerve; otherwise, he may end up as they are. He maintains his equanimity in spite of these sights, bolstered by the sight of Heurodis sleeping under a grafted tree, just as she had been before she was abducted.
Lines 409-471
At some point after he has crossed the threshold, the hero of the monomyth undergoes an ordeal in which he experiences a confrontation with an enemy and emerges victorious. In Sir Orfeo, this turns out to be a more gentle experience than the hero might have feared, given that during his initial interview with the fairy king, the king utters some fierce, challenging words, demanding to know who Orfeo is, since never before has a man come to his kingdom without first being sent for. Orfeo adopts a humble posture and speaks in modest, self-deprecating terms. He gives much the same answer that he gave to the porter, while also emphasizing his poverty. He does not mention that he is a king as well as a minstrel because he does not want to challenge the fairy king directly, since there is an obvious power imbalance in this situation.
Orfeo’s confidence in his strategy pays off. The “sweet” (Line 442), charming music that issues from his harp does its transformational work on the king and queen. The king is so delighted by the music that he tells Orfeo to ask for whatever he wants, and he, the king, will grant his desire. This is an example of a common element in folklore and other literature known as the “rash promise.” When Orfeo asks for Heurodis, the king initially refuses, but Orfeo asks him to keep his word, and the king graciously agrees to do so. He thus shows himself to be a creature of honor rather than an evil force—another example of the fairy kingdom mirroring life in Orfeo’s medieval court, in which men are expected to keep their word. It should also be noted that the fairy king imposes no condition on the return of Heurodis, unlike Hades in the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, who instructs Orpheus that he must not look back at Eurydice until they are out of the underworld. Orpheus fails to follow this instruction, resulting in Eurydice being pulled back once more into the underworld, with Orpheus losing her forever.
Lines 472-604
In this section, the hero Orfeo, like the hero in the monomyth, returns from the zone of magnified power with a boon for his society. In Sir Orfeo, the boon is the gladness that fills the court when the people realize that their king and queen have returned; the ultimate boon is the restoration of Orfeo’s enlightened kingship. Before that, however, another motif is introduced, coming after Orfeo and Heurodis have reached Winchester after a long journey from the fairy kingdom: In his ragged clothing, no one recognizes Orfeo (nor, it seems, his queen), and they stay the night in a beggar’s lodging.
The next day, Orfeo goes alone into the city, dressed as a beggar but carrying his harp. In the street, he happens to meet the steward he placed in charge of the kingdom, and here begins the test of Enduring Love and Loyalty. From the steward’s initial response to Orfeo, it seems that, after all these years, he has remained loyal to the memory of his king. He offers Orfeo hospitality in his castle, without knowing who he is—other than a needy harper—saying that he welcomes all harpers “[f]or my dear lord Orfeo’s sake” (Line 518). However, this is not quite enough for Orfeo to go on, and as soon as he gets the chance, he devises the test.
After Orfeo has impressed everyone with his playing of the harp, the steward asks about how he came into possession of the harp. The story Orfeo tells shows that he is willing to lie in order to ascertain a more important truth. He says he found the harp next to the remains of a man who had been torn apart by lions. This deeply upsets the steward, who guesses that the dead man was Orfeo, and he falls to the ground in shock and grief that Orfeo takes to be absolutely genuine. The steward has proved his loyalty. The loyalty test is found in other literature as well, notably the Odyssey, when Odysseus returns (like Orfeo) to his homeland and tests the loyalty of the old swineherd Eumaeus.
When Orfeo reveals his true identity to the steward and the entire court, and the steward flings himself at the king’s feet and the other nobles offer their allegiance, the happy ending is assured. No one has to be punished for disloyalty. The hero’s return is also a time of renewal. Orfeo is recrowned, as is Heurodis, and a new era begins. The only further detail the text provides is that “long they lived” (Line 595), but the reader can surely assume that Orfeo, during his long time of trials, has acquired a certain wisdom and resilience that will now stand him in good stead. Moreover, he has found the wife whom he assumed was lost forever, and they have rekindled and strengthened their love. In light of “these marvels” (Line 598), the lay that the harpers sing can only be “good” and the “music sweet” (Line 602).
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