Sir Orfeo - Commentary

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 the underworld, with the traditional fairy motifs of the fairy raid 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 the 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."

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" 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.