Sir Orfeo

The theme of loss and recovery centers around Sir Orfeo and his wife, Heurodis, who have their lives turned upside down after Heurodis’s encounter with the fairy world. Heurodis is plucked clean out of the comfortable human world, where she lived in “fairest bliss” (Line 31). When the fairy king informs her that she is to be abducted, she is so grief-stricken that she seems to go “mad” (Line 86). She scratches her face, drawing blood, and tears her clothes. She is so out of control that she has to be restrained, but still she shouts and raves and struggles. The loss she experiences is profound, but nothing can be done to prevent it. There is something precarious about the noon hour and the grafted tree in the orchard under which she sleeps. This is exactly the time and the place when the fairy world seems able to break through into the human world.

For Orfeo, the loss of his wife is overwhelming, so much so that he cannot continue in his former life. He renounces everything—his status, wealth, fine clothes, the allegiance of many nobles and knights. His life of ease and comfort, and his days of wielding authority, are over. He goes into the wilderness, where he lives for 10 years in poverty and solitude, dressed only in the attire of a beggar. Rather than indulging in fine feasts, he now has to forage for roots and berries, and his former happiness is replaced by sadness and woe.

Although Orfeo lives the life of an ascetic in the wilderness, he does not do so for religious reasons. He is not trying to purify himself in order to live a more spiritual life. He is simply broken by the loss of his wife. Perhaps he also feels the need to punish himself for being unable to protect her. When he tells the courtiers that he never wants to see a woman again, it is likely because that would only remind him of his terrible loss.

The turnaround, or recovery, when it finally comes, is as fulfilling as the loss was devastating. It arises simply because Orfeo, who sometimes sees the fairy king and his retinue at the fateful noon hour in the woods, happens to see Heurodis one day. She is with the fairy women on horseback with their falcons. Orfeo and Heurodis gaze at each other for a silent moment, but then the other ladies hurry Heurodis away. Having seen her briefly and lost her for a second time, Orfeo is filled with despair. With his heart broken again, he thinks he might as well die. But something else takes over in him, and he manages to follow the ladies and gain entrance to the fairy kingdom. He survives a perilous interview with the fairy king and returns home with the greatest of prizes, his newly re-found queen, and the couple resume their former happy life together. Long exile is followed by a return in which all losses are restored.

In this pattern of loss and recovery, or exile and return, there are some echoes of Christianity: Orfeo goes through a process of redemption through suffering. The time he spends in the wilderness echoes a common biblical motif, although what sin Orfeo may have committed for which he must do penance is not stated. Heurodis is also linked to Eve in the book of Genesis. The grafted tree under which she sleeps and from which she is abducted by the fairy king puts in mind the tree of knowledge, from which Eve, tempted by the devil, plucks the forbidden fruit. (The fairy king is not exactly a devil, but he does act as a disruptor of human happiness.) This also hints at humankind’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden into a life of hardship and separation from God (like the hardship Orfeo experiences in the wilderness). The parallels with Christianity should not be pushed too far, however, since Sir Orfeo is notable for the absence of sin and guilt on the part of Orfeo or Heurodis—Heurodis, for example, is known for her “grace and goodness” (Line 55)—which differs from the Christian story of human disobedience to God.