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Middle English Poetry (PCMEP)
PCMEP Text Information
Sir Orfeo
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About the edition and manuscript base:
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| Text name: | Sir Orfeo |
| Alternative names: | We readen oft and find iwrite; Orfeo was a king; The tale of Sir Orfeo; Sir Orpheus |
| Content: | Sir Orfeo is the king of England. His wife, Dame Heurodis, is miraculously kidnapped by a fairy king (lines 39-200). Distraught, Orfeo abandons his kingdom and lives as a hermit in the wilderness for years, playing his harp (lines 200-296). He discovers the fairy realm, wins back his wife through his musical skill, and returns to reclaim his throne (lines 297-605). For a full summary of the story see The Database of Middle English Romances. Sir Orfeo is generally regarded as a poem with great literary merit, "[c]ritics [being] unanimous in their praise" (Bliss 1954: xli). |
| Genre/subjects: | romance, tale, Breton lay, lay of Britain, love and loyalty, exile and return, fairies and the supernatural |
| Dialect of original composition: | Southern East Midlands, central southern Midlands, London Sir Orfeo was probably written in "the Westminster-Middlesex dialect" (Bliss 1954: xxi). The language is broadly compatible with the East Midlands at the Anglian-Saxon border (e.g., present participle in -ing) (ibid.: xviii). Features such as reflexes of Old English ēo rhyming exclusively with themselves (e.g., þre : ympe-tre 'three : orchard tree') (ibid.: xix) indicates the western, and the form owy 'away' (ibid.: xx) the southern, edge of this dialect area. Purdie (2008: 197) prefers a localisation "further W[est] than M[iddlese]x" and hypothesizes that the south-western Midlands author may have moved to London. |
| Date of original composition: | 1275-1330 The date of the earliest witness, the Auchinleck manuscript, of c. 1330-40 can serve as the terminus ante quem for the composition of the poem. The original may be several decades older since time lags between original composition and manuscript witnesses are common in Middle English. The text was "composed in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth centuries" (Laskaya & Salisbury 1995: introduction to Sir Orfeo). The original may stem "from the end of the thirteenth century" (Wells 1916: 158). "The text itself may well have been composed in the first quarter of the fourteenth century" (Treharne 2000: 465). Since "the A[uchinleck] version is not far removed from the origianl and represents it with reasonably accuracy" (Bliss 1954: x), the file has been grouped into PCMEP period 2b (1300-1350) rather than 2a (1250-1300). |
| Suggested date: | 1305 |
| PCMEP period: | 2b (1300-1350) |
| Versification: | couplets, aa short lines of usually 4 stresses |
| Index of ME Verse: | 3868 (IMEV), 3868 (NIMEV) |
| Digital Index of ME Verse: | 6172 |
| Wells: | 1.89 |
| MEC HyperBibliography: | Orfeo |
About the edition and manuscript base:
| Edition: | Bliss, Alan J. 1954. Sir Orfeo. Oxford: Clarendon. 5-51. |
| Manuscript used for edition: | Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, Advocates' 19.2.1 [Auchinleck manuscript], ff. 299r-303r |
| Online manuscript description: | National Library of Scotland Auchinleck Manuscript eLALME Manuscripts of the West Midlands (item 38) |
| Manuscript dialect: | East-Midlands The texts of the Auchinleck manuscript were copied by several different scribes (e.g. Bliss 1951 identifies 6 scribes). Sir Orfeo was written down by the main scribe 1 (Bliss 1954: x). The language of this scribe has been localized to the London/Middlesex border (McIntosh et al. 1986: 88). |
| Manuscript date: | s. xiv-in The Auchinleck manuscript is conventionally dated to c. 1330-40: "On paleographical evidence, the manuscript is now unanimously assigned to the period 1330-40, and this date is confirmed by the addition, at the end of the text of the The Anonymous Short English Metrical Chronicle (item 40), in this manuscript only, of a reference to the death of Edward II and a prayer for 'þe ȝong king edward' (f. 317rb), who succeeded in 1327" (Pearsall & Cunningham 1977: vii). The online version of the Middle English Dictionary lists the manuscript date as "c1330". See also Bliss (1954: ix-x). |
About the file:
| File name: | M2b.SirOrfeo |
| ID: | SirOrfeo,x.y.z: x=page, y=line, z=token |
| Word count: | 3,505 |
| Token count: | 345 (includes final "Amen" and "Explicit" as two tokens) |
| Line count: | 567 (605 lines minus initial 38 lines missing in the Auchinleck manuscript) |
Other:
| General notes: | The beginning of the poem is lost in the Auchinleck manuscript (folio 299, of which only a stub remains). Bliss prints instead (pages 2-5) an emendated version of the beginning of Lay le Freine from the same manuscript (folio 261). The parsed file for Sir Orfeo starts on page 5 in Bliss' edition with the text extant in Auchinleck, starting with Orfeo was a kinge // In Inglond an heiȝe lording. Sir Orfeo is extant in three manuscripts:
The lay may have been accompanied by music and sung by a minstrel (Bliss 1954: xix-xxx, Treharne 2000: 465). While no immediate source for the poem is known, it is possible that it is a translation of an Old French original (Bliss 1954: xl-xli). |
| Remarks on parses: | The line breaks follow the rhyming scheme as in Bliss' (1954: 5-51) edition. Pilcrow (¶) signs in the edition have been removed without comments. The parses are largely unproblematic. |
References
Bliss, Alan J. 1951. 'Notes on the Auchinleck Manuscript.' Speculum 26.4. 652-658.
Bliss, Alan J. 1954. Sir Orfeo. Oxford: Clarendon.
Laskaya, Anne & Salisbury, Eve. 1995. The Middle English Breton Lays. TEAMS Middle English Text Series. Kalamazoo, Michigan: Medieval Institute Publications. (available online)
McIntosh, Angus, Samuels, Michael L. & Benskin, Michael. 1986. A Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press.
Purdie, Rhiannon. 2008. Anglicising Romance: Tail-rhyme and Genre in Medieval English Literature. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer.
Treharne, Elaine. 2000. Old and Middle English: An Anthology. Oxford: Blackwell.
Wells, John E. 1916. Manual of the Writings in Middle English, 1050-1400. New Haven, CT: Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences. (available online)