Artifice and Artistry in Sir Orfeo- Lerer 1985
[footnotes moved to the end- need to be proofed]
Artifice and Artistry in Sir Orfeo
by Seth Lerer
Speculum, Vol. 60, No. 1 (Jan., 1985), pp. 92-109
Artifice and Artistry in Sir Orfeo
By Seth Lerer
In the half-century since Kenneth Sisam characterized the Middle English Sir Orfeo as a Greek myth "almost lost in a tale of fairyland," scholars have struggled to synthesize these two apparently disparate elements into a unified reading of the poem.[1] The narrator has seemingly transformed the ancient legend of Orpheus and Eurydice into a contemporary romance of a
king Orfeo and his queen Heurodis. The Greek harper becomes an English minstrel, and some readers have explored the meaning of this transformation through the traditions of medieval mythography and the music theory of Boethius.[2] In Orfeo's loss of his wife and kingdom, his wandering in the wilderness, and his final successful return, other readers have seen the
outlines of a specifically Christian allegory. Many of these scholars haveexplored the exegetical resonances between Orpheus and David and Orpheus and Christ, and, in spite of differences in emphasis and technique, they share a view of Orfeo's journey as a kind of penance or pilgrimage of the soul.[3] Unlike his classical counterpart, however, Orfeo finds his wife not in Hell but in fairyland, and in defining the precise nature of this other world, suggestions range from a version of the Celtic world of "the dead and the taken" to associations between fairyland and the architecture of Revelation.[4]
I propose here a different approach to the nature and origin of this fairy landscape, its relationship to Orfeo's own kingdom, and its centrality to the themes of poetry and music in the poem. A close look at the Auchinleck text reveals a description of fairyland indebted to the technical terms of painting in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century England. An awareness of this source
material facilitates an interpretation of fairyland as a kingdom of artifice: a display of human craft which manipulates surfaces for the awe or delectation of the beholder. The poem contrasts this artificial world with what I will call
Orfeo's artistry: a musical skill which does not simply dazzle the senses but
which can move the spirit. The artifice of painting or architecture imposes a
human plan on nature; musical artistry, however, has the power to bring out
the order inherent in Creation. Only the artist can find that order, and the
poem contrasts deceptive structures which offer but the semblance of security
with an art which can harmonize man with nature and with man. The
poem thus imbues the technical language of decorative and musical craft
with a moral sense, and it is through the dynamic of artifice and artistry that
I understand the poem's literary structure and meaning.
Sir Orfeo's movement of loss, exile, quest, and recovery owes much to the
romance tradition, while the hero's progress through a physical and spiritual
wasteland signals the workings of allegory. Vernacular romance often portrays
the hero's encounter with palaces of illusory splendor, and religious
narratives frequently contrast deceptively Edenic loci with the true earthly or
celestial Paradise.[5] Behind these various secular and sacred patterns lies a
dynamic of order and disorder present in the romance traditions in general
and in Sir Orfeo in particular. From the civic harmony and well-planned
orchards of the court, Orfeo moves through uncultivated wilderness only to
come upon an alien kingdom whose physical splendor seems to reshape the
landscape according to a crafted plan.[6] But this kingdom is a deceptive one,
and Orfeo must leave with his queen to restore the social and spiritual norms
which rule his court. He effects this restoration through his powers of
musical and narrative performance, and in the end, the poem argues for the
place of artistry in civilization and for the place of music and poetry in life.
Through a close analysis of the vocabulary and possible source material of
the Auchinleck version of the poem, this study will show how Sir Orfeo
articulates a vision of art's power to reshape experience. Implicit in my
argument is the belief that the Auchinleck redaction contains a clearly
expressed version of the story. I appeal to its authority not because of its age
or paleographic niceties, but because of its consistent imagery, its unique and
pointed vocabulary, and what I take to be its thematic coherence.[7] Part of
that coherence lies in the Auchinleck narrator's continual attempt to associate
his art with Orfeo's. His scenes call attention to Orfeo's skill with words
as well as with music, for the king's ability to deal with fairy lords and human
stewards ultimately relies on his ingenuity in conversation and storytelling.
By associating himself with his minstrel hero, and by showing the power of
artful storytelling, the narrator makes a case for his own poem as an effective
work of art.
Sir Orfeo's opening depicts a city governed by artistic decree, where ruler
and ruled appear united under the ordering powers of courtly craft.
Largesse and courtesy reign (42), and Orfeo's lineage, combined with
Heurodis's grace and beauty, tells the reader that this is an idealized court
patterned along the lines of romance convention. Orfeo's harping unites
human skill with an almost divine inspiration, as his music seems to transport
the listener to a kind of Paradise:
In al Pe warld was no man bore
Iat ones Orfeo sat bifore
(& he mizt of his harping here)
Bot he schuld penche pat he were
In on of pe ioies of Paradis,
Swiche melody in his harping is.
(33-38)
From the structured harmonies of Orfeo's city, Heurodis goes out one May morning to a beautiful pleasance, and the field she enters appears not as nature run wild, but as nature shaped by the horticulturalist. The orchard and the ympe-tre signal a human attempt to impose some order on the landscape, an order whose poetic expression may well be shaped by contemporary
English practice.
Historically speaking, the royal orchards of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were walled enclosures, designed as much to keep regulated plantings in as to keep the wilderness out.[8] Records from Henry III's court stress the need to prevent intruders from entering orchards, and an order from 1250 commands two walls to be built around the queen's orchard so that "no one may be able to enter" and the queen may "be able to amuse herself"within.[9] Heurodis's motivation, "To play bi an orchard-side" (66), is thus perfectly in keeping with royal custom, and the poem and its historical analogue stress the well-planned security of such cultivation.[10] More relevant
to the progress of the poem's imagery are those sources which stress the
power of human craft to reshape nature. William of Malmesbury's description
of the gardens of Thorney Abbey, while itself imposing a religious
diction on factual observation, nonetheless argues for the ability of human
hands to tame potentially threatening wilderness. "In this place cultivation
rivals nature: what the latter has forgotten the former brings forth."[11]
The sense of cultus as an ideal of civilization which stands behind William's
description has a long history, and medieval writers could argue, along with
St. Ambrose, that "the world itself would have no attraction unless a husbandman
had improved it with varied culture."[12] The ympe-tre, or grafted
tree, in Orfeo's orchard presents one detail of this culturing technique.[13]
The grafting of trees was, as one historian reports, "a medieval enthusiasm," in sharp contrast to its modern, utilitarian function.[14] Medieval treatises considered it a highly prized art, and a text of 1305 holds it to be "a great beauty and pleasure to have in one's garden trees variously and marvellously grafted, and many different fruits growing on a single tree."[15] A surviving
fifteenth-century text, "The Feate of Gardening" (probably composed before 1400, however), presents in detail the techniques of grafting, and it revels in the grafter's ability to change nature almost at whim.[16]
Orfeo's kingdom shows us craft domesticating man and nature. Taken together, the details of musical artistry, public decorum, and horticulture all present aspects of that sense of communitas which organizes civic life and which has been explored in medieval contexts by Giuseppe Mazzotta.[17] Such principles of community point to the ideal of a city which promises both
inner fulfillment and personal security. In these apparently civilized surroundings,
the capture of Heurodis is all the more disturbing. Her horrifying
dream and mystifying abduction imply the insufficiency of mere physical
security. When Heurodis narrates her vision to the court, she presents
fairyland in terms strikingly similar to Orfeo's kingdom, and these similarities
alert the reader to the limits of kingly force and courtly craft. Two fair knights, properly armed, approach her and bid her speak with their king (135-39). The king and his retinue seem fairer than any she has seen(147-48), and his jeweled crown shines as bright as the sun (152). His palace commands the same models of order and decorum as Orfeo's. Heurodis reports how the fairy king,
. .. brouzt me to his palays,
Wele atird in ich ways,
& schewed me castels & tours,
Riuers, forestes, frip wip flours.
(157-60)
The reader's recognition of this similarity is delayed until Orfeo's exile into
the wilderness reminds him that he, too, ". .. had castles & tours, / Riuer,
forest, frip wip flours" (245-46).
At one level, the two kingdoms seem strikingly similar in the ways they
show an apparently decorous civilization at work. At another level, their
differences go beyond the simple distinction between natural and supernatural.
Fairyland promises violence and pain if Heurodis will not "wip ous
go, / & liue wip ous euer-mo" (167-68). Orfeo, however, had promised,
"Whider Pou gost ichil wip pe, / & whider y go ]ou shalt wip me" (129-30).
Lines which for Orfeo read like a marriage vow sound in the fairy king's
mouth like a prison sentence, and the force of this parallel shows the
violation of social rite. The fairy king's words pervert the rhetorical rituals
and conventions of civilized life, just as his courtiers and his court seem to
mimic the trappings of decorum. That they can abduct the queen suggests
that Orfeo's kingdom is not as secure as it appears: the horticulturalist's
hand cannot stay her capture; the orchard's beauty cannot console her. In
spite of the apparently "artistic" quality to his realm, it is significant that
Orfeo's musical artistry is absent from these scenes of Heurodis's amusement,
fear, and abduction. Instead of soothing her with song, he cries
"Allas" (127, 176); he draws his court now not into an audience experiencing
paradisal music, but rather into a "conseyl" (179) shocked into silence. Orfeo
relies simply on the conventions of royal force: the impotence of his "armes"
and "ten hundred kni3tes" (182-83) indicates that his court here is strong
only in number. In short, he is no artist now, and as in many vernacular
romances, the failure of simple prowess signals the need for a shift in heroic
strategy. Heurodis's disappearance will motivate the king on a journey which
will strengthen his musical art and his verbal, rather than his physical,
power.[18]
Orfeo's departure into the wilderness juxtaposes the demands of political
life with the needs of personal exile. He does not leave before he has held
court to entrust his steward with the kingdom and left directions for the
order of succession. His last act as king reaffirms the political order as he
instructs his court to "make 3ou pan a parlement" (216) after they are sure
he is dead. Now, dressed in his pilgrim's mantle and staff, barefoot and with
only his harp as a relic of court life, Orfeo enters the wilderness. The
narrator's description of his loss (241-46) emphasizes that Orfeo's journey is
a departure from the regulated world of court. With each new rhetorical
antithesis, he progressively strips away the veneer of civilized life (247-60).
If Orfeo's journey is a kind of self-exile, and if the details of his dress signal
spiritual pilgrimage, there is nonetheless a literary precedent for his decision
in secular romance. Such a journey enacts the willing isolation of the hero
from society; it helps him come to terms with himself apart from the
demands of feudal and marital life.[19] In addition, the reader will witness
Orfeo's skill with music and with words reach levels not before attained in
court. These features combine with the romance narrative conventions to
prepare the reader for a series of expected events: the appearance of an
enchanted castle; the rescue of the beloved; and the restoration of social and
personal harmony.
In the Auchinleck version of the story, the appearance of the fairy castle
recalls not only these earlier narrative tropes, but also the details of contemporary
architecture. Close comparison with thirteenth-century royal accounts
and other literary texts suggests that the narrator presents this palace
as an attempted ordering of the world through human artifice. The enamel
work of the fairy castle would have signaled to a contemporary audience the
latest in decorative technique. The poem creates a fantasy world out of the
details of topical allusion and the vocabulary of craft.
Amidde pe lond a castel he size,
Riche & real & wonder heize:
Al pe vt-mast wal
Was clere & schine as cristal;
An hundred tours per were about,
Degiselich & bataild stout;
De butras cor out of pe diche
Of rede gold y-arched riche;
De vousour was auowed al
Of ich maner diuers aumal.
(355-64)
The poem's most recent editor has argued for an Old French original on the
evidence of buttresses and voussoirs. Bliss claims that flying buttresses "were
scarcely known in England in the thirteenth century, . and would have
occurred more readily to the mind of a French poet than to that of an
English one" (p. xl). The evidence of Henry III's orders for the decoration
of his palaces, however, suggests quite the opposite. Winchester cathedral
had its voussoirs painted in alternate colors by the middle of the century.[20] A
record from the Liberate Rolls of 1269 states that Henry III commanded the
queen's chamber at Winchester to be ornamented with a turret cum duplici
vousura.[21] Another rolls entry from a decade earlier speaks of a flying boteraz
coming out of a tower ditch.[22] The poem's vocabulary grows richly French at
this moment not because of the limits of translation, but rather out of the
demands of craft. These are technical terms, terms which by their very
specificity call attention to their origin in the world of contemporary
architecture and decorative arts. In particular, the word aumal has received
inappropriate handling from editors, and early redactors were led to emend
it to the nonsensical "animal."[23] The Middle English Dictionary fails to give a
citation contemporary with the Auchinleck manuscript, and Sir Orfeo's use of
the word may be its first appearance in English.[24]
To translate it simply as "enamel," however, is misleading. As E. W.
Tristram points out, the terms admallum and aymallum, used in royal accounts
to characterize the decorations on Henry III's famed Painted Chamber,
invariably meant not true enamel work (the word used for that was limoge)
but rather an artificial enamel made by painting on glass or foil.[25] Tristram's
close examination of unpublished rolls records shows that aymallum was used
on the vaulting of Westminster Abbey and in the Painted Chamber itself.[26]
St. Edward's Chamber was decorated with such enamel (rolls for 1267-70),
and an account for December 1269 orders "gold in leaf, enamels in diverse
colors, and other necessaries for the pictures of the Shrine."[27] The effect of
this kind of painting, known also as translucida, was of shimmering brightness,
and many accounts from well into the fourteenth century record the
visitor's awe at such craft.[28]
Sir Orfeo's use of aumal and its vision of fairyland also adumbrate a moral
sense, and it alerts the reader to the status of fairyland as a world of artifice.
A. Bartlett Giamatti has demonstrated the literary function of enameled
visions, especially in Dante, and the aumal work of fairyland gives added
historical weight to his arguments. Giamatti finds in Dante's "verde smalto"
of Limbo (Inferno 4.118) and in the "sommo smalto" of Purgatory (Purgatorio
8.114) an idiom for describing anticipatory Paradises which look forward to
the final union of the hero with God or his beloved.[29] The architectural
splendor and bright colors of these loci seem to resemble Paradise, yet Dante
is primarily interested in their very artificiality. His use of the technical terms
of the decorative and plastic arts calls attention to the purely visual aspects of
these places. In Giamatti's terms, the highly wrought character of the Valley of the Princes in particular "provides the proper setting for those who
tended to the external and secular world to the detriment of higher concerns"
(p. 99). Giamatti defines this artificial quality as a sense of being "too
overtly made," with "too much care expended on its visible aspects" (emphasis
his, p. 99). He later demonstrates that by the time of Ariosto,
enameled features of description "imply the falsity and artificiality of Alcina's
island."[30]
Courtly romance also provides an analogue to Orfeo's vision of fairy
artifice. The stunning edifices of the Roman d'Eneas show how the artisan's
craft can reshape the landscape into a dazzling, but ultimately pernicious,
form of civilization. Such a city presents itself to the viewer as an artifact: a
construction designed only to awe, to direct the attention not to the moral
bases which organize society but rather to the illusory trappings by which we
all too often measure civilized life. Dido's Carthage offers a particularly
striking parallel to Sir Orfeo's fairyland, complete with enameled towers,
voussoirs, and colorful designs:
De chieres pieres naturalz
ot un mui enz el mur asis,
et set mile esmalz i ot mis
es pilers, es antailleiires,
es oiseries, es volsures,
es columbes, es fenestriz,
es verrines et es chasiz.
(508-14) [31]
Robert Hanning has acutely demonstrated the moral force behind such
scenes in the romances. While they may look like the landmarks of a locus
amoenus, they signal the application of human craft to disguise potential
danger. Dido's walls may be stunningly beautiful, but they also bristle with
the machines of war.[32] Similarly, for all their splendor, the walls of fairyland
are "bataild stout" (360). As an example of artifice and ingenuity, the palace
of Carthage poses a threatening alternative to the ideals of conduct which
the Virgilian hero must follow. This is a world of illusion, whose technical
tricks and decorative richness fail to conceal the moral vacuity of its inhabitants. [33]
In these contexts, Sir Orfeo's fairyland becomes a kingdom of artifice
precisely because it is so consciously crafted. It looks like Paradise (375-76),
but it is not. Instead of the blessed, it houses only the tormented. The king
and queen sit in a tabernacle (412), and their clothes and jewels are so bright
they blind the viewer. Developing the comparisons between the human and
fairy court suggested earlier, the narrator's description now confirms the
ambivalent relationship between the two worlds. Both impose a crafted
order on experience; both are cities wrought by human skill. This order
should carry with it a sense of security, but apparently impregnable cities
yield easily to invasions: Heurodis is abducted from the orchard; she is
rescued from the castle. The narrator creates elaborate structures only to
undermine them: to show that the walls alone do not ensure security or
imprisonment. Artifice creates only the illusion of control, and against this
superficial ordering, the narrator counterpoints a true civilizing force in the
artistry of Orfeo's music. Throughout the poem, his harping offers a restoration
of natural and civic harmony, and a close analysis of the progress of
his art reveals the nature of his sojourn in fairyland and the meaning of
Heurodis's return.
Orfeo's harping could metaphorically transport its listener to Paradise
from court, and it can also create an Eden in the wilderness. From the
poem's beginning we are told of the inspiring and restorative powers of his
music. After his initial departure from court, his harping continues to offer
a sequence of reorderings. Through the repeated use of the word "melody,"
the Auchinleck narrator punctuates the progress of Orfeo's journey. Only in
his text does the word appear in all five scenes of musical performance.[34] It
is not simply joy or mirth, as in the other texts, but music itself which
becomes the poem's subject at these points. If there is a philosophical and
literary explanation for the function of melody in the poem, it may lie less
with the Boethian musical inheritance than with the place of song in the
communities of man and nature. The poet plays on the earthly and celestial
connotations of "melody" to show how Orfeo's artistry brings man and
nature into a shared community: whether he is charming the beasts or
captivating the court, Orfeo unites his surroundings into a listening audience.
The lexica of Middle English point to a specific use of "melodie" in certain
contexts as an expression of natural, social, or spiritual harmony, and with
each appearance of the word in the poem, a new facet of Orfeo's artistry is
revealed.[35] The narrator's initial equation of Orfeo's melody with the joys of
Paradise points to a specifically eschatological reference taken from the
language of Revelation and religious poetry.[36] In the wilderness, Orfeo's
music draws the "wilde bestes" into an almost domesticated Eden (273-80).
His playing before nature may be viewed as restating the relationship between
man and Creation found in Eden, and it had long been a feature of
both Western and Byzantine art to equate Orpheus with Adam and the good
shepherd. For the early fathers, it was this very fact of the expulsion from
Paradise which violated the deeper harmonies between human and animal
coexistence.[37] When Orfeo plays before the fairy court, it is no accident, then, that his notes are "blisseful" (a feature reduced in the Harley text to a mere "mery," H 438). The minions of the other world crowd around him as
the beasts themselves had formed a willing audience in the wilderness.
Bifor pe king he sat adoun & when pe weder was clere & bri3t
& tok his harp so miri of soun, He toke his harp to him wel ri3t
& tempre] his harp as he wele & harped at his owhen wille.
can, In-to alle Pe wode Pe soun gan
& blisseful notes he Per gan, schille,
Pat al pat in Pe palays were Pat alle Pe wilde bestes pat per
Cor to him forto here, beb
& liggeb adoun to his fete, For ioie abouten him pai teD,
Hem penkeb his melody so swete. & alle Pe foules pat Per were
(435-43) Come and sete on ich a brere,
To here his harping a-fine
- So miche melody was per-in;
(269-78)
For their effect, both scenes naturally depend on the mythic Orpheus's
ability to charm the beasts and soothe Pluto's heart. They may be seen as
restating the Fulgentian idiom of the power of music to give "the hidden
forces [of the spirit] the effect of delight," regardless of whether the musician
is "soothing wild beasts," "charming the birds," or placating people.[38]
These passages are so similar in their rhetorical structure (notice, for example,
the pivotal use of Pat in the syntax at 439 and 273) and in their praise of
"melody," that they reveal the Auchinleck narrator's claims for music as an
ordering force. It transforms a hostile wilderness or a threatening fairyland
into a receptive community of listeners. Orfeo's melody creates a bond
between the performer and his world, no matter how alien that world may be.
The force of these scenes also shows fairyland, for all its artifice, to be an
artless world. It only apes the life of courtliness. Orfeo witnesses knights and
ladies dancing to "al maner menstraci" (302). He can rely on the conventions
of patronage to get past the porter: "Icham a minstrel, lo!" (382) is all he has
to say and the gates instantly open. But when he enters, Orfeo sees the
terrors hidden within. If the poet's description reveals the hollowness of
fairy artifice, then the moral vacuity of the king himself is clearest in his
attempt to renege on his promise to the minstrel. Orfeo and the king strike a
bargain based on social convention: he entertains the king, and the king is so
well pleased that he offers a reward. Have anything you want, he states; and yet, his boast, "Largelich ichil be pay" (451) contrasts sharply with the habits of Orfeo as king: "Large and curteys he was also" (42). When Orfeo requests
Heurodis, the king balks, and his willingness to go back on his word mocks
the courtly generosity he espouses. But Orfeo, with a flattering appeal to
gentillesse - "Gentil King," in the Auchinleck narrator's words (463) -
reminds him of his word and convinces him to release his captive. Significantly,
Orfeo nowhere charms the inhabitants of fairyland: his melody
does not open the gate nor does it reduce the fairy king to whimpering
defeat. What ensures Orfeo's success are the conventions of civilized life and
his own ingenuity at making them work. These conventions include music as
a social force, courtliness as a mode of behavior, and promise-keeping as a
personal habit. Orfeo alone brings all these features to fairyland. He explains
to the porter and the king the nature of his calling, and through his
arguments as well as his art, Orfeo brings the fairy world into a community
participating in the structure of social and moral decorum which governs
cultivated life. He has rejected the display of force which failed him at home
and which the fairy king himself had brandished before Heurodis. Rather
than offering scenes of conquest, as the classical sources do, the Auchinleck
narrator presents patterns of domestication.
Central to this dynamic is the civilizing power of Orfeo's music, and it is
natural that in the familiar halls of civilization itself, the returned king would
find his old steward preserving the political and musical order:
Per were trompours & tabourers,
Harpours fele, & crouders:
Miche melody Pai maked alle.
(521-23)
Unlike the fairy king, who seemed stunned that Orfeo should enter unannounced,
and who seemed so skeptical of his craft that Orfeo had to explain
it, the steward greets this nameless minstrel with open arms (515-18). His
society welcomes the artist, and together with its ever-present "melody,"
Orfeo's court remains a bastion of civilized life. The scene of Orfeo's performance
at his home court recreates his display at fairyland:
. . when pai ben al stille
He toke his harp & tempred schille.
Pe blissefulest notes he harped pere
Pat euer ani man y-herd wip ere.
(525-28)
In both scenes, Orfeo tempers his harp (437, 526) and his notes are blissful
(438, 527). His playing creates a community of listeners, and his musical
skills go hand in hand with his verbal abilities to effect the restoration of his
kingdom. The two stories he tells the steward - the one false, the other
hypothetical - demonstrate Orfeo's abilities at moving and convincing
through verbal manipulation. Just as he had argued his way out of fairyland with his wife, so Orfeo now narrates his way home. When Heurodis finally
returns to the court in triumph, it is musical artistry which caps Orfeo's
success: "Lord! Per was grete melody" (588-90). The celebration in music
expresses the restoration of political and marital norms, and it reaffirms the
sense of communitas shaken at the story's opening. Central to this scene is the
ability of music to bring together king and queen, ruler and ruled, into a
community of celebrants. Certain readers of the poem have, at this point,
found a definite eschatological focus, and certainly the later, Ashmole narrator's
desire to wish upon Orfeo and his poem's audience "be blysse of
Heuyn" indicates a possible religious resonance to the reunion.[39] In much
Middle English poetry, too, the word "melodie" is specifically associated with
a saint's or hero's triumphal entry into Heaven, and Sir Orfeo's earlier associations
of melody with Paradise or Eden may imply a certain celestial sense in
the restoration of the kingdom.[40]
But in the end, this melody is also minstrelsy, and the Auchinleck narrator
returns us not to Heaven but to Brittany. Breton harpers made the lay, and
the narrator passes critical judgment on his source in a way which associates
his own enterprise with that of his historical predecessors and fictional hero.
The lay of Orfeo is "swete" (602), and in a similar way Orfeo's own harping
was thought "swete" by the fairy audience (442). The force of this echo
serves two purposes. First, it equates the audiences inside the poem's fiction
with the audience outside; we are made to respond to Sir Orfeo much in the
same way that Orfeo's own listeners responded to his music. Second, the
echo equates the performer of the lay with Orfeo himself, for both are
capable of pleasing an audience and both have a central role at court. This
concluding praise of its own subject, taken in conjunction with the poem's
prologue, brackets the text with self-conscious reflections on the power of
minstrelsy to preserve the story and revive its meaning with each new recital.
The poem's source lies in those works "we redep oft & findep y-write" (1),
and the life of King Orfeo survives through the efforts of minstrels much
like their story's hero. The list of legendary topics opening the poem (1-20)
places its subject in a specific history: a history of both auentours and auentour
poetry. Fictional subject and factual performer dovetail, as it becomes clear
that Orfeo is nothing less than the ideal topic for a Breton lay. If the
narrator only "can tel sum, ac nou3t alle" (22), this one is certainly the best.
At the poem's close, the narrative bracketing is completed as we are told how
the story which the audience has just heard became the subject of the lay we
have just read. In both the prologue and the epilogue, the poem names itself
(24, 601), and in so doing it calls attention to its status as an artistic object.
The Auchinleck narrator fills his text with set pieces of rhetorical description
which reinforce the reader's impression that his poem is a consciously
crafted work. He uses the details of contemporary decorative technique as
well as literary conventions to reveal his abilities. If, for instance, Heurodis's
orchard conforms to the plans of royal horticulture and her ympe-tre to
arboreal technique, the larger poetic context of their appearance reveals his
abilities in lyric composition. The description of the May morning and the
locus amoenus of the garden are clearly conventions here, and they encourage
the reader to admire the narrator's own artistry. His description of fairyland
is also artfully crafted. This vision, the narrator claims, cannot be expressed
in words (373-74); and yet, this is precisely what he prepares to do. His
vivid, technical description of the palace gives the audience a concrete
reference for its exotica. In one sense, he may be said to adapt the techniques
of the visual artist in both creating and offering up for our amazement
an imagined world. In another sense, he may adopt the powers of the
rhetorician in offering the catalogue of the dead and mutilated. This famous
passage (387-401) has long been the subject of speculation on the uniqueness
of the Auchinleck narrator's vision.[41]
Rather than indicating the details
of a Celtic otherworld, or presenting a useless narrative excursus, this passage
calls attention to itself as a tour de force of narrative skill. Through
anaphora, variation, and a potentially endless catenulate structure, the narrator
imposes a rhetorical plan on an experience so horrible that words
indeed might fail. His narrative control contrasts sharply with the wonder of
his hero and the disorientation of his subject, and his lines offer an assertion
of an overarching literary order. In a similar manner, Orfeo's sojourn in the
wilderness appears deftly controlled through a series of rhetorical antitheses
and catalogues. Whether through the disruptions of the wilderness or the
deceptive patterns of fairyland, Orfeo's journey is carefully mapped by the
narrator's planned descriptions. He thus uses the techniques of both the
decorative and the rhetorical arts to display his own skills at manipulating
them.
The narrator's talent is Orfeo's too. His disputation with the fairy king and
his dissimulations and recitations before the steward all show his skill at
manipulating others through words. Orfeo, like the romance heroes before
him, is both a solver of problems and a creator of fictions,[42] and it is through
such acts of storytelling within the poem that the Auchinleck narrator exemplifies
the ability of narrative to shape fantastic experience to human needs.
Even Heurodis appears as a storyteller, for we do not witness the events of
her dream save through her recitation. Her announcement, "Ichil Pe telle al
hou it is" (132), sounds very much like a minstrel's exordium, and her
narrative organizes a nightmare into a well-structured drama of description
and dialogue. Similarly, toward the poem's end, Orfeo tells the beggar with
whom he lodges "euery grot" of his adventure (490). The story of Sir Orfeo
begins to recapitulate itself, and Orfeo's precis orders its events into a
memorable sequence. Finally, when the disguised king tests the steward, it is
through an elaborate series of narrative fictions: first, how he supposedly
found the harp by the mangled body of its owner; then, through a long
subjunctive recapitulation of the story's events. The force of this scene lies
with the power of storytelling to raise emotion and reveal truth, whether it
be the truth of the steward's loyalty or the truth of Orfeo's identity. As much
as music, narrative is an art, and Orfeo's skills serve him in good stead in his
performance before the steward.[43]
This emphasis on scenes of narrative recitation suggests a role for Sir
Orfeo's audience. Like the fairy court or the steward's courtiers, the poem's
readers are asked to render judgment on the artistry of a performance, and
to recognize that the poem's theme is the ability of art to bring us to an
awareness of our shared humanity. In addition to making its audience
judges, Sir Orfeo makes them celebrants. By focusing both on the melody and
the sweetness of Orfeo and his narrator, the Auchinleck version brings its
readers and listeners into the shared experience of loss and restitution. At
the poem's end the celebration of Heurodis's return and the celebration of
the Breton minstrel merge into one, as poet, audience, and fictional characters
all participate in praise. In sum, we witness the power of music and
narrative both inside and outside the text. Orfeo can sway fairyland; the
poet can sway us.
The abduction of Heurodis from the orchard is now understandable. The
structures of human craft may reshape nature through walls and grafted
trees, but they cannot exclude the more profound disharmonies and fears
which menace the mind. The Auchinleck narrator's careful echoes in his
descriptions of fairyland and Traciens indicate not simply that the fairy
kingdom is a dark version of home, but that there is a little bit of fairyland in
everyplace. The successful return of Heurodis vindicates the power of verbal
discussion of the affiliations between romance hero and narrator as performers is relevant to my
argument (see, too, pp. 105-12).
Artifice and Artistry in Sir Orfeo 109
skill and musical artistry to restore lost love, and this very success rests for its
power less on the conscious rewriting of classical myth or religious typology
than on a deep faithfulness to the poem's own central pattern of imagery.
Heurodis's return enacts the poem's argument: that artistry can recapture
something of what we have lost in our attention to artifice. The poet's skills
at transforming the details of contemporary craft into imaginary edifices are
formidable. But even more formidable are his skills at storytelling, and his
rhetorical control shows us narrative artistry restoring order to a potentially
fragmented world.
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
----------------
Footnotes:
1 Kenneth Sisam, Fourteenth Century Verse and Prose (Oxford, 1921), p. 13.
2 John Block Friedman, Orpheus in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, Mass., 1970), especially pp.
98-136, 175-94; J. K. Knapp, "The Meaning of Sir Orfeo," Modern Language Quarterly 29 (1968),
263-73; Michael Masi, "The Christian Music of Sir Orfeo," Classical Folia 28 (1974), 3-20.
3 Felicity Riddy, "The Uses of the Past in Sir Orfeo," Yearbook of English Studies 6 (1976), 5-15;
Penelope B. R. Doob, Nebuchadnezzar's Children (New Haven, 1974), especially her section "The
Holy Wild Man: Sir Orfeo," pp. 158-207; David L. Jeffrey, "The Exiled King: Sir Orfeo's Harp
and the Second Death of Eurydice," Mosaic 9 (1976), 45-60. See also Kenneth R. R. Gros Louis,
"The Significance of Sir Orfeo's Self-Exile," Review of English Studies 18 (1967), 245-52, and his
earlier, more general article, "Robert Henryson's Orpheus and Eurydice and the Orpheus Traditions
of the Middle Ages," Speculum 41 (1966), 643-55. For a reading of the poem as a
celebration of human love, see D. M. Hill, "The Structure of Sir Orfeo," Mediaeval Studies 23
(1961), 136-53. For one explanation of the poem's ending as a personal response to the classical
myth, see A. M. Kinghorn, "Human Interest in the Middle English Sir Orfeo," Neophilologus 50
(1950), 359-69. For a reading which assesses the narrative art of the poem in the light of other
Middle English romances, see Mary Hynes-Berry, "Cohesion in King Horn and Sir Orfeo,"
Speculum 50 (1975), 652-70. For a reading which combines the archetypalism of Frye with the
formalism of Vladimir Propp, see Patrizia Grimaldi, "Sir Orfeo as Celtic Folk-Hero, Christian
Pilgrim, and Medieval King," in Morton W. Bloomfield, ed., Allegory, Myth, and Symbol, Harvard
English Studies 9 (Cambridge, Mass. 1981), pp. 147-61.
4 Dorena Allen, "Orpheus and Orfeo: The Dead and the Taken," Medium /Evum 33 (1964),102-11; Robert M. Longsworth, "Sir Orfeo, the Minstrel, and the Minstrel's Art," Studies in Philology 79 (1982), 1-11.
5 For the patterns of romance and the features of the genre most relevant to the present
essay, see R. W. Hanning, The Individual in Twelfth-CenturyR omance (New Haven, 1977), and the
links established between romance, folk-tale, and myth established in the studies of Hill,
Grimaldi, and Hynes-Berry.
6 This movement is suggested only tentatively by Longsworth as one of the many structures
he finds operating in the poem. For a synthesis of medieval literary and philosophical views of
order, especially in reference to the pilgrimage theme, see Gerhart B. Ladner, "Homo Viator:
Mediaeval Ideas on Alienation and Order," Speculum 42 (1967), 233-59. For palaces of craft in
later literatures, see Hans P. Gurth, "Allegorical Implications of Artifice in Spenser's Faerie
Queene," PMLA 76 (1961), 474-79, and A. Bartlett Giamatti, The Earthly Paradise in the Renaissance
Epic (Princeton, 1966), pp. 148 (on Ariosto), 188-99 (on Tasso), and 254-60 (on Spenser).
7 A case remains to be made for the place of Sir Orfeo in the Auchinleck manuscript as a whole
and for the unity of the entire manuscript, but the following studies chart the major lines of
inquiry: E. Kolbing, "Vier Romanzen-Handschriften,"E nglische S tudien 7 (1884), 177-201;
Doob, NebuchadnezzaCr'hs ildrenp, p. 170-71, 204-6; and the three studies of L. H. Loomis, "The
Auchinleck Manuscript and a Possible London Bookshop of 1330-1340," PMLA 57 (1942),
595-627; "The Athelstan Gift Story: Its Influence on English Chronicles and Carolingian
Romances," PMLA 67 (1952), 521-37; "The Auchinleck 'Roland and Vernagu' and the 'Short
Chronicle,'"M odern L anguage N otes 60 (1945), 94-97. The recent publicationo f the manuscript
facsimilew ill facilitatem ore research: see TheA uchinlecMk anuscriptN: ationalL ibraryo f Scotland,
AdvocatesM' S. 19.2.1, with an introductionb y Derek Pearsalla nd I. C. Cunningham (London,
1977), especially pp. vii-xi. All quotations from the poem in this essay are from Sir Orfeo, ed. A.
J. Bliss, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1966), and, unless otherwise noted, will be from the Auchinleck
manuscript.
8 For the development of gardens in medieval England and their perceived social meaning,
see Evelyn Cecil [Alicia Amherst], A History of Gardening in England, 3rd ed. (New York, 1910),
pp. 30-68; Christopher Thacker, The History of Gardens (Berkeley, 1979), pp. 81-93; John
Harvey, Medieval Gardens (Beaverton, Oregon, 1981), pp. 52-93; M. L. Gothein, A History of
Garden Art, ed. W. P. Wright and trans. Mrs. Archer-Hind [sic] (New York, 1928; repr. 1966),
1:169-204. For the literary treatments of gardens, and for their religious, literary, and moral
significance, a variety of' viewpoints are represented by Giamatti, Earthly Paradise; John V.
Fleming, The Roman de la Rose: A Study in Allegory and Iconography (Princeton, 1969); and Terry
Comito, The Idea of the Garden in the Renaissance (New Brunswick, 1979).
9 Liberate Rolls, 34 Henry III, m. 6, dated 20 June 1250, quoted and translated in Cecil,
History of Gardening in England, p. 32 and n. 2. For another translation, see Calendar of Liberate
Rolls, 3: 1245-51 (London, 1937), p. 292.
10 Medieval writers also recognized a certain moral sense to the making of' orchards, and
scholars have long noticed the typological associations of literary gardens in general and of the
garden in Sir Orfeo in particular. Arguments range from the orchard as a place of the Fall
(Jeffrey) to the setting for the noontide demon (Friedman) and the hortus of the Song of Songs
(Longsworth).
11 William is comparing the land cultivated by the monks with the wilderness which grows
outside the abbey walls. I quote from the translation offered in Jean Leclerq, The Love of
Learning and the Desirefor God, trans. Catherine Misrahi (New York, 1961), p. 165; the original
quotation is from De gestis pontzficum Angliae 4, PL 179:1612-13.
12 See the discussion in Comito, The Idea of the Garden, who quotes the passage from St.
Ambrose, Hexameron 1.8.28 (PL 14:137-38). For the idea of cultus in the Middle Ages and its
implied relationship of civilization and culture, see the discussion in Brian Stock, Myth and
Science in the Twelfth Century (Princeton, 1972), pp. 68-69, 81-82, 89-92. Stock brings out the
Boethian and Macrobian heritage for the concept: on the one hand, cultivation signals human
technical progress and the growth of civilizations; on the other hand, it represents the human
attempt to order a world according to a perceived divine plan. For a meditation on these themes
from the perspective of comparative literary theory, see Harry Levin, "Semantics of Culture,"
Daedalus 94 (1965), 1-13.
13 See Mzddle English Dictionary s.v. impe. An impe-yard was, by the twelfth century, a nursery
for young trees or new grafts. The ympe-tre itself has also been read typologically as a symbol of
the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden (Jeffrey), and mythologically as a detail of the
Celtic fairy landscape which motivates Heurodis's capture (see Grimaldi, "Sir Orfeo as Celtic
Folk-Hero," p. 152, and the tentative suggestions in Bliss, Sir Orfeo, pp. xxxv-xxxvii).
14 Thacker, History of Gardens, p. 85.
15 From Petrus de Crescentiis (1230-1320), Liber ruralium commodorum, quoted and translated
in Thacker, History of Gardens, p. 85, and discussed by Harvey, Medieval Gardens, p. 72; and
Gothein, Garden Art, pp. 201-3.
16 Printed in Alicia M. Tyssen Amherst [Evelyn Cecil], "A Fifteenth-Century Treatise on
Gardening," Archaeologia 54 (1984), 157-72. The details of grafting technique are described in
lines 21-48 of the poem. While the unique manuscript of the poem is dated 1440, Harvey
believes that the poem is a translation of a fourteenth-century Latin text for two reasons:
first, there is no mention of rosemary, an herb introduced late in the century; second, he
identifies the author as John le Gardener of Windsor who died in 1337 (Harvey, Medieval
Gardens, pp. 115, 155).
17 Giuseppe Mazzotta, Dante, Poet of the Desert (Princeton, 1979), pp. 106-46, especially on the
idea of the city as a garden, pp. 107-20.
18 Hanning presents a strong case for the opposition of personal ingenuity and force in the
development of the romance hero (Individual in Twelfth-CenturyR omance, pp. 108-11), a quality
subsumed under one meaning of the Old French term engin. The idea in this context is nicely
defined by Geraldine Barnes, "Cunning and Ingenuity in the Middle English Floris and
Blauncheflur," Medzum Evum 53 (1984), 10-25, especially her arguments on p. 12: that the hero
possesses a faculty through which he can "overcome obstacles and shape circumstances to his
own advantage through intellectual rather than physical prowess," and that the lovers' reunion
in the poem is "the result of a series of ruses requiring the application of engin and judicious
conseil."O n the matter of numbering Orfeo's retainers, the Auchinleck version of the poem is
unique in its consistency and repeated emphasis on the precise numbers, and its narrator offers
further comparison between Orfeo's court and fairyland. Orfeo prepares for the fairy attack:
"& wele ten hundred kniztes wip him, / Ich y-armed, stout & grim" (183-84). In the wilderness,
he sees the fairy host, "Wele atourned, ten hundred kni3tes, / Ich y-armed to his ri3tes, / Of
cuntenaunce stout & fers" (291-93).
19 Doob finds in Orfeo's deteriorating physical appearance and isolation in the wilderness an
identification with the holy wild man of myth and the hairy anchorite of the eremitic traditions
(NebuchadnezzaCr'hs ildrenp, p. 158-207). In Hanning's description of Partonopeu's" withdrawal
to the forest," I find a closer analogue to Orfeo's condition: Partonopeu's "long hair, uncut nails,
and pale, dirty body" make him unrecognizable, and I think Orfeo shares with him a certain
"self-destructiveim pulse ... by offering his entire person and life to the wild, destructivef orces
of nature" (Individual in Twelfth-Century Romance, p. 82). Hanning summarizes the structural
patterns of romance in the context of the hero's loss of love or sanity on pp. 197-200, although
I might add that Sir Orfeo here corresponds more to what Hanning labels the "less sophisticated
romance" in which "external catastrophe" (i.e., the abduction of Heurodis) motivates the hero,
rather than an inner, personal crisis (p. 209).
20 E. W. Tristram, English Medieval Wall Painting: The Thirteenth Century (Oxford, 1950), pp.
37-38).
21 Calendar of the Liberate Rolls, 6: 1267-72 (London, 1964), p. 89, membrane 4, item 784.
22 Calendar of the Liberate Rolls, 4: 1251-60 (London, 1959), p. 307, entry for 29 June 1256.
23 Bliss (Sir Orfeo, n. to line 364, p. 54) states that the five minims in the manuscript must lead
to a reading "aumal." For a discussion of the paleographical issues behind the reading, see the
review of Bliss's first edition by S. R. T. O. D'Ardenne, Review of English Studies 8 (1957), 58, and
the editor's added n. 4. Early readings as animal led J. R. R. Tolkien to translate the lines in
question: "The vault was carven and adorned / with beasts and birds and figures horned" (Sir
Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Sir Orfeo [Boston, 1978], p. 131).
24 Middle English Dictionary, s. v. aumayl. The earliest citation in the Oxjord English Dictionary,
however, may be contemporary with the Auchinleck manuscript: "Brende golde . . .
enaumayled with azer" (c. 1325; s.v. enamel, v. quotation from Early English Alliterative Poems, B:
Cleanness 1457).
25 Tristram, Englzsh Medieval Wall Painting, p. 407.
26 Tristram, English Medieval Wall Painting, p. 104: "The word translated as 'enamel' in this
entry, and also in another of a year earlier, which refers to paintings on the vaultings of the
Abbey as well as in the Painted Chamber, is aymallum or admallum, and it seems probable that it
relates in these instances and some others to the species of imitation enamel, . . .which we see in
the Westminster panel. This imitation enamel was extensively used towards the close of the
thirteenth century and early in the fourteenth."
27 Tristram, English Medieval Wall Painting, p. 147, citing an unpublished account in Liberate
Rolls, membrane 10, December 1269.
28 Perhaps the most striking of contemporary accounts is that of 1322, when two Irish friars,
on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, stopped at London and Canterbury to admire the decorative
artwork of the Painted Chamber and Canterbury cathedral. Their description of the Painted
Chamber reads as follows: "Et eidem monasterio quasi immediate conjungitur illud famosissimuln
palatium regum Anglorum, in quo est illa vulgata camera, in cujus parietibus sunt omnes
historie bellice totius Biblie ineffabiliter depicte, atque in Gallico completissime et perfectissime
communiter conscripte, in non modica intuentium admiratione et maxima regali magnificentia."
I quote from the edition of Mario Esposito, Itinerarium Symonis Semeonis ab Hybernia ad Terram
Sanctam, Scriptores Latini Hiberniae 4 (Dublin, 1960), p. 26. Tristram mentions the work as
proof of the Chamber's renown (English Medieval Wall Painting, pp. 110-11), and D. W.
Robertson, Jr., mentions this report in Chaucer's London (New York, 1968), pp. 65-66.
29 Giamatti, Earthly Paradise, pp. 95, 98-99, 101 and n. 3.
30 Giamatti, Earthly Paradise, p. 142 and n. 10, referring to Orlando Furzoso, "l'erboso smalto,"
(6.20), and pointing to further influences on Camoens, Ronsard, Milton, and Marvell.
31 Quoted from Eneas, roman du XIIe siecle, ed. J.-J. Salverda de Grave (Paris, 1973), 1:16. For
further uses of the imagery of enamel work (esmal) in the poem, see lines 2136, 3139, 5735,
6120. For the use of the word in Old French poetry and its associations with the artifice of'
public architecture and decoration, see Tobler-Lommatzch, AltJranzosischeW irterbuch (Wiesbaden,
1954), 3:1110, s.v. esmal.
32 Hanning, Individual in Twelfth-Century Romance, p. 108 and n. 4.
33 Hanning offers a very full discussion of the problems of artifice for the French romance,
and his arguments complement many of my own conclusions. See his discussion on engin, pp. 105-38, esp. pp. 107-12. While he discusses Eneas in detail, he does not mention the passage
quoted here, nor does he discuss the imagery of the enamel work.
34 The Harley readings, in sequence, are: "Suchejoy and melody in his harpyng is" (H, 46); "To
her harpyng pat was fyne - / So mechel joy was Per-ine" (H, 265-66); "The kyng behelde & sat
ful stylle; / To here his harpyng he had gode will" (H, 407-8); "Per was merthe in halle" (H, 474);
"Per Pey lyved gode lyfe afturwarde, / & syPe was kyng Pe stewarde" (H, 502-3). The Ashmole
readings, in corresponding sequence, are: "Suche melody per-in is" (Ash., 40); "To here hys
harpyng so fyne/ - So mych melody was Per-jne" (Ash., 281-82); "And felle dounne to hys
fete, / They thou3t hys herpe was so suete" (Ash., 432-33); "Ther was grete myrthe in pe halle"
(Ash., 514); "For per was myrth & melody, I Off yche maner mynstralsy" (Ash., 584-85) (emphases
mine).
35 For the variety of meanings for Middle English "melodie," see Henry H. Carter, A Dictionary
of Middle English Musical Terms (Bloomington, 1961), pp. 269-76. In its metaphorical senses,
the word described the music of the spheres, of the soul, and of heaven (defs. V, a, b, c). For the
connotations of the Latin melodia as a spiritual or celestial force, see Franz Blatt, ed., Novum
glossarium mediae Latinae (Copenhagen, 1959), s. v. melodia. A convenient summary of these
associations may be found in the late-thirteenth-century De proprietatibusr erum of Bartholomeus
Anglicus, who states (in John of Trevisa's late-fourteenth-century translation): "As art of
nombres and mesures serveb diuinite, so do]b e art of melody.... And it is yseide pat heuene
gob aboute wip consonancy and acord of melody." I quote from M. C. Seymour et al., eds., On
the Propertieso f Things: John of Trevisa's Translation of BartholomeusA nglicus De proprietatibusr erum
(Oxford, 1975), 2:1386.
36 For background to these associations, see Leclerq, Love of Learning, pp. 73-82, and Peter
Damian's De gloria paradisi (PL 145:980-83). This rhythmus pointedly expresses the theme of
paradisal music, and it reemphasizes the place of divine artistry in the heavenly vision. The
choral welcome of the blessed offers crown and song ("Post triumpham coronati / Mutuo
conjubilant"), and the voice of melody fills the ears of the returning souls: "Novas semper
harmonias / Vox melodia concrepat." Leclerq also translates a twelfth-century poem which he
labels "Une elevation sur les gloires de Jerusalem" (Love of Learning, p. 76 and p. 364, n. 26),
which combines the imagery of the radiant beauty of the city's architecture with the heavenly
sound of its music (see p. 82).
37 George H. Williams, Wilderness and Paradise in Christian Thought (New York, 1962), shows
that early patristic interpretations of Jesus with the angels and beasts in the wilderness (Mark
1.13) saw the harmonies established there as "the New Covenantal Adam in Paradise," and
Williams claims, "More and more, in Byzantine art, it is the figure of Orpheus that replaces
Adam among the animals" in scenes such as this (p. 34). Friedman adds evidence to this
argument by reproducing mosaic works testifying to the early hybridization of Orpheus as a
good shepherd and tamer of beasts (Orpheus in the Middle Ages, pp. 44-45), and he adduces
twelfth-century readings of the Orpheus myth which testify to the trope's survival (pp. 156-57).
A parallel instance of this iconography might be the Chertsey Abbey mosaic of Tristan harping,
as a variety of birds and beasts surround his central tableau. For a reproduction of the tile work
(c. 1260) see Peter Brieger, English Art, 1216-1307 (Oxford, 1957), plate 54B. On the early
church's attempts to recapture this human and creaturely harmony in the idea of the cloister or
hermitage as a type of Paradise, see Williams pp. 38-46, and Leclerq, Love of Learning, pp.
164-66. On the power of music to express the unity of Creation, see Bartholomeus Anglicus,
trans. Trevisa: "Also gadre pou hereof pat musike and armonye oonep and acordep dyuerse
Pinges and contrary, ... and warnek of Pe vnite of the exemplare of God in contrary wo;chings
and dyuers" (On the Properties of Things, 2:1394).
38 L. G. Whitbread, trans., Fulgentius the Mythographer (Columbus, Ohio, 1971), p. 97. For the
Latin, see R. Helm, ed., F. P. Fulgentii Opera (Leipzig, 1898), p. 79: ". .. et modulis tantum ui
secreta latentibus uoluptatem reddit effectus; dicere enim possumus quod Dorius tonus aut
Frigius Saturno coiens feras mulceat, si Ioui, aues oblectet."
39 The coda to the Ashmole manuscript reads: "And all pat bys wyll here or rede/ God
forgyff kem per mysded, / To Pe blysse of Heuyn pat Pei may com, / And euer-mor Per-jn to
wonne; / And pat it may so be/ Prey we all, for charyte!" (Ash., 598-603).
40 See in particular these quotations offered in the Middle English Dictionary, s.v. melodie, p.
281, which may bear on the poem's concluding sense of melody and celebration: "With grete
melodie of his harpe, seint Daui ... ladde heom to Ierusalem" (c. 1300, SLeg.Cross [Ld] 251);
"Angels . .. Vnder-fenge Pe soule of Gij, & bar it wib gret molodi Into Pe blis of heuen" (c.
1330, Guy of Warwick 2, p. 620); "He blissid thi sunnys, the whilke sail than rest in the iurusalem
in endles melody" (c. 1340, Rolle Psalter [UC 64] 147.2).
41 For a view of the extended description of the fairy castle in the Auchinleck manuscript as a
distracting interpolation, see Bruce Mitchell, "The Faery World of Sir OrJeo," Neophilologus 48
(1964), 155-59.
42 I borrow the phrase from Hanning, Individual in Twelfth-Century Romance, p. 103, whose
43 For the hero's retelling of his adventures as a convention of romance, see R. Howard Bloch,
Medieval French Literature and Law (Berkeley, 1977), pp. 199-200. Bloch argues that the presentation
in words of a physical ordeal develops from the conventions of legal reportage and
testimony, and that this procedure confirms the knight's reentry into civilization from the forest
or wilderness.