I would like to thank Morgan Dickson and Fanny Moghaddassi for their tireless efforts in putting this volume together, and their keen editorial judgements, which, along with the useful criticisms of the reviewers, to whom thanks are also due, have much improved this paper.
- 1 See Laskaya and Salisbury’s introduction to their TEAMS edition (1995) for more on the background (...)
1Readers familiar with Middle English romance will be aware of the ever-popular Sir Orfeo, and also of its mysteries. The poem belongs to, and typifies, a special class of the romances known as Breton lais: short, presumably sung tales, often concerning love and featuring fairy motifs. It is first attested in the Auchinleck manuscript dated 1330-40 and was presumably written in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth centuries. Its author is unknown, as is its source, though there is much speculation as to a possible version in Old French.1 It is adapted from the classical tale of Orpheus, though little is known about the route it took to become a romance. The story is simple enough: Heurodis, the wife of King Orfeo, is kidnapped by fairies and Orfeo, in grief, leaves his kingdom in the charge of a steward dwelling in the wilderness for ten years. A chance (?) encounter with a troop of fairies, of which his wife is a part, gives him the means to discover the entrance to the fairy world, where his exquisite skills at harping help secure his wife’s release, allowing him to return to his kingdom and, once his steward’s loyalty has been tested, claim it anew. The simplicity of the story, however, belies its difficulties, and the text has been subject, even more than is usual, to numerous conflicting interpretations. My task in this paper is not so much to offer a new interpretation as to look at how the text controls the ground of our interpretation: more particularly, how it controls our knowledge of what is happening.
- 2 For a detailed look at Bliss’s reconstruction of the poem’s beginning, which attempts to validate (...)
2By way of introducing my theme, I would like to look at two mentions of paradise in the poem, whose parallelism has often been noted. The first, which I have labelled A, is from the description of Orfeo at the beginning of the poem (as it has been reconstructed by Bliss).2 The second, labelled B, follows Orfeo’s entrance into the fairy otherworld.
- 3 “In all the world was no man born / Who once Orfeo sat before / And he might his harping hear / Bu (...)
- 4 “No man may tell, nor think in thought / The rich work that was there wrought: / By all things it (...)
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A In al þe warld was no man bore Þat ones Orfeo sat bifore (& he miȝt of his harping here) Bot he schuld þenche þat he were In on of þe ioies of Paradis. (33-37)3
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B No man may telle, no þenche in þouȝt, Þe riche werk þat þer was wrouȝt: Bi al þing him þink þat it is Þe proude court of Paradis. (373-76)4
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In A, the poem is emphasising the superlative musical skill of the hero, and to do this a hypothetical person—indeed any person whatsoever—is invoked to experience Orfeo’s harping as one of the joys of paradise. In B, Orfeo has come across a castle and is marvelling at its ornate and luxurious construction. Not only is it made from precious metals and stones, but, in a conceit sadly suggestive of our modern cities, we are told that night never falls there: when it should be dark the stones light up as bright as the sun. The brilliance of it all impresses Orfeo as seeming to be paradise.
3That neither the hypothetical anyone in A nor Orfeo in B are actually in paradise is indicated by the use of the modal verb schuld and the subjunctive were in A, the restriction to a specific point of view in both passages, the parallel (though not identical) word choice þenche / þink, and, finally, the context, which in neither case suggests a literal paradise.
4Ben Weber writes that “Both these passages draw attention to the problem of perception and the illusions that perception can create” (2011: 27). Furthermore, “In spite of fairyland’s beautiful appearance it is a dangerous (if not exactly evil) place, not at all the paradise it seems to be.” Daniel Sawyer seems to have something similar in mind when he talks about “the illusory artifice of Orfeo’s harping” (2022: 225). Both commentators analyse the passages based on an opposition between truth and illusion, that is, they assume there is something deceptive about the beauty of the fairy world and of Orfeo’s music. This beauty doesn’t simply suggest paradise, it effects a dissimulation, so that the music and the otherworld essentially pretend to be paradise. In the case of the otherworld, this deception is dangerous, if not positively malevolent.
- 5 This disquieting mix has long been an object of critical discussion. See (to name but three) Hynes (...)
- 6 See Green (2016: 49-50, 60) etc.
5This is one way of thinking about these passages. It assumes that we can find oppositional perspectives in the text which are not directly indicated and thus require detailed reconstruction; it assumes that we must look for, and are able to find, hidden truths in the verbal and perceptual surface of the narrative. This is understandable given the mysteries the poem gives rise to. More than anything else, such a reading is concerned with deciphering the strange mix of positive and negative qualities exhibited by the fairies: in order to make their presentation morally coherent, positive qualities are read in the light of the negative.5 Interestingly, this way of reading the otherworld repeats the demonisation of fairies that occurred with ever increasing intensity during the medieval period, their power and splendour seen more and more in terms of demonic illusion.6
6There is, however, another way of reading these passages, which I think takes us closer to the spirit of the text. Even if we assume that the hypothetical person in A and Orfeo in B really do think they are experiencing paradise (and that’s not at all clear), for us, it may be supposed to have simply the force of an analogy. Key is the inexpressibility topos in B: nobody can even think the incredible works of the fairy realm; what we can think of, though, and Orfeo does, is paradise. The parallel analogies then mark a limit pertaining to what we are able to think and say, rather than an ironic surface that points to an opposing truth. It is not that Orfeo’s song is a travesty or simulacrum of paradise, or that the otherworld is its shadowy opposite, but that the idea of paradise is a limited, analogical placeholder for the truth of what these things are. The objects are illuminated by the analogy for a second, along with the amazement and sense of the marvellous that they convey, but ultimately they themselves remain elusive.
- 7 In literary studies the term is often found in possible world theory, which draws heavily on the u (...)
7These are examples of what I’m going to call epistemic limits. The word epistemic is a technical term in linguistics and philosophy, used in a range of ways, which all, however, refer back to a general sense to do with knowledge: “Of or relating to knowledge, or to its extent, linguistic expression, or degree of validation” (Proffitt 2023).7 I will use the term in this general sense to discuss how, in Sir Orfeo, careful limits are placed upon what we know. I will focus on two aspects of the text in which the narrative is driven by epistemic concerns. Firstly, in the early sections of the poem relating to Heurodis’s predicament, information is revealed to us—that is, is given linguistic or narrative expression—only gradually; we are initially barred from knowledge. How does this work? How does it affect how we relate to Heurodis? Secondly, in the sections related to the fairies, information is often revealed in such a way that it doesn’t yield valid knowledge at all. How does this work—without destabilising the coherence of the text? What does it mean for our view of the fairies? In both cases, I will try and convey something of how Sir Orfeo controls “the sense of baffled involvement in a mystery” characteristic of medieval romance (Stevens, 1973: 21).
8At the beginning of the narrative, Heurodis has gone with two companions to “play bi an orchard-side” (66). It is springtime, the orchard is dizzy with new growth, and the queen wishes to see the flowers and hear the birds sing. We are in the realm of the idyllic, and this idyll, I want to say, is the basic comprehensible state of the world—the known world, if you like. It is a vision of benign and pastoral aristocratic existence. This state of affairs is interrupted by an event that, quite literally at first, represents the unknown to us. The three women set themselves under an “ympe-tre” (whether this refers to a grafted or an orchard tree) and Heurodis falls asleep. What follows is a dramatic shift in her demeanour, the first of the poem’s many extreme contrasts:
- 8 “But, as soon as she awoke, / She cried, and made terrible noise: / She chafed her hands and her f (...)
Ac, as sone as sche gan awake,
Sche crid, & loþli bere gan make:
Sche froted hir honden & hir fete,
And crached hir visage—it bled wete;
Hir riche robe hye al to-rett,
& was reueyd out of hir witt. (77-82)8
We have an eruption in noise and self-directed violence, her “loþli bere” accompanied by actions indicating intense distress: “froted,” “crached,” “to-rett.” Part of the impact of this is that we as readers have no idea what’s going on; we are given nothing to explain it, there is no visible cause. The world around her remains the same idyll as before. Thus Heurodis’s actions are incomprehensible to us. Her internal world has evidently changed, but we have no access to it. The narrative has set a limit at this point.
9This particular limit is controlled by perspective. It is worth briefly unpacking the technical aspects of this. Burkhard Niederhoff defines perspective as “the way the representation of the story is influenced by the position, personality and values of the narrator, the characters and, possibly, other, more hypothetical entities in the storyworld” (2013: §1). We can think about how the narrative takes perspective on Heurodis and her situation, and also how her perspective—her position, personality and values—is represented and in turn influences the narrative.
10In addition to perspective, the superordinate term, I will talk about an internal or an external perspective on a character. By this I mean whether the narrator (and by extension the reader) is able to see into a character’s mind, that is, whether the description of, for example, an emotion constitutes an instance of narratorial mindreading, commonly called psychonarration, or, whether it is, alternatively, based on a decipherment of external signs. This is somewhat different from the also important question of whether we are able to see with or through a character’s eyes or not, a phenomenon which I will talk about using the term point of view. My aim here is not to endorse or elaborate on one or other given narrative theory, but just to establish some terms that help us to see how it is that we are given information, or not given information, in and by the text of Sir Orfeo, and what affect this has.
- 9 Curiously, both the Harley and Ashmole manuscripts imply that her companions already know somethin (...)
11To return to Heurodis, then, it should be clear that we remain external to her, that is, that we don’t at this moment have access to her mind, which is why we don’t know what’s happening.9 Additionally, there is no single character with point of view in the narrative as yet. There is, however, certainly a character whose centrality to the narrative has been stressed. Thus, when Orfeo appears shortly after the above events, we can think of the perspectival shift that occurs as a clarification:
- 10 “When Orfeo heard that tiding / There had never been anything worse for him. / He came with ten kn (...)
When Orfeo herd þat tiding
Neuer him nas wers for noþing.
He come wiþ kniȝtes tene
To chaumber, riȝt bifor þe quene,
& bi-held […]. (97-101)10
12As soon as he arrives in the story, we are given insight into his mind in the form of one of the superlatives frequent in romance: nothing for him could be worse than to hear what has befallen his wife. The impact of the change in Heurodis is measured by his reaction to it. We are then oriented around his point of view, as indicated by the word “bi-held” here. In a sense he embodies the external perspective on Heurodis previously established by the narrator, or perhaps we could say that this perspective was always awaiting Orfeo as the index of what it perceived. It will be from Orfeo’s point of view that we see most, though not quite all, of the rest of the narrative. That isn’t to say that everything is described through his thoughts but just that the narrative takes his vantage point—which is, of course, a limited one. These limits are clearly shown in the speech that follows:
- 11 “O dear life, what is wrong, / (You) who have always yet been so calm, / And now cry out wonder lo (...)
“O lef liif, what is te,
Þat euer ȝete hast ben so stille,
& now gredest wonder schille?
Þi bodi, þat was so white y-core,
Wiþ þine nailes is al to-tore.
Allas! þi rode, þat was so red,
Is al wan, as þou were ded;
& al-so þine fingres smale
Beþ al blodi & al pale.
Allas! þi louesom eyȝen to
Lokeþ so man doþ on his fo!” (102-12)11
Here Orfeo reflects Heurodis’s change of condition back to us in more of those extreme contrasts, this time alternating in rapid succession. Just as the springtime idyll was interrupted by Heurodis’s apparent madness, so has the form of Heurodis proper to this idyll been transformed by her apparent madness. Orfeo’s speech is a lament, a tale of loss. This is firstly a loss of beauty and wholeness, represented by a set of conventional tropes for the description of female beauty in romance: fair white skin, red cheeks, slender fingers, lovely eyes, etc. Secondly, it is a loss of serenity, represented by the word “stille,” which we should translate not as “still,” with its negative connotations, but rather as “calm:” a calm appropriate to the idyllic stability of the world as it was. But most importantly for us this loss is also a loss of comprehensibility. Note the words in bold above, which suggest Orfeo’s amazement and the limitations of his perspective. Her voice is described as “wonder schille.” The word wonder doesn’t just intensify the loudness of the voice, it marks it out as something inexplicable, a marvel. Her face “Is al wan, as þou were ded.” This comparison in the subjunctive marks, I think, the absence of a possible assertion in the indicative. Orfeo doesn’t have anything but an analogy based on the surface expression of a hidden cause: neither he nor we know actually why she is wan. Her eyes “Lokeþ so man doþ on his fo.” She’s clearly looking at him, the very opposite of a foe, with an intense look of alarm and aversion. Again, the comparison highlights the strangeness of the immediate appearance, and the absence of any clarifying reason for it. Heurodis’s behaviour is beyond our ken—she has become other. But this otherness is strictly temporary.
- 12 “Then lay she still at last, / And began to weep keenly hard.”
13In response to Orfeo’s speech Heurodis begins to cry: “Þo lay sche stille atte last, / & gan to wepe swiþe fast” (117-18).12 Note that she also becomes “stille” again, as if returning to a sadder version of her prior state. Furthermore, the change this time, though we are still external to Heurodis, is perfectly comprehensible: she moves from something like terror to something like anguish in response to Orfeo’s concern. In a sense she re-enters the realm of comprehensibility in this moment. Then she finally speaks, and the epistemic limit placed by our external perspective on her dissolves. Her thoughts are no longer inaccessible because Orfeo can appeal to her to utter them. She becomes a secondary narrator, and we learn that it is only the threat of the fairy king to take her away that has made her briefly incomprehensible, and that, though she is to be taken to the inaccessible otherworld, this inaccessibility is only contingent.
- 13 “We were never once wrathful, / But ever I have loved you / As my life, and so you me.”
- 14 “Wherever you go I will (go) with you, / And wherever I go you shall (go) with me.”
14Heurodis’s perspective is then revealed as not merely comprehensible, but perfectly equivalent and complementary to Orfeo’s. Before she explains what has actually happened, there is a moment where she focuses on the inevitable loss they are to experience: “Ones wroþ neuer we nere, / Bot euer ich haue y-loued þe / As mi liif, & so þou me” (122-23).13 The postponement of her explanation increases suspense, but, more importantly, the emotional cost of the situation is revealed. Instead of beginning with a first-person story in the narrative tenses, she begins with the first-person plural in the present perfect, drawing our attention to what is to be lost: the idyllic stability, the unity and reciprocity of their relationship. Orfeo echoes this in his sad response: “Whider þou gost ichil wiþ þe, / & whider y go þou schalt wiþ me” (129-30).14 Here the two lines exhibit not only structural parallelism, but a chiasmus where the subject, object and prepositional object of one line switches places with the other: þou, ich and þe become y, þou and me. Their wills are shown to align grammatically and iconically with each other in a mirror-image. The relationship is a picture of non-differentiation.
15We also see this later in the tale, in a rare moment where we depart from Orfeo’s point of view. Orfeo has been suffering in the wilderness for ten years when he encounters Heurodis hawking with a troop of fairy ladies:
- 15 “Eagerly he beheld her, and she him also, / But neither to the other spoke a word. / For misery th (...)
Ȝern he biheld hir, & schir him eke,
Ac noiþer to oþer a word no speke.
For messais þat sche on him seiȝe,
Þat had ben so riche & so heiȝe,
Þe teres fel out of her eiȝe. (323-27; punctuation modified)15
- 16 Lewis J. Owen sees their silence here as enchantment (1974: 249). This is possible but the textual (...)
Once again we see, in line 323, a chiastic structure, and the recurrence of the word “beheld” and its implicit repetition in ellipsis underline their mutual recognition, though their silence acts as a barrier to a moment of true reunion.16 Then Heurodis begins to cry again. However, this time we know why she cries not only because we can infer it from the external context but because the narrative takes an internal perspective on her. We are given the reason for her emotion: it is because of the “messais,” that is, the misery or wretchedness that she sees him bearing, he who “had ben so riche & so heiȝe.” The internal logic of her external behaviour becomes suddenly available despite the silence: her sympathy with Orfeo’s state moves her to tears. Thus there is an inversion of the earlier situation, which in itself is another instance of chiasmus: she who was before the object of concern is now the subject looking with concern upon the sufferings of the hero. Furthermore, it is she, briefly, who has point of view.
16Whether Heurodis speaks her thoughts or we get direct access to them, what we find is unity, reciprocity, mirroring; in other words, an emotional and structural compatibility between Heurodis’s and Orfeo’s perspectives. Nonetheless, for all that a certain equality in their affections is asserted and shown, it is Orfeo’s perspective that dominates and saturates the narrative. Perhaps this is why Heurodis seems to disappear into the background once she has been rescued from the otherworld: united with Orfeo again, her perspective is no longer really other than his. There are obvious feminist implications here, though it is not only the patriarchal hierarchy that is envisioned as a unity: at the end, when Orfeo tests his steward, a similar compatibility is discovered. The steward corresponds precisely to what Orfeo would wish him to be. In the world of the idyll, the situation harmonises with the hero. Thus neither Heurodis nor the steward represent figures of real otherness. They confirm Orfeo’s knowledge, even if, in the case of Heurodis, she has been plunged by circumstance into the unknown. There is, however, another world in the narrative than that of the idyll, and it is to this world, the source and symbol of the unknown, that we now turn.
17The idea of perspective remains important for thinking about the fairies and the epistemic limits placed upon them, but here I would also like to introduce another analytical tool: the concept of ambiguity. A useful definition of ambiguity is provided by the linguist Thomas Wasow: “An expression is ambiguous if it has two or more distinct denotations—that is, if it is associated with more than one region of meaning space” (qtd. in Winkler, 2015: 1). By “expression,” Wasow has in mind a linguistic unit, but the definition can be scaled up to encompass elements of a narrative, e.g. entities or ideas. By “two or more distinct denotations” we can understand “two or more distinct meanings,” but not all types of meaning are applicable here: connotative meaning, by its nature plural and unstable, is excluded from the domain of ambiguity so that the term has analytical usefulness (otherwise every social, emotional or associative nuance entails ambiguity, and hence a total and correspondingly futile ubiquity of the term).
18Another useful distinction is that between conjunctive and disjunctive ambiguity. Conjunctive ambiguity is something that we find, for example, in a pun. Both meanings are asserted as true (or potentially true) and neither excludes the other; both are, in a sense, correct. A disjunctive ambiguity, by contrast, is one where the meanings are not compatible: only one can be correct strictly speaking (Rimmon, 1977: 25). It is the disjunctive ambiguity that’s especially troubling for our sense of knowing something. We encounter several disjunctive ambiguities in relation to the fairies. For the purposes of this paper, I will present two ambiguities that I think are key to understanding the limits of our knowledge of these creatures, and then a further one, more suggestive than consequential, to conclude.
19Orfeo, in his sad sojourn in the wilderness, sometimes encounters the fairies, and in so doing also encounters two mysteries, which I have numbered and highlighted in bold:
- 17 “He might see besides / (Often in hot mornings) / The king of fairy with his rout / Come to hunt a (...)
He miȝt se him bisides
(Oft in hot vnder-tides)
Þe king o fairy wiþ his rout
Com to hunt him al about
Wiþ dim cri & bloweing,
& houndes also wiþ him berking;
[1] Ac no best þai no nome,
[2] No neuer he nist whider þai bi-come. (281-88)17
20As is the case throughout the poem, the fairies mirror a human aristocratic ideal, as seen here in their occupation of hunting with hounds. But they inhabit this ideal with a mysterious otherness. The first mystery is that, for all they are apparently hunting, they take no “best.” The second is that they simply appear in the wilderness; Orfeo doesn’t know “whider þai bi-come.” It is this first mystery that gives rise to an ambiguity, which we can see clearly in two interpretations given by different editors of the poem:
1. “Presumably the fairies catch nothing because they seek a rare kind of prey, namely people like Heurodis who have been made vulnerable by special circumstances” (Shepherd, 1995: 288n3).
2. “Notably, this hunt appears to be aimless; no game is taken. It seems to resemble the Otherworld condition of suspended life described in lines 389-90” (Laskaya and Salisbury, 1995: 287n).
- 18 A secondary factor here is the lexical ambiguity of best: does it include human beings or not (see (...)
Strangely, both of these interpretations are valid. First of all, because they are both well-grounded in the narrative context. The fairies do indeed take people from the human world to the otherworld, an action easily imaginable as hunting, and they also mysteriously resemble humans, while presiding over conditions that seem, as we shall see, to challenge notions of ordinary causality and implication. Secondly, both interpretations represent a possible meaning of the phrase “no best þai no nome.” We can summarise the ambiguity more clearly as follows:
1. The fairies hunted for best but didn’t find it.
2. The fairies went through the outward motions of hunting for best.18
Both of these meanings are possible—but they are incompatible, and we cannot decide between them with any certainty. What is mysterious and unspecified here are the fairies’ intentions: we see their outward actions, but don’t see the intentions behind them. We see, of course, only what Orfeo sees. This is related to what James Wade calls the “inscrutability” of fairies in medieval romance, which almost amounts to a rule: the inner life of a fairy is normally inaccessible to a human observer, including the narrator of the text (2011: 15).
21The second mystery in the above passage will be quickly solved: he’s about to follow a troop of fairy ladies into the otherworld and learn where they come from. There is an epistemic limit placed here by virtue of Orfeo’s perspective, but it is temporary. The distance between the human and fairy worlds can be crossed by purely physical means, unlike the distance between human and fairy minds. In contrast to this and to Heurodis’s madness, Orfeo will never learn the secret of the fairy hunt. This ambiguity thus marks an epistemic limit that is not temporary—though this doesn’t foreclose, and indeed encourages, competing interpretations.
22Now I turn to probably the most controversial passage in the poem: the description of what Dorena Allen called “the taken” (1964: 104), namely those who, like Heurodis, have been brought by the fairies from the human world to the otherworld. I have included marginal line numbers to assist textual analysis:
- 19 “Then he gazed everywhere about / And saw lying within the wall / Folk that had been brought thith (...)
387 Þan he gan bihold about al
& seigh liggeand wip-in þe wal
Of folk þat were þider y-brouȝt,
390 & þouȝt dede, & nare nouȝt.
Sum stode wiþ-outen hade,
& sum non armes nade,
& sum þurth þe bodi hadde wounde,
& sum lay wode, y-bounde,
395 & sum armed on hors sete,
& sum astrangled as þai ete;
& sum were in water adreynt,
& sum wiþ fire al for-schreynt.
Wiues þer lay on child-bedde,
400 Sum ded & sum awedde,
& wonder fele per lay bisides:
Riȝt as þai slepe her vnder-tides
Eche was þus in þis warld y-nome,
Wiþ fairi þider y-come.19
23There are all sorts of difficulties in and with this passage, and more than one ambiguity. I won’t undertake an exhaustive analysis here. Instead, I’d like to focus on one problem—and even for this I won’t be able to provide a complete solution: are any of these people actually dead?
24The main issue is that there is a contradiction, which Bruce Mitchell thought such a severe problem that he decided the passage must be an interpolation (1964: 157). First we are told that the “folk” within these walls were “þouȝt dede, & nare nouȝt.” Then a little later we are told that “Wiues þer lay on child-bedde, / Sum ded & sum awedde.” How is it that at one moment we hear that these people are not dead, and then that some of them are dead?
25We first need to understand the different references more precisely. The enumeration of the taken, which certainly includes incidences that we would ordinarily take to be fatalities, proceeds by repeated use of the word “sum:” “Sum stode wiþ-outen hade, / & sum non armes nade,” etc. (It is something to think about, incidentally, that there is more than one person suffering from each of these conditions.) This anaphoric device is then repeated again in line 400: “Sum ded & sum awedde.” But the referent is no longer the same as for “sum” in lines 391-398. In the earlier lines, “sum” refers back to “folk” in line 389. In other words, some of the folk that Orfeo sees have no head, some of them have no arms, etc. In line 400, by contrast, “sum” refers back to “Wiues þer lay on child-bedde” in line 399. In other words, some of the women lie on their childbed dead, some lay there mad.
26Of course, the “wiues” are also a subset of the “folk,” so there would still be a contradiction here, if we thought that the word “ded” meant the same thing in line 400 as in line 390. But perhaps it does not? Given that the people are all shown in the postures in which they taken, it seems reasonable to suggest that the second occurrence of the word “ded” is a description of what happened or seemed to happen in the human world. It would describe, then, two possible events that can befall a woman in or around childbirth: death and madness (or what we would now call post-partum psychosis). But it wouldn’t be describing what happened to them in the end: these women who were thought to have died in childbirth in the human world only apparently died in childbirth, but are not actually dead. One way of reading this passage, then, is to say that its many fatalities are only apparent fatalities, which the person only seemed to undergo in the human world. If we accept this, there is not necessarily a contradiction: there is simply what appears to happen in the human world, and then what is actually the case, an illusory appearance and a reality.
27There is, however, something unsatisfactory about this as a solution, though I believe that it is indeed the logic of the passage. The problem is the status of this appearance in its alleged unreality. For us, this appearance is governed by Orfeo’s point of view, which is stressed once again by the word “behold” in line 387. It is unclear, indeed ambiguous, whether this point of view encompasses the narratorial statement “þouȝt dede, & nare nouȝt,” that is, whether the stated fact that they are not really dead is evident to Orfeo. But regardless of this, we are only shown what Orfeo can see, and what he can see, what appears to us via him, are groups of people in either vulnerable states or states of death. In other words, all that is actually seen here is what happened to the taken in the human world. Orfeo sees people headless, drowned, shrivelled by fire and dead in childbirth—and yet these people are said to be somehow not really dead? How is this the case? There is a contradiction between the appearance of the people and their stated reality. Which one do we believe?
- 20 Rohmann et al.: “We define epistemic ambiguity as the state in which at least two hypotheses coexis (...)
28This question gives rise to an ambiguity. It is, appropriately enough, an epistemic ambiguity.20 Based on the information that is given to us by the text, two plausible hypotheses are possible:
1. The taken that were “þouȝt dede” are not dead (the appearance is not real).
2. The taken that were “þouȝt dede” are dead (the appearance is real).
- 21 Neil Cartlidge has noted, examining Amadas and Ydoine in the context of Sir Orfeo, that “a romance (...)
- 22 “There is no remedy for man’s death.” The translation of this truism in the version by J. R. R. To (...)
- 23 One way of trying to resolve this impasse would be to reconstruct a context that resolves the ambi (...)
There is something of a religious paradox in this ambiguity.21 Sir Orfeo presents a situation where the dead may not be dead, a denial of the truism with which the barons of Orfeo’s country comfort the steward when he believes Orfeo is dead: “It nis no bot of mannes deþ” (552).22 But it does not show us this, or tell us how this can be so and thus, in the case of the dead in the above passage, it remains only ambiguously the case.23
- 24 E.g. Fletcher (2000: 147); Cartlidge (2004: 200); Williams (2012: 543).
29Much has been written about the distress caused by the horrors and contradictions of this passage.24 But it is notable that it poses much more of a problem for us than it does for Orfeo. His aim is to rescue Heurodis, and the conundrum of the taken doesn’t present a barrier to him at all, as the next lines make clear:
- 25 “There he saw his own wife, / Dame Heurodis, his dear life, / Sleeping under an orchard tree; / By (...)
Þer he seiȝe his owhen wiif,
Dame Heurodis, his lef liif,
Slepe vnder an ympe-tre:
Bi her cloþes he knewe þat it was he.
& when he hadde bihold þis meruails alle
He went in-to þe kinges halle. (405-410)25
The description of the taken ends with him seeing Heurodis. This sighting is, for him, the key piece of information he is looking for. He is granted access to a set of “meruails”—as heroes often are—but the only thing that he really needs to know is that his wife is indeed there. Then he can proceed into the King’s hall. I think that’s one reason why the version of the poem in the Harley manuscript excludes the list of the taken but does include this sighting:
- 26 “Orfeo looked about everywhere; / He saw folk sat under the wall, / Some that were thither brought (...)
Orpheo loked about ouer-all;
He sawe folk sit vnder þe wal,
Sum þat wer þyder y-brouȝt
– Al dede were þey nouȝt.
Amonge hem lay his owne wyfe,
Þat he loued as his lyfe.
Sche lay vnder an ympe-tre:
By her glowes he wyst it was sche. (371-78)26
- 27 His is not an epistemic quest, in Doležel’s terms, that is, a quest for knowledge (1998: 126).
From the point of view of the plot of the poem, what is essential is that he has found his wife.27 It is also notable that Orfeo doesn’t seek an explanation. He allows the ambiguity to remain, leaving an epistemic limit as a richly fertile source of critical controversy.
30I’d like to present the third ambiguity of the fairies by way of a conclusion. But first, let’s briefly summarise our findings.
31We saw how, at the beginning of the poem, an idyll is intruded upon by violent and unknown forces, which gather Heurodis up into a mystery. An epistemic limit is placed on her situation by means of an external perspective on her and a point of view that is ultimately Orfeo’s. Nonetheless, her perspective, for all that it is shut off from Orfeo by the actions of the fairy king, is ultimately not fully differentiated from his, mirroring his in an idyllic vision of married bliss.
32In contrast to this, the fairies have been seen thus far to be properly inaccessible, mysterious and foreign. This is shown in the two ambiguities above, which placed epistemic limits on our capacity to understand both their hunt and the actual states of the humans they have taken into their world.
33The third and final ambiguity I would like to present in relation to the fairies is perhaps a little fanciful. It takes place as Orfeo plays to the fairy king and queen, his music so charming the king that the latter promises to grant Orfeo whatever he wishes, and thus the right to take Heurodis back with him. As Orfeo plays his music, we learn that:
- 28 “The king harkened and sat full still; / To hear his song he had good will. / Good pleasure he had (...)
Þe king herkneþ & sitt ful stille;
To here his gle he haþ gode wille.
Gode bourde he hadde of his gle;
Þe riche quen al-so hadde he. (443-6)28
- 29 The ambiguity in Harley is restricted to the fairy king (402-3). In Ashmole it is extended to the (...)
The ambiguity is this: do we see inside the thoughts of the fairy king and queen here? Or is the good will of the king and the pleasure of the king and queen being adjudged from outward signs? In other words, are we dealing with an external or an internal perspective on the fairy monarchs and their minds?29 We said that what James Wade calls “inscrutability” is almost a rule when it comes to the fairies. What if, in this moment where Orfeo’s music overcomes the laws of the border separating the human and fairy world, the narrative relaxed its constraint on its representation of fairies and they became, for a second, a little less inscrutable? I don’t think we can properly determine if this is the case, and perhaps it doesn’t matter in the end—it certainly doesn’t give us access to the fairies’ mysterious intentions and the meaning behind their activities. The fairies remain figures of otherness. But still it’s as if, when Orfeo plays his music to the fairies, the idyll is summoned, and a strange harmonisation occurs between him and these elusive others. The incomprehensible force of his music touches these incomprehensible beings, and they become more comprehensible, their thought process as open to us as the hypothetical anyone we met above, who “schuld þenche þat he were / In on of þe ioies of Paradis.” Correspondingly, the limits of what we can know seem to waver, tantalisingly, suggestively—but not conclusively. As if there were more that we could know, but also as if there were more than we could ever know.