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Loss and Recovery: A Morphological Reconsideration of Sir Orfeo

Loss and Recovery: A Morphological Reconsideration of Sir Orfeo A l e x a n d r a H e n n e s s e y O l s e n , D e n v e r , Colo. Most modern readers agree that Sir Orfeo is one of the loveliest of the Middle English metrical romances, yet they find the poem "perplexing [. ..] [because] in a move unique among retellings of the Orpheus legend, the unknown Orfeo poet has eliminated from his romance the climactic second death of Eurydice [...] distort[ing] the obvious psydiological high point of his story"1. Critics have examined works available to medieval poets to find the explanation for what D. L. Jeffrey has called the "twisting"2 of the classical story, but the explanations tend to be unconvincing because most critics assume that the poet should not have made the change. No one seems even to have considered that the poet may have changed the story in order to turn "one of the strongest, most comprehensive myths dealing with the human predicament [. ..] [about] the profound sense of loss and heart sickness which attends a personal confrontation with the problem of Death "8 into a story that is a http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Fabula de Gruyter

Loss and Recovery: A Morphological Reconsideration of Sir Orfeo

Hennessey Olsen, Alexandra
Fabula , Volume 23 (1) – Jan 1, 1982
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Publisher
de Gruyter
Copyright
Copyright © 2009 Walter de Gruyter
ISSN
0014-6242
eISSN
1316-0464
DOI
10.1515/fabl.1982.23.1.198
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

A l e x a n d r a H e n n e s s e y O l s e n , D e n v e r , Colo. Most modern readers agree that Sir Orfeo is one of the loveliest of the Middle English metrical romances, yet they find the poem "perplexing [. ..] [because] in a move unique among retellings of the Orpheus legend, the unknown Orfeo poet has eliminated from his romance the climactic second death of Eurydice [...] distort[ing] the obvious psydiological high point of his story"1. Critics have examined works available to medieval poets to find the explanation for what D. L. Jeffrey has called the "twisting"2 of the classical story, but the explanations tend to be unconvincing because most critics assume that the poet should not have made the change. No one seems even to have considered that the poet may have changed the story in order to turn "one of the strongest, most comprehensive myths dealing with the human predicament [. ..] [about] the profound sense of loss and heart sickness which attends a personal confrontation with the problem of Death "8 into a story that is a

Journal

Fabula – de Gruyter

Published: Jan 1, 1982

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