ABSTRACT
The Middle English lay Sir Orfeo rewrites the classical Orpheus myth. This chapter argues that Sir Orfeo simultaneously represents the queen’s death; that Orfeo’s journey to the Underworld entails a reconciliation that bespeaks loss; and that, by interweaving death and resuscitation, rupture and repair, the poem meditates on the way in which romance averts tragedy. Sir Orfeo refuses to decide whether Heurodis is alive or dead because it wants to show the degree to which tragedy constitutes romance. The firm boundary between “real” and fairy worlds is established when Heurodis is abducted, only to be softened and crossed when, after ten years in the forest, Orfeo glimpses his wife, follows her into the fairy kingdom, and brings her back to Winchester. The content of Orfeo’s memory transmutes the death of Heurodis. Heurodis’s silence is all the more notable in the context of the musical and narrative forms of sound that define Orfeo’s return to the throne.
