The Son of Orfeo: Kingship and Compromise in a Middle English Romance

Deposition of an heir nonapparent

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the Middle English Sir Orfeo—a poem drawing in complex ways on classical, Celtic, and Christian traditions—is a sugar-candied, bowdlerized variant of the familiar Orpheus and Eurydice story. Like Orpheus, Orfeo loses a beloved bride to a supernatural decree he is powerless to resist; like him, he becomes despondent and world-weary without her; and like him, he sets out to attempt her recovery. But where his classical namesake had stumbled on the verge of success, losing Eurydice a second time and ending his life in misery, Orfeo successfully brings Heurodis home, to overcome a secondary challenge and win back his former status. He would appear to resemble more closely Walter Map's knight of Lesser Britain, who, in De Nugis Curialium, overcomes nature and successfully retrieves his deceased wife from a faerie circle.¹ Small wonder that most critics of Sir Orfeo concur: "[t]o deny that the ending is dominated by [a] 'joy of recovery' would be perverse."² The impression of unconditional success is further enhanced by readings of the poem as allegory, standing in for anything from Christian piety to good kingship.³

Yet, one false note mars this triumphant harmony, suggesting—perverse as this may strike some modern readers—that Sir Orfeo's end might not be quite so unequivocally happy as it first appears. The knight of Lesser Britain "Rapit [uxorem suam], et gauisus est eius per multos annos coniugio, tam iocunde, tam celebriter ut priori, et ex ipsa suscepit liberos, quorum hodie progenies magna est, et 'Filii mortue' dicuntur" [seized (his wife), and enjoyed a union with her for many years, as pleasant and as open to the day as the first had been, and had children by her, whose descendants are numerous at this day, and are called the sons of the dead mother].⁴ Unlike the otherwise comparable lucky mortua, however, for whom the bearing of children is an integral part of the "joy of recovery," Heurodis remains barren and silent, producing no heir for Orfeo to bequeath his hard-earned kingdom to.⁵ Orfeo and Heurodis are indeed allowed to live happily, but not ever after. The prizes reclaimed from the Faerie King and from Orfeo's own steward return, respectively, to death and to the steward:

Now King Orfeo newe coround is,& his quen, Dame Heurodis,& liued long after-ward,& seþþen was king þe steward.

(593-96)⁶

"Omnia debemur vobis, paulumque morati / serius aut citius sedem properamus ad unam" [We are in all things due to you, and though we tarry on earth a little while, slow or swift we speed to one abode]—these had been Orpheus's words to Hades,⁷ and Orfeo vindicates them as punctiliously as a rash promise. Like his ancient forerunner, Orfeo can only postpone but not overcome mortality. Moreover, that victory over death to which all monarchs aspire (and which Map's lesser knight had attained), the continuity of his dynasty, also eludes Orfeo: the line of "King Pluto" and "King Juno" (43-44) ends with him. For a medieval audience, Orfeo's lack of an heir of his flesh effectively undermines all his other achievements.⁸ To regard the steward as a surrogate son is merely to gloss Orfeo's personal and political defeat with euphemistic varnish.⁹ How, then, should this diversion of the royal succession be understood? What are we to make of Orfeo's dynastic tragedy, set against the predominant tone of joy in the poem?

This essay takes as its starting point Orfeo's missing son, the absent heir apparent. It is not mere perversity to inquire after this poetic nonentity: a concern with progeny was central to fourteenth-century political thinking, in the realms of both romance and reality, charging Sir Orfeo's silence on the issue with significance.¹⁰ Listening closely to Orfeo's disrupted succession reveals suggestive undertones of political and social tension embedded in the poem. Both internally, in terms of the lai's "realism," and externally, in terms of...