The Juvenile Audiences of Sir Orfeo

In earlier studies of the historical circumstances preceding and surrounding the birth of children's literature in the early modern era, one of my contentions has been that we moderns can learn much from medieval ways or presenting imaginative literature to children. Like other cultures that anthropologists term traditional, the Middle Ages made no provision for a separate literature for children, apart from pedagogical texts designed to teach them to read, to write, to cipher, and to behave civilly. Children and adults shared the same imaginative literature, as well as a substantial body of sermons, saints' lives, miracle tales, and folk-tales that occupy the borderland just outside the pale of high art. A major consequence of this shared literary experience is that during the Middle Ages, children and adults received in common the society's most compelling expressions of its profoundest truths; there were no special literary versions of truth reserved for children. Beginning in the Renaissance, that situation changed, with deleterious consequences.

As part of my continuing effort to understand the actual literary experience of medieval children, I would like now to examine evidence that children knew one particularly fine medieval narrative poem, the Middle English Sir Orfeo , a short romance that can be said in several ways to typify medieval narrative and thus to represent the larger range of medieval children's literary experience. Well known from 1300 to 1500 and current even later, Sir Orfeo is not the greatest Middle English narrative poem, but it nevertheless exhibits great craftsmanship. It is preserved in three manuscripts that I will discuss later. It has the brevity that characterizes the Breton lai. Its structure, culminating in what J. R. R. Tolkien terms in Tree and Leaf eucatastrophe (p. 68-73), gives it a profoundly consolatory theme that is characteristic of the outlook of the later Middle Ages, and thus allows us to consider it representative of the broad range of narrative, lyric, and dramatic forms that constitute medieval literature.

There is considerable evidence that medieval children were a part, and were perceived to be a part, of the literary audience of their day. Evidence of children's knowledge of Sir Orfeo is, however, indirect, deriving first from the probability that since medieval children were clearly part of other literary occasions, they would have read or heard Sir Orfeo also. I do not know of any record that specifies this poem as the object of children's reading or hearing.

But two additional kinds of indirect evidence allow us to conclude that medieval children knew this romance. The first kind implies the poem's formal accessibility to children, the fact that in theme, tone, and structure it is amenable to children's capacities. The second kind, more complex, implies its physical accessibility to children who could read or listen to it. This indirect evidence provides further insight into the nature and extent of the literary experience of medieval children, and permits us to consider Sir Orfeo a paradigm of medieval children's literature.

In terms of accessibility to children, Sir Orfeo has the simple structure characteristic of the Breton lai, in vogue from the time of the lais of Marie de France in the twelfth century down through the end of the fourteenth century. Indeed, the structural pattern evident in Sir Orfeo is representative of medieval narrative generally—and is important evidence for Klaus Arnold's contention that children's exclusion from the high literary culture of their society was a function, when it occurred, not of their age but of their social class; those who had the occasion to hear or read quite probably did so, along with their elders. As both William Ryding and Piero Boitani suggest, the medieval narrative paradigm is a matter of simple juxtaposition; episodes are strung together like beads on a string, with narrative junctures articulated clearly. The audience, whether listening or reading, is not taxed to keep track of action which, especially in the case of Middle English romance, is briskly entertaining. As Donald Howard and Robert Kellog have shown, this straightforward approach to narrative, clearly a product of the medieval orientation toward...