Family, Familia, and the Uncanny in Sir Orfeo

In Sir Orfeo, a beloved wife is lost and recovered, but returns to a marriage that has changed. In the meantime, an officer of the royal household has proved his worth and is granted the throne (“ʒif . . ./. . . ich founde þe þus trewe, / . . . / Þou schust be king after mi day”).¹Sir Orfeo’s ending is most obviously striking for being a happy one in a story that is better known for ending in loss.² I find it equally striking, however, that this happy ending is anti-patrimonial: it decenters the family and then excludes lineage from the royal succession (the steward is apparently no relation to Orfeo). This essay explores how exceptional or subversive Sir Orfeo’s ending is in the context of literary and political culture in late medieval England. I argue that the decentering of Queen Heurodis and the rise of the steward address in a radical way deep troubles with the family as a political structure—troubles that are represented in the poem by the uncanny world of fairy.

Many of my readings in what follows are built up from small details in the text, including, for example, the distribution of “seeing” and “beholding” in the version in the Auchinleck manuscript. I do not mean to suggest that every audience would have registered every detail in accord with my interpretation. Rather, I hope that I draw attention to details that contribute to larger, aggregate meaning—meaning that is conveyed, with more or less force, even when some component details go unminded. And I recognize, of course, that some audiences might understand Sir Orfeo as a whole in ways at odds with my interpretation. At the same time, I attempt to specify cultural contexts that make my interpretation a likely fit for medieval audiences involved in those contexts.

Queen, Steward: The Lost Look

The relationships central to Sir Orfeo differ in quality and trajectory: one is intensely mutual and has genealogy at stake, the other is personal but more clearly hierarchical and beyond kinship; one seems to shrink, the other blossoms. In sum, King Orfeo’s household shifts from a condition in which political structure is shaped around a conjugal relationship (with reproductive, genealogical potential) to one in which a political structure is determined chiefly by a service relationship. Assuming that the steward in the poem is steward of the king’s household and not steward of England, then the difference is between family (based on blood and marriage ties) and familia (the household including servants and followers).³ The steward’s quietly revolutionary rise to the throne, achieved by royal grant, imagines new horizons for the elite in royal service. More broadly, by privileging service-merit over lineage, it intersects with diagnoses of the development of modern politics that tell a story of resistance to forces of kinship and “patrimonialism.”⁴

A corollary of the steward’s rise is the marginalization of Orfeo’s queen. When Heurodis and Orfeo find themselves face to face in the wilderness after ten years apart, they share a look that is perhaps the poem’s most poignant moment (“ʒern he biheld hir and sche him eke” [323]). Yet from this point on there is no further intimacy on show. A strong reading of the couple’s love could take this lack of excitement to signify diminished expression without diminished feeling, in which case the shared look in the wilderness becomes in retrospect all the more expressive of the unexpressed, of feeling known only to themselves. In any case, spousal intimacy retreats at the end of the poem, either to an inaccessible personal zone or further yet.

Heurodis is at no stage powerful or controlling, but she is centre-stage in the opening phase of the narrative. After her rescue she is silent and, until Orfeo is restored to his kingship, very nearly invisible. She then finds herself in a relatively depersonalized queenly role, which is maximally public without legible detail. Familiarity with the symbolism of civic entry procession and coronation (both of which are bestowed on Heurodis) might prompt an audience...