Robert Henryson's Orpheus and Eurydice and the Orpheus Traditions of the Middle Ages

Abstract

IT is not the vogue in contemporary criticism to argue that a particular work marks the culmination of a tradition, but that is exactly what Robert Henryson's Orpheus and Eurydice does for the dual mediaeval traditions of the Orpheus myth. That critics have tended to ignore the poem is unfortunate, for it tells us a great deal about the agglomerative poetic methods of a mediaeval poet, underlines the two distinct mediaeval approaches to classical fables, and emphasizes the depth of allusion which a mention of Orpheus generated for an intelligent, moderately-educated mediaeval reader. The myth of Orpheus and Eurydice was, of course, known to men of the Middle Ages primarily from Ovid's Metamorphoses, Virgil's Georgics, and Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy.' But that was only the beginning. Translations and commentaries, from King Alfred's version of Boethius to the compendious fourteenthcentury Ovide moralise, twisted and distorted elements of the story to fit Christian doctrine and instruction. By applying the four-fold interpretation of tales that had long been standard procedure for studying scripture and classical literature in general, commentators expanded the myth to two and three times its normal length. The anonymous Ovide moralise, for example, a work more widely read by late mediaeval French poets than the Metamorphoses itself,2 interprets different parts of the myth as allegories of the Vices, the Virtues, the life of Christ, Adam and Eve and the serpent, Heaven and Hell, the religious life, and contemporary abuses in the Church. Growing like Pinocchio's nose, these allegories and moralizations mark one of the Orpheus traditions in the Middle Ages what might be called the textual tradition in which Orpheus exemplifies the man dominated by the senses who is forever looking longingly back on earthly things, and Eurydice represents man's passion which constantly flees from virtue (Aristaeus) and, in so doing, runs through fields and meadows symbolic of mortal desires where the serpent, or deadly sin, is waiting to strike.3 There is, however, another Orpheus tradition in the period, one which most certainly arises from the oral tradition, and which is related to the prominent position in mediaeval society of the singer of tales the scop, the minstrel, or the minnesinger. In England and, indeed, among Teutonic peoples in general, the