King Orfeo

Orfeo: A song blending Celtic and Mediterranean mythology! This song weaves together the story of the musician Orpheus’ search for his wife Eurydice in the Underworld with Celtic beliefs of the Otherworld and the fae.

The words I’m singing here are the beginning of this long and beautiful story: King Orfeo goes hunting, leaving his wife sad and weary at home. The king of fairy shoots her with an arrow or dart (she is what was called “elf-shot”), and she is taken away to his kingdom, prompting Orfeo to begin a long quest to retrieve her.

This song has only been collected once, from the singing of Andrew Coutts, an old man in Unst, Shetland. We do know that this story circulated in the middle ages as a Breton lais, a type of medieval romance- but this is the only recorded sung version. Coutt’s version was in the Shetland dialect of English, blended with Lowland Scots. The two refrain lines were in Norn, a dialect of old Norse, which was spoken in the Shetlands. The refrain lines have been translated to mean “The wood is green early,” and the second as “Where the hart runs yearly,” which is where we get the English adaptation of these lines.

I love singing this song at this time of year, as we travel on the long road to winter. The air is shifting here in Western North Carolina (Tsalagi land): it’s still sweat-inducingly hot in the middle of the day, but bracingly cold at night. The dreamy, dark time of winter, just as the Otherworld itself, feels ever closer at hand.

If you like songs like this one and live near me in Western NC, you should check out my Pagan Choir, which starts September 29th! you can learn more and register at sarosings.com/paganchoir