Research Information System
14th International IDEA Conference: Studies in English, Trabzon, Turkey, 6 - 08 October 2021, pp.116
Considering
the works featuring the myth of Orpheus, the anonymous Breton Lai Sir Orfeo stands out as the most
widely-known one. However, Scottish poet Robert Henryson retells the myth in
the late fifteenth century by adding extensive use of allegory and a moralitas part at the end. Orpheus loses
his wife Eurydice and begins to search for her not in the woods like the king in
Sir Orfeo, but in the heavenly realm.
While the king in Sir Orfeo enjoys a
happy ending, Henryson’s Orpheus fails in his quest once he looks back to
Eurydice. Here, Henryson presents a worldly character, who, in a hasty
decision, cannot comprehend the importance of spirituality of the circumstance
and acts in a worldly manner. Thus, the poem ends with a disappointed yet more
matured character. In a typical medieval dream narrative, the persona goes
through a journey in a vision, at the end of which s/he is educated and spiritually
transformed. Henryson employs the depiction of a character who sets off a
heavenly realm, a dreamlike setting, in search of his wife and returns to the actual
world with an educated and enlightened mind. Furthermore, his use of allegory
and celestial setting matches the patterns of the seminal works of the genre
such as The Divine Comedy, The Romance of the Rose and Somnium Scipionis. In this light, the
aim of this paper is to examine how Robert Henryson’s Orpheus and Eurydice could be reconsidered as a late example of
medieval dream vision genre.