Cynewulf - King Orfeo

King Orfeo is a medieval resetting of the classic tale of Orpheus and Euridyce as the quest of King Orfeo to reclaim his wife Lady Heurodis (here Lady Isobel) from the realm of the King of Faery. The story is preserved in three Middle English manuscripts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and in the Shetlandic folk-ballad King Orfeo among others.
The tune of this version was collected from a certain John Stickle of the Shetland Islands in the middle of the 20th century. He could only remember and sang a couple of fragmented verses after first exclaiming to the collector something like -- 'have you ever heard such nonsense as this?' The collector knew the significance of what he was hearing as he had, for the first time, discovered a tune to the ballad.
The song here has been constructed from a number of versions of the tale, and copied, in the most part, from an Archie Fisher recording.
The garbled two piece refrain has its origins in a Scandinavian tongue and basically means 'yearly greens the wood' and 'where the hart (i.e. stag) goes yearly'

Category:

Music

Tags:

• King Orfeo
• British
• Folk
• Shetland
• Archie
• Fisher
• Irish
• Bouzouki
• magic
• song
• cynewulf
• king
• orfeo