King of Faery

The King of Faery is the ruler of the Otherworld in Sir Orfeo, a poem retold within the narrative. He embodies the perilous nearness of that realm to the human world: Heurodis can vanish into it despite the armed protection Orfeo places around her. The King is first a source of loss, then the ruler Orfeo must approach and persuade in order to recover his wife.

Identity and Otherworldly Power

Sir Orfeo retells the Greek underworld myth through Celtic traditions of the Land of Faery, an Otherworld understood not as a distant underground realm but as a place just one step aside from ordinary life. Things can exist in both worlds, and can be drawn from one into the other. The King’s power belongs to this porous boundary: Heurodis dreams that he will take her, tells Orfeo of the danger, and is nevertheless carried away. Orfeo surrounds her with armed knights, but their human protection cannot prevent her from slipping through the air and disappearing.

Heurodis and Orfeo’s Exile

Heurodis’s disappearance sets the poem’s central loss in motion. Stricken with grief, Orfeo gives up his crown and retreats to the forest, where he lives alone for ten years, digging for roots, eating leaves and berries, and playing his harp to charm the beasts. The King is not shown directing Orfeo’s years in the wild; rather, his prior taking of Heurodis leaves Orfeo separated from the life and status he has abandoned. The King’s realm remains the destination that grief makes Orfeo seek, even when he cannot yet follow its inhabitants.

The Hunt and the Return

Orfeo watches the grand hunting parties of the Faery King pass through the forest, but at first he cannot follow them. The turning point comes when sixty ladies, each carrying a falcon, ride by to hunt cormorants, mallards, and herons. As Orfeo watches the birds strike their prey, his pleasure in hunting returns. He walks toward the women and recognizes Heurodis among them; the sight of the hunting party has brought him across the boundary that had kept him from her.

The King’s Release of Heurodis

Following the ladies, Orfeo reaches the Faery King’s castle, a palace filled with people believed dead but still present in the Otherworld. There he plays his harp and persuades the King to release Heurodis. The encounter reverses the King’s place in the story: the power associated with her loss becomes the authority Orfeo must address to secure her return. Yet the poem also makes the hawks’ flight and the deaths they cause the means by which Orfeo enters the realm and finds his wife. The King’s Otherworld is therefore both the site of separation and the setting for reunion.