Orfeo

Orfeo is the bereaved king of an anonymous thirteenth-century poem whose journey from royal life into the forest, and back toward his lost wife, gives Helen Macdonald’s reflections on grief and wildness an ancient narrative pattern. In the poem, it is not force of arms but the sight of falcons striking prey that awakens Orfeo’s buried love of hunting and leads him into the otherworld where his wife is held.

Identity and Loss

The poem retells the Greek myth of Orpheus and the underworld through traditional Celtic songs about the Land of Faery. Its otherworld is not a distant subterranean realm but a place just aside from ordinary life, where things may exist in both worlds and be drawn from one to another. That porous boundary shapes Orfeo’s fate: his wife, Heurodis, vanishes into Faery despite the armed protection he provides.

Heurodis has dreamed that the King of Faery will take her. Terrified, she tells Orfeo, who surrounds her with knights; their weapons cannot stop the threat. She slips through the air and disappears. The episode establishes the limit of Orfeo’s royal power: he can command armed men, but cannot defend his wife against a danger that crosses the boundary between worlds.

Exile in the Forest

Stricken with grief, Orfeo gives up his crown and runs to the forest. For ten years he lives alone and ferally, digging for roots, eating leaves and berries, and playing his harp to charm the beasts around him. His beard grows long and matted. The change is more than a flight from court: the king relinquishes the signs of rank and enters a life organized by hunger, solitude, and the forest.

Orfeo watches the grand hunting parties of the King of Faery pass through the woods, but cannot follow them. His separation from Heurodis is therefore also a separation from the world in which she might be found. The forest shelters him from human society, yet leaves him an observer of the processions that lead toward the otherworld rather than a participant in them.

The Hunt and the Return

The turning point comes when sixty ladies ride through the forest, falcons on their fists, hunting cormorants, mallards, and herons. As Orfeo watches the falcons strike their prey, he remembers his love of the sport. The sight changes his relation to the hunt: what had been something witnessed from a distance becomes a route back into action. He walks toward the women and recognizes Heurodis among them.

Following the hunting party, Orfeo enters the otherworld and reaches the King of Faery’s castle, where people thought to be dead are present but not dead. There he plays his harp and persuades the King to release Heurodis. The recovery is won not by the armed protection that failed at the orchard, but by Orfeo’s passage into the realm that took her and by the art he carries with him.

Narrative Significance

In Macdonald’s recollection, the poem surfaces while she is taking chicks from a freezer, an unexpected memory excavated from her student years. Its appearance connects her own reading about people who flee into the wild with a story much older than those accounts. Orfeo’s forest life gives that pattern a sharp cost: grief takes him from his crown and kindred, while his eventual return depends on a moment of renewed attention to the living movement of the hunt.

The falcons’ flight and the deaths they bring are what usher Orfeo into the otherworld and enable him to find his lost wife. Macdonald places this power within a still older Eurasian tradition in which hawks and falcons were regarded as messengers between this world and the next. Orfeo’s story thus makes the hawk more than an emblem of escape into nature: its crossing of boundaries helps turn bereavement’s apparent dead end into a passage toward reunion.