The Otherworld as a realm of the lost

The Otherworld as a realm of the lost is a mythic space adjacent to ordinary life, where those who have vanished or died may still be present and, in some stories, brought back. In Helen Macdonald’s account, this idea links the uncertain disappearance of T. H. White’s hawk Gos to her father’s sudden death. Hawks become figures able to cross a boundary that humans cannot: a boundary at once belonging to myth and to the grieving mind. The concept gives shape to an old hope, but Macdonald’s eventual recognition is not that she can enter this realm and retrieve the lost. It is that she must wait in this world for what can return.

A boundary beside the ordinary world

The Otherworld in the Celtic tradition described through Sir Orfeo is not a distant underworld beneath the earth. It lies one step to the side of everyday reality. Things may exist in both places, and may be drawn from one to the other. That closeness makes the boundary especially charged: a disappearance can seem less like an absolute ending than a passage into a neighboring domain, even when those left behind cannot follow.

In the poem, Heurodis sleeps in an orchard beneath a grafted fruit tree and dreams that the King of Faery will take her the next day. She warns her husband, Orfeo, who surrounds her with armed knights. Their protection cannot prevent her disappearance: she slips through the air and is gone. The episode establishes the Otherworld not as a place reached by ordinary strength or vigilance, but as a realm whose threshold can open unexpectedly within the familiar world.

Grief, exile, and return in medieval stories

After Heurodis is taken, Orfeo abandons his crown and goes into the forest. For ten years he lives alone, finding food among roots, leaves, berries, and fruit, while his beard grows long and matted. He watches the hunting parties of the King of Faery pass, but cannot follow them. The decisive change comes when he sees sixty ladies riding with falcons on their fists. Watching the birds strike their prey recalls his love of hunting; he approaches the women and recognizes Heurodis among them. He has crossed into the Otherworld, follows the party to the King’s castle, and persuades the King to release his wife.

The poem makes the falcons’ flight and the deaths they cause the means by which Orfeo finds a way into the realm of the lost. His forest exile is not simply a retreat from society: it brings him to the edge of the world where Heurodis can be found. Yet the return depends on a particular opening, not on exile alone. The hawks’ passage into the air and their strike upon prey prompt Orfeo to move toward the riders, turning a scene of hunting into the route toward reunion.

A related pattern appears in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Latin Vita Merlini. After a battle in which a Welsh king loses many friends, grief overwhelms him. He weeps for three days, refuses food, and then flees secretly into the woods. There he lives hidden for a summer, feeding on wild plants and fruit, running after or flying past the animals, and forgetting himself and his kin. This forest-dweller is Merlin Sylvestris, Merlin of the Woods, later recast in stories as the great magician and as Merlyn, the teacher of King Arthur in The Sword in the Stone. The poem connects bereavement with a feral withdrawal from human life; the later identity of Merlin carries that time in the woods into a very different role.

Hawks as messengers across worlds

Macdonald places these literary accounts alongside ancient shamanic traditions across Eurasia, in which hawks and falcons were understood as messengers between this world and the next. Across these examples, the bird’s ability to move through the air gives material form to a crossing unavailable to people on the ground. In Sir Orfeo, hawks help disclose the path to the lost wife; in the broader mythic pattern, they mediate between the living and the dead. This is not presented as proof that the supernatural realm exists. It is the recurring imaginative function of the hawk that matters: the bird seems capable of moving between domains that human grief can picture but cannot enter.

Gos occupies a similar uncertain place in Macdonald’s reading of T. H. White’s book. As a child, she remembered a story in which the animal does not die. Gos is lost, and although White is certain that his hawk is dead, the book leaves room for the possibility that he might return. In Macdonald’s imagination, Gos remains in a dark forest, his toes gripping bark and his eyes watching from among innumerable trees. The forest becomes a destination for what has vanished, not because its inhabitants are confirmed to be alive, but because loss has not been made identical with death.

Macdonald’s grief and the limit of the myth

Macdonald recognizes that her childhood image of Gos in the forest had become entangled with her own bereavement. Her father’s death was sudden; there had been no time to prepare for it, and she could find no sense in its occurrence. The mythic logic of the lost forest offered another possibility: her father had not ceased to exist but was somewhere beyond the boundary, with Gos and the other lost and dead. In dreams of a hawk slipping through a rent in the air, she had wanted to follow the bird, find her father, and bring him home.

A childhood drawing of a kestrel, with its jesses repeatedly pencilled over, gives this hope an earlier form. Macdonald relates it to Melanie Klein’s account of children’s mourning and the revival of early patterns of loss in later grief. The knots and lines suggest an insistence on safety and connection: an effort to hold something to the world rather than let it disappear. In this sense, the Otherworld is not only a setting from inherited stories. It is also a structure through which childhood memory can shape an adult’s response to bereavement.

The change in Macdonald’s understanding comes as Mabel eats a whole pigeon beneath an apple tree. The bird’s feeding recalls the dreams in which Macdonald wanted to become a hawk and vanish into another world. She sees that she is not the hawk, however intensely she has tried to shed her human self or lose herself in fields and leaves. She is the person beneath the tree, waiting for the hawk to return. That distinction does not erase the imaginative forest or the longing that produced it; it changes the position she occupies in relation to it. The lost may still be pictured beyond reach, but she can no longer mistake identification with the hawk for a way of recovering them.

The concept therefore holds together two different movements: the mythic journey into a neighboring realm and the living person’s attempt to give loss a place. Orfeo crosses the boundary and returns with Heurodis; Macdonald’s father remains beyond recovery, and Gos remains lost within the uncertainty of White’s story. For her, the myth’s final significance lies not in a guaranteed reunion but in making the wish to retrieve the dead intelligible. The hawk carries that wish across the imagined border, while the person left behind must remain here, watching and waiting.