SOURCE: “Sir Orfeo” in Mediaeval Romance in England: A Study of the Sources and Analogues of the Non-Cyclic Metrical Romances, Oxford University Press, 1924, pp. 195-99.

In the following essay, Hibbard briefly describes the known versions of Sir Orfeo and traces the work's sources and development through the centuries.

versions. The earliest extant version in Middle English of the Lay of Sir Orfeo is found in the early fourteenth-century Auchinleck manuscript. The poem contains 602 lines in short riming couplets and is to be ascribed to the South-Midland district (Zielke, p. 55). The two fifteenth-century manuscripts, Harleian 3810 and Ashmole 61, seem to be minstrel variants of a second version (y) derived from the same source as the Auchinleck text (Zielke, p. 25). The original poem was probably composed about the end of the thirteenth century.

Coming at a time when “imitation and not originality was the rule in English writing,” the grace and...