Beyond What We Know: On Epistemic Limits in Sir Orfeo

From Orfeo’s gradual realisation of his wife Heurodis’s inevitable departure, to his discovery of the wonders of the fairy world and the possibility of reunion, the flow of information and knowledge is key to the narrative dynamics of the fourteenth-century Middle English Breton lay Sir Orfeo. But this is a narrative in which there are as many mysteries as revelations. When the fairies cross over into Orfeo’s world on their hunt, it is ambiguous as to what they hunt for, or even whether they hunt for anything at all. When Orfeo crosses over into the other world of the fairies, the gallery of the “taken” reveals to him people in a perhaps unintelligible state between life and death. The unknowable and the knowable interpenetrate. My paper will explore how Sir Orfeo presents knowledge, the textual features and literary devices that reveal or block it, and how we as readers might work with the limits of the text and the glimpses it offers of how the unknown can be mediated.