Miorița

Miorița (English: The Little Ewe) is an old Romanian pastoral ballad and is considered to be one of the most important pieces of Romanian folklore. It has several versions with quite different content. One of these was selected by Vasile Alecsandri to form the textbook reference.

For the village in Constanţa County, see Ciobanu.

Content

The setting is a simple one: three shepherds (a Moldavian, a Transylvanian and a Vrâncean) meet while looking after their flocks. An apparently enchanted ewe belonging to the Moldavian tells its master that the other two are plotting to murder him and steal his goods.

The shepherd replies that, were this to happen, the ewe is to ask his killers to bury his body by the sheep's pen. She is to then tell the rest of his sheep that he had married a princess during a ceremony attended by the elements of nature, and marked by the falling of a star. However, there is no rite of passage metaphor with heavenly manifestations in the version of the story the ewe is to tell the shepherd's mother: she is to hear only of her son having married a princess.

This poem was quoted extensively by Patrick Leigh Fermor in his account[1] of the second part of a journey on foot from Holland to Constantinople in 1933-34. He includes a partial translation which he refers to as "ramshackle but pretty accurate". This was actually made later during an extended stay prior to September 1939 in eastern Romania.

Legacy

The Miorița is often referred to in the novel 'My swordhand is singing' by Marcus Sedgwick.[2]

The Miorița plays a fundamental role in the novel 'The Forbidden Forest' by Mircea Eliade.

Trivia
  • Miorița was the name of the state-owned milk company during the Nicolae Ceaușescu régime.
gollark: What poster?
gollark: To randomly partly restart a conversation from 10 minutes ago, the UK government apparently cares enough about security that they have this program to (apparently) try and teach "cybersecurity" stuff to teenagers, but I have no idea how good they actually are about pentesting.
gollark: Sounds like your country has stupid laws. I wonder if the UK's are better but I kind of doubt it.
gollark: !!FUN!!
gollark: If you do it, I will launch orbital laser bees.

References
  1. Fermor, Patrick Leigh (1986). Between the Woods and the Water. London: John Murray. pp. 204–207. ISBN 0-7195-4264-2.
  2. My Swordhand is Singing. London: Orion. 2006. ISBN 978 1 84255 558 3.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.