Miorița

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A coin face featuring a shepherd sitting on the ground playing a flute. A sheep looks up to a round astral object in the sky. A curved line on the background suggests a mountain range. The word MIORIȚA in an archaic print type follows the curve of the coin edge.
Reverse of a 50 Moldovan lei coin dedicated to Miorița

"Miorița" (ad. mioriță, lit. 'The Little Ewe Lamb'), also transliterated as "Mioritza", is an old Romanian pastoral ballad considered to be one of the most important pieces of Romanian folklore. It has numerous versions with quite different content, but the literary version by poet Vasile Alecsandri (1850) is the best known and praised. This had previously been the oldest known written text, arousing suspicion that the poet may have authored it entirely, until the discovery was made of a version from the 1790s.

Etymology

The Romanian word mioriță, with diminutive suffix -ița, is the diminutive form of Template:Linktext meaning 'ewe lamb',<ref name=oprea-dict/> therefore, the literal meaning is "little ewe lamb". Some have translated the title as "The Lambkin".<ref name=jackson/>

Summary

A summary adhering to the plotline of Alecsandri's poem is as follows:<ref name=newcombe/>

Three shepherds, one a Moldovan, another a Transilvanian ({{#invoke:Lang|lang}})Template:Refn and the third a Wallachian/Vrancean, meet while tending their flocks of sheep.Template:Sfnp<ref name=popa/>

In the Moldovan's flock, there is a black-fleeced<ref>Newcombe tr. :"Dear little black sheep/Black-nosed, clad deep". Template:Harvp</ref> (or black-spotted<ref>Latham tr. : "Miorita, speckled lamb, / Face of sooty black". Template:Harvp; Template:Harvp</ref>)Template:Refn and black-muzzled animalTemplate:Refn (or perhaps flecked with gray<ref>Template:Harvp: "Ewe lamb dapple-gray/ Muzzled black and gray"</ref>). It is an enchanted ewe lamb which can talk, and it informs its master that the other two are plotting to murder him so they can steal his livestock (sheep, horses, hounds).Template:Sfnp The shepherd is resigned to the fate of his own death,<ref name=brezianu&spanu/><ref name=kligman-p242>Template:Harvp p. 242</ref> and instructs the lamb that in the event of his murder, the lamb is to go ask his killers to bury his body by the sheepfold (sheep's pen; Template:Langx).Template:Sfnp<ref name=kligman-p242/> The ewe was also to tell all his other sheep that he has married a princess during a wedding attended by the elements of nature, marked by a falling star,Template:Sfnp this cosmic event with nuptial elements represents the Moldovan shepherd's vision of death.<ref name=brezianu&spanu/>

The shepherd also requests that his three instruments—a little flute<ref>Newcombe tr., Template:Harvp</ref> or shepherd's pipe<ref>Template:Harvp, p. 307</ref><ref name=cap-bun/> (fluieraș) made of beech, another flute-pipe made bone, and a third flute-pipe made of Template:Interlanguage link—be buried beside his head, so that whenever the wind blew, the flutes would play and the sheep would gather.Template:Sfnp<ref name=kligman-p243/>Template:SfnpTemplate:Refn

The poem concludes with shepherd's instruction for the ewe to act as messenger to his aging mother: she is to be told the same story, that he has gone off to marry a princess at heaven's gate (or marry the Black Earth in some versions<ref name=kligman-p243>Template:Harvp p. 243</ref>).Template:RefnTemplate:SfnpTemplate:Sfnp According to the shepherd's earlier instructions (to give to the other sheep), what will become of him is that The Hills will officiate as the priest, and the Sun and Moon act as his godparents—in other words, he is describing his own imminent death in veiled terms, completely allegorized as a Romanian wedding.<ref name=kligman-p243/><ref>Cf. the lines "Sun and moon came down/To hold my bridal crown, " Template:Harvp [1993], on which Template:Harvp notes: "the sun and moon holding the crown for the bride and groom, just as the godparents do at Romanian weddings" and the mountain officiating as priest substantiates that a wedding scene is being evoked.</ref>

Textual sources

The pastoral ballad has been passed down in a widespread area across the Romanian provinces,Template:Sfnp with Moldavia at the core.<ref name=brezianu&spanu/> There have been over one thousand versions collected, the best-known and lauded is the reworking by Vasile Alecsandri published in the winter of 1850,<ref name=fenechiu&munteanu/>Template:Sfnp perhaps collected directly from street minstrels.<ref name=jackson/> The claim that Alecu Russo was the ballad's discoverer who supplied the material to the poetTemplate:SfnpTemplate:Sfnp has been subject to skepticism, since nothing has been found among Russo's papers to substantiate it.Template:Sfnp

A version predating Alecsandri's by several decades came to light in 1991, inscribed in the journals of Gheorghe Șincai from the first half of the 1790s. The Alecsandri version is not entirely different from this, thus establishing that there were indeed original base texts available to him at the time to be reworked, rather than him having to reconstruct the ballad out of whole cloth.Template:Sfnp

It has also been asserted that the ballad originates from the Vrancea district,Template:Sfnp but the role of the murderous Vrancean shepherd is replaced by a Jewish shepherd in known Vrancean variants of the ballad.<ref name=oisteanu/> The ballad occurs in every Romanian province (thus also in Oltenia and Bessarabia),Template:Refn, and the names (nationalities) of the shepherds and geographical details depends on the localization.Template:Sfnp The Transylvanian version lacks the lamb's clairvoyance but retains the last will concerning the objects to bury and cosmic wedding.Template:Sfnp

Translations

A prose translation in English, "Miora", appeared in E. C. Grenville Murray's Doĭne: Or, the National Songs and Legends of Roumania (1853).Template:Sfnp<ref name=murray/> This was followed by Lord Henry Stanley's verse translations (1856) into English as well as French.Template:SfnpTemplate:Sfnp

A translation by N. W. Newcombe was also printed in Grigore Nandriș's Colloquial Romanian (1945).<ref name=impey/>Template:Sfnp The ballad was also rendered under the title "Mioritza: The Canticle of the Sheep, the Enchanted Ewe" by Octavian Buhociu (The Pastoral Paradise: Romanian Folklore, 1966).<ref name=ben-amos/> Translations by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet William D. Snodgrass appeared in Miorița (1972),<ref name=impey/> Cinci Balade Populare. Five Folk Ballads (c. 1993) and Selected Translations ("The Ewe Lamb", 1998).Template:SfnpTemplate:Sfnp A translation by Ernest H. Latham Jr. was published in a Doca's grammar book in 1995;Template:Sfnp Latham's version (with Kiki Skagen Munshi as co-translator) appeared in his 2020 monograph on the poem.Template:Sfnp

In other cultures

The Csángós and the Hungarians of Transylvania know the ballad as Szép Fejér Juhászka (Hungarian: The Beautiful White Shepherd). The story is about a shepherd who is approached by three strangers (thieves, Tatars, Wallachian shepherds, pig herders) who want his sheep. Sensing that death awaits him, he asks them to bury his sültü (shepherd's flute) next to him (so that when the wind blows it, people could hear him) and to tell his mother that he is "married to the lard of the earth and to the sister of the sun".<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

Analysis

A comprehensive study was made by Template:Interlanguage link (Miorița, 1964), compiling 538 examples of the ballad to illustrate, with additional fragments and variants.<ref name=ben-amos/>Template:Sfnp

Miorița was identified as one of the four cornerstone myths used as theme in Romanian folk poetry, according to the analysis of George Călinescu (1941).Template:Efn<ref name=cornis-pope/><ref name=dobre/>

Although the poem may be seen as an exemplar traditional Christianity, i.e., turning the other cheek,<ref name=williams/> Mircea Eliade sees "cosmic Christianity" at work, i.e., "the capacity to annul the apparently irremediable consequences of a tragic event by charging them with previously unsuspected values".<ref>Template:Harvp apud Eliade (1972), Zalmoxis, The Vanishing God, p. 255</ref> Man's bond with Nature is emphasized: this "mystical solidarity" is what enables the shepherd to overcome his fate.<ref>Template:Harvp apud Eliade (1972), p. 254</ref> This bond with Nature is also spoken in terms of the "cosmic marriage" or "mioritic marriage".<ref>Template:Harvp apud Eliade (1972), p. 251</ref>

Legacy

The Miorița ballad is summarized and discussed by Mircea Eliade in Zalmoxis, The Vanishing God (1972),<ref name=cap-bun/> and plays a fundamental role in his novel The Forbidden Forest.

The poem was quoted extensively by Patrick Leigh Fermor in his account<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> of the second part of a journey on foot from Holland to Constantinople in 1933–34. He includes a partial translation of the poem which he refers to as "ramshackle but pretty accurate", which was completed during an extended stay in Eastern Romania before September 1939.

The Miorița is often referred to in Marcus Sedgwick's novel My Swordhand is Singing (2006).<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

See also

Explanatory notes

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References

Citations

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Bibliography

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(Translations)
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