Poetry
The Ewe Lamb
Miorița
Anonymous · 1850
Synopsis
Three shepherds, a Moldavian, a Wallachian and a Transylvanian, drive their flocks together. The Moldavian's ewe lamb, which can speak, warns him that his two companions want to kill him to seize his animals. Instead of fleeing, he entrusts her with his last wishes: that he be buried near his sheepfold with his three flutes, that his sheep be told he married in the presence of the Sun and the Moon, and that his old mother be told he wed a queen at the gates of paradise.
Context
Vasile Alecsandri published the ballad in 1850 in the journal Bucovina, then took it up again, revising it, in his Poesii populare, which critics have long debated, according to Eliade; a version from the 1790s was found in 1991 in the notebooks of Gheorghe Șincai. Adrian Fochi gathered nine hundred and thirty documents of it in 1964, including seven hundred and two complete variants. Jules Michelet was the first to translate it into French, in 1854. George Călinescu counted it among the four founding myths of Romanian literature, and Mircea Eliade devoted a study to it.
Who it is for
A short ballad, in Romanian folk verse, that is worth reading aloud; several French and English translations exist.
Prizes and reception
Translated into more than twenty languages, it is regarded as one of the most important works of Romanian folklore.