the wife , in this story , was dead and buried and yet her husband found her in magno feminarum cetu de nocte and snatched her away and brought her back home to human life once more . whether this old Breton tale had already been contaminated with the classical legend of Orpheus and Eurydice we can not say , but the strange oscillation between contrary concepts is characteristic of Orfeo as well . the motive for abduction in fairy tales is usually love , as , for example , in Guingamor , Lanval and Graelent ; but Heurodis was not snatched away for love ; the fairy king had his own queen ; besides , to have introduced the love motive in this fashion would have cut across the theme of marital love and loyalty upon which the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice hinges . if the king of fairy is not to be entirely identified with the king of the dead , what reason can be offered for his behaviour ? it is at this point , when Orfeo saw his wife lying under the ympe tre in the castle courtyard , that the interlacing of the classical and Celtic stories appears at its most intricate . Heurodis was abducted in the &amp;symbol;e comessing of May . in a vague , imperceptible way , the fairy king , who was also the god of an underworld , since Orfeo had to go in at a roche to reach him , seems here to have taken on some of the attributes of Dis , who stole Proserpina away as she was gathering spring flowers in the meadow ; and Heurodis also seems to take the place of Proserpina , for Eurydice was not abducted , but killed by the poisonous fangs of a snake . in classical legend , Dis or Pluto was the king of the underworld and the dead ; but , according to Caesar , the Celts also had a god of the underworld similar to Dis , from whom all the Gauls claimed to be descended : galli se omnes ab Dite patre prognatos praedicant , and in later fairy lore he or the classical Dis or both became identified with the king of fairy , if Chaucer is to be believed : Pluto that is the kyng of fairye ( merchant &apos;s tale , 983 ) . again , in the classical legend , the two attributes of Dis fell together ; he was not only the power of winter in seasonal myth , he was also the god of Hades , the ruler in the kingdom of the dead . in Celtic legend also , there existed a seasonal myth similar to that of Dis and Proserpina ; it took the form of an abduction story , closely resembling the abduction of Heurodis in some of the details to which the classical versions offer no similarity . traces of this myth are to be found in Culhwch and Olwen and the vita Gildae , said to have been written by Caradoc of Llancarvon : ( a ) . Creiddylad daughter of Lludd Silver-hand ( the maiden of most majesty that was ever in the island of Britain and its three adjacent islands ) . and for her Gwythyr son of Greidawl and Gwyn son of Nudd fight for ever each May-calends till the day of doom &amp;hellip; . Creiddylad daughter of Lludd Silver-hand went with Gwythyr son of Greidawl ; and before he had slept with her there came Gwyn son of Nudd and carried her off by force . Gwythyr son of Greidawl gathered a host and he came to fight with Gwyn son of Nudd . and Gwyn prevailed &amp;hellip; . Arthur heard tell of this and he came into the north and summoned to him Gwyn son of Nudd and set free his noblemen from his prison and peace was made between Gwyn son of Nudd and Gwythyr son of Greidawl . this is the peace that was made : the maiden should remain in her father &apos;s house unmolested by either side , and there should be battle between Gwyn and Gwythyr each May-calends for ever and ever , from that day till doomsday ; and the one of them that should be victor on doomsday , let him have the maiden . the details worth noting in relation to Orfeo are : the abduction had reference to the May-calends or &amp;symbol;e comessing of May in ( a ) and there is an implication of seasonal cycle in per unius anni circulum in ( b ) ; the husband was a king and the stolen wife a queen in ( b ) ; the ravisher was also a king in both ( a ) and ( b ) , but whereas in Culhwch and Olwen he was undoubtedly the king of the underworld , Gwyn ap Nudd , king of Annwn , Melvas was made king of the summer region or Somerset , since it was to his castle in Glastonbury that he carried the queen . possibly the roles of Arthur and Melvas have been exchanged , for Gwythyr ap Greidawl seems to be equated with the sun or summer , if the elements in his name are any guide , Gwythyr , victor and Greid- , old Irish ?&amp;symbol;greid , to scorch . Melvas ought to be the equivalent of Gwyn ap Nudd . however , as the version in the vita Gildae was obviously altered to boost Glastonbury abbey and Gildas , these differences may be bits of local colour . finally , in both ( a ) and ( b ) , an attempt was made to recapture the woman with the help of armed knights , and in ( b ) Guinevere was restored to her husband just as Heurodis was given back to Orfeo . why Orfeo was a king might now appear to be more reasonable ; and the fact that he was successful in bringing his wife safely out of fairyland becomes something more than a mere romantic and neo-fairy ending to an old , tragic story . yet , to understand Orfeo completely , we must turn again to the classical tale of Orpheus and Eurydice , for it is this alone which can explain why Heurodis was abducted for no apparent reason . Eurydice , like the dead mother in the Breton tale , filii mortue , was the beloved wife who died ; Heurodis , her nominal counterpart , was at the same time semi-Proserpina , semi-Creiddylad-Guinevere , and was abducted ; the reason for her abduction is omitted because , as Eurydice , she should have died , and , as Proserpina-Creiddylad-Guinevere , she should have been stolen for love ; either reason is incompatible with the theme of Orfeo . when Orfeo arrived in the fairy underworld , he saw his queen , not in the palace among the ladies with whom he had met her in the forest , but in the outer courtyard , among a collection of sick , mad , crippled and headless people , who were lying there exactly as they had been on earth when they had been snatched away in their noontide sleep . in the forest she had been alive ; she had recognized him and had wept ; yet , when he followed the fairy company and came to find her in fairyland , she is pictured as being in her first condition , not as she was the day she was abducted , for then she was not asleep , but as she was when the fairy king first appeared to her - asleep under the ympe tre . the poet says that all the people who were lying there , and that includes Heurodis , &amp;symbol;ou&amp;symbol;t dede and nare nou&amp;symbol;t . even when full allowance has been made for the marvellous things which could happen in fairyland , it is difficult to believe that a person without a head was not dead in the first instance . and are we to understand that these headless , armless , burnt and choked people , to say nothing of the mothers in childbed , also arose as Heurodis evidently did , and took part in the dancing and hunting in the forest ? analysis of this kind emphasizes the slight inconsistencies in the narrative and serves to show up the seams in the joining of the Celtic and classical tales . at the same time , we can scour Georgics , 4 and Metamorphoses , 10 in vain for any hint or detail which might help to throw light on this odd picture . the bodiless phantoms that came in their thousands from the depths of Erebus at the sound of Orpheus &apos;s lyre ( Georgics , 4 , 475-7 ) and the bloodless spirits who wept at the strain ( Metamorphoses , 10 , 41 ) can not honestly be considered as in any way comparable to the folk liggeand wi&amp;symbol;in &amp;symbol;e wal , for Orfeo had not yet entered the king &apos;s palace nor had he touched the strings of his harp nor did these people outside come in later on to listen to him . if it be remembered that not only the legend of Orpheus , but the whole of Virgil &apos;s work was widely known in the middle ages , a clue may be found in another Virgilian description of the classical underworld , the one in Aeneid , Bk 6 . Aeneas , when he prayed to be allowed to visit his father &apos;s shade in Hades , made use of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice to strengthen his petition ; if Orpheus could call up his wife &apos;s shade in Erebus , could not he , Aeneas , also a descendant of the gods , make the same journey ? he was allowed to do so and when he reached the entrance to Hades he is pictured as approaching it across the vestibulum or forecourt , with the limen and fores , the main door , at the far side ; that is , Virgil has imagined the entrance to Hades in contemporary terms , those of the Roman house , just as the poet of Orfeo has visualized the entrance to the fairy underworld in terms of a medieval castle : what Aeneas saw in the forecourt of Orcus was very similar to that which Orfeo saw in the courtyard of the fairy king &apos;s castle ; all kinds of horrors had made their beds there , but where Virgil has enumerated abstractions and the customary grisly inhabitants of Tartarus , the author of Orfeo has presented a picture of examples , an oddly assorted gathering of people , most of whom would have been found , in the middle ages , in purgatory , because they had died suddenly and unshriven - the burnt , the drowned , women who had died mad in labour , soldiers killed in battle and those who , like Hamlet &apos;s father , had been taken , grossly , full of bread and had died choking . none of them has a right to a home in fairyland , at least , not according to the ancient tradition concerning that place ; all who go there are either stolen or lured from earth on account of their beauty or desirability . that Heurodis should be there is intelligible , but the rest seem to belong to the Christian otherworld of punishment , which , in the middle ages , owed many of its features to the pagan conception of Tartarus ; both were places in which the wicked or the unassoiled found themselves after death and every traveller who had the temerity to visit them , were he an Orpheus , an Aeneas or a Knight Owen had his sight seared with visions of human agony . Orpheus descended into Hades , Orfeo tunnelled into fairyland ; the two stories which are so successfully merged in other parts of Orfeo are just here a little divergent , or perhaps it is that the classical element is for the moment uppermost and has , in its detail , been partly overlaid with contemporary notions . in any case , the similarity between the settings is very close . another interesting point of comparison lies in the linking of sleep with the idea of Death &apos;s kingdom . Virgil has used the word sopor , which has an intensive force , implying a torpor akin to the sleep of death , consanguineus Leti sopor . sleep , in classical legend , was associated with Hades . according to Hesiod ( theogony , 1 , 211 ff ) , Erebus and Night were the children of Chaos ; and Night , the mother of Doom , Fate and Death , also gave birth to Sleep and the tribe of Dreams and painful Woe . Cicero echoes this in his de natura deorum , 3 , 17 : Amor Dolus Metus &amp;hellip; Mors Tenebrae Miseria ... Somnia quos omnes Erebo et Nocte natos ferunt . in Orfeo the same idea is present , for , in the fairy otherworld , which is also an underworld , the miseries , exemplified by the folk liggeand wi&amp;symbol;in &amp;symbol;e wal , are definitely related to sleep : ri&amp;symbol;t as &amp;symbol;ai slepe her vndertides . next , there is the tree , the great elm of dreams . no true parallel to it has yet been found in classical legend . 