Recognizing Race Through Sir Orfeo 's Uncanny Faerie Other

Though Sir Orfeo is frequently taught in medieval literature courses, it is not often read for its race-making. However, reading Sir Orfeo through a psychoanalytic lens reveals the poem's pervasive race-thinking. In Sir Orfeo, anxieties about the instability of racial categories are expressed through the power that the King of Faerie — Orfeo's uncanny double — exerts over Orfeo and his kingdom. The King of Faerie serves as a catalyst for Orfeo's transformation into blackness and a second uncanny double of himself. Racialized as heathenness, this blackness is legible through markers such as beards and clothes and constructs a white self that assumes power through nobility and masculinity. In Sir Orfeo's happy ending, Orfeo is returned to his familiar self — shaved, crowned, and no longer black. Sir Orfeo therefore resists the mutability of the racial categories it constructs, making it a helpful example of how the uncanny can be used to read race in other texts with doubled selves.