Mioriţa

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Mioriţa (The Little Ewe) is an old Romanian pastoral ballad and considered one of the most important pieces of Romanian folklore. It has several, quite different in content versions, one of which was selected by Vasile Alecsandri to the form the textbook reference.

[edit] Content

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

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 in fact married a princess during a ceremony attended by the elements of nature themselves, and marked by the falling of a star. However, the rite of passage metaphor discards all celestial reference in the version of the story the ewe is to depict to the shepherd's mother: she is to hear only of her son having married a princess.

[edit] Trivia

Mioriţa was the name of the state-owned milk company during the Nicolae Ceauşescu régime.
The first two verses of Mioriţa are written on all the banknotes of Moldova.