The presentation of the Fairies who take Heurodis here displays Celtic influences in the concept of the space they inhabit as being a parallel dimension to the everyday world rather than the Land of the Dead as in the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. The ability to move between one world and the other distinguishes the tale as told in its various British versions such as Sir Orfeo and the Shetland ballad King Orfeo where the captors are envisaged as inhabitants of a parallel fairy domain rather than as the infernal region of the Dead ruled over by Hades as in the Greek myth.
Katharine Briggs sees the tale as related in British folk narratives as being equally influenced by Celtic stories such as The Wooing of Etain as it is from Classical sources, in particular the version of the story in Ovid’s Metamorphoses which would have been the most widely available source in Britain in the Middle Ages and for some time after[9]
