- To Vic Smith:
This is something I have always been struggling with.
When you are making a collection of Child Ballads, where do you stop?

Francis James Child did mention foreign language analogues to the ballads he categorized, but many of them were only distantly related or happened to contain a similar feature by coincidence.
There might be some, like the Joe Heaney's Irish Lord Randall, for example, which are very closely related to their English Language counterparts, but that's the problem, how to decide what to include and what to leave out?

A similar problem are ballads like Earl Brand, The Douglas Tragedy, Child of Elle, Erlinton and The Bold Soldier/Keeper/Dragoon.
Or what about Henry Martin and Sir Andrew Barton?
What about Katharine Jaffray and The Green Wedding?
The Three Ravens and The Twa Corbies?

All tell more or less the same story, all of them are English/Scottish and yet I would (again, that's just my opinion) consider them to be separate ballads.

I often don't know where to draw the line between where one ballad stops and another begins and by which criterias we should separate them or treat them as the same thing.
Sometimes ballads we consider to be variants of the same differ in story details, sometimes story details are the reason we separate them, it's all quite confusing.

Now I don't want to derail this thread again, but could you point me towards any texts or recordings of non English variants of the King Orfeo ballad?
I'd be interested in learning more about them.

There's just so much that's worth discussing and thinking about that it's hard for me to keep focused on one subject.

I'm aware of a Swedish song, Harpans Kraft, which does have some similarities to the Orfeo story, but I wouldn't call that a version of the same ballad.
Two beautiful field recordings of Harpans Kraft are on the CD "Den Medeltida Balladen", sung by Ester Sjöberg and Svea Jansson.

I have uploaded them to Soundcloud, if you're interested in hearing them:
Harpans Kraft - Ester Sjöberg
Harpans Kraft - Svea Jansson

King Orfeo is one of those ballads that fascinates me, I wonder how the medieval lay of Sir Orfeo turned into a local Shetland ballad...