Румын халық балладасы "Миорица"

Old Romanian pastoral ballad; important piece of Romanian folklore
the village in Constanța County

"Miorița" (ad. mioriță, lit. 'The Little Ewe Lamb'), also transliterated as "Mioritza", is an old Romanian pastoral ballad considered to be one of the most important pieces of Romanian folklore. It has numerous versions with quite different content, but the literary version by poet Vasile Alecsandri (1850) is the best known and praised. This had erstwhile been the oldest known written text, arousing suspicion that the poet may have authored it entirely, until the discovery was made of a version from the 1790s.

The Romanian word mioriță, with diminutive suffix ița, is the diminutive form of mioară meaning 'ewe lamb', (or black spotted)Refn|group="lower alpha"|Newcombe's translation gives "black sheep", yet the footnote glosses lău (m.), laie (f.) as 'gray'. The term lai is defined as "sheep with black or gray wool; wool (of inferior quality) sheared from such sheep" in one dictionary). It is an enchanted ewe lamb which can talk, and it informs its master that the other two are plotting to murder him so they can steal his livestock (sheep, horses, hounds). The shepherd is resigned to the fate of his own death, and instructs the lamb that in the event of his murder, the lamb is to go ask his killers to bury his body by the sheepfold (sheep's pen; stână). or shepherd's pipe). Refn|group="lower alpha"|He will marry the princess "Pe o gură de rai (at heaven's gate)", which echoes the opening lines of the ballad Pe un picior de plai, /Pe o gură de rai", printed on a Moldavian banknote.

The pastoral ballad has been passed down in a widespread area across the Romanian provinces, with Moldavia at the core. Man's bond with Nature is emphasized: this "mystical solidarity" is what enables the shepherd to overcome his fate. This bond with Nature is also spoken in terms of the "cosmic marriage" or "mioritic marriage".

The Miorița ballad is summarized and discussed by Mircea Eliade in Zalmoxis, The Vanishing God (1972), of the second part of a journey on foot from Holland to Constantinople in 1933–34. He includes a partial translation of the poem which he refers to as "ramshackle but pretty accurate", which was completed during an extended stay in Eastern Romania before September 1939. The Miorița is often referred to in Marcus Sedgwick's novel My Swordhand is Singing (2006).