Miorița

[2] A summary adhering to the plotline of Alecsandri's poem is as follows:[3] Three shepherds, one a Moldovan, another a Transilvanian (ungurean)[a] and the third a Wallachian/Vrancean, meet while tending their flocks of sheep.

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).

[f][6][27] According to the shepherd's earlier instructions (to give to the other sheep), what will become of him is that The Hills will officiate as the priest, and the Sun and Moon act as his godparents—in other words, he is describing his own imminent death in veiled terms, completely allegorized as a Romanian wedding.

[38][39] The ballad was also rendered under the title "Mioritza: The Canticle of the Sheep, the Enchanted Ewe" by Octavian Buhociu (The Pastoral Paradise: Romanian Folklore, 1966).

Sensing that death awaits him, he asks them to bury his sültü (shepherd's flute) next to him (so that when the wind blows it, people could hear him) and to tell his mother that he is "married to the lard of the earth and to the sister of the sun".

[44][45] A comprehensive study was made by Adrian Fochi [ro] (Miorița, 1964), compiling 538 examples of the ballad to illustrate, with additional fragments and variants.

[51] The Miorița ballad is summarized and discussed by Mircea Eliade in Zalmoxis, The Vanishing God (1972),[21] and plays a fundamental role in his novel The Forbidden Forest.

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.