"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. Etymology The Romanian word mioriță, with diminutive suffix -ița, is the diminutive form of meaning 'ewe lamb', therefore, the literal meaning is "little ewe lamb". Some have translated the title as "The Lambkin". Summary A summary adhering to the plotline of Alecsandri's poem is as follows: Three shepherds, one a Moldovan, another a Transylvanian () and the third a Wallachian/Vrancean, meet while tending their flocks of sheep. In the Moldovan's flock, there is a black-fleeced (or black-spotted) and black-muzzled animal (or perhaps flecked with gray). 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; ). The ewe was also to tell all his other sheep that he has married a princess during a wedding attended by the elements of nature, marked by a falling star, this cosmic event with nuptial elements represents the Moldovan shepherd's vision of death. The shepherd also requests that his three instruments—a little flute or shepherd's pipe () made of beech, another flute-pipe made bone, and a third flute-pipe made of —be buried beside his head, so that whenever the wind blew, the flutes would play and the sheep would gather. The poem concludes with shepherd's instruction for the ewe to act as messenger to his aging mother: she is to be told the same story, that he has gone off to marry a princess at heaven's gate (or marry the Black Earth in some versions). 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