OBERON

king of the fairies in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Oberon serves as a magical counterpart to the human males and, thus, in his relationship to Titania, provides a different view of love and the relationship with the beloved. The magic that Oberon chooses to teach Titania a lesson is responsible for all the comic misadventures of the plot. The character of Oberon was derived largely from Lord Berners' prose translation of the medieval French poem Huon de Bordeaux, though it also contains elements of Zeus and his relationships to Hera and to mortals. French Alberon, German Alberich, king of the elves, or of the faerie, in the French medieval poem Huon de Bordeaux. In this poem Oberon is a dwarf-king, living in the woodland, who by magic powers helps the hero to accomplish a seemingly impossible task. In the legendary history of the Merovingian dynasty Oberon is a magician, the brother of Merowech (Mrove). In the medieval German epic the Nibelungenlied he is the dwarf who guards the underground treasure of the Nibelungen and is overcome by Siegfried and forced to yield the cloak of darkness (the Tarn-kappe). In another Middle High German epic, entitled Ortnit, Alberich appears as the king of the dwarfs and the titular hero's father. Huon de Bordeaux, through the prose translation of John Bouchier (Lord Berners), furnished the name Oberon and the fairy element for Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream (first performed 159596), Ben Jonson's court masque Oberon, the Faery Prince (1611), and Christoph Martin Wieland's verse romance Oberon (1780). The character is treated again in Carl Maria von Weber's opera Oberon (1826). In the musical dramas of Richard Wagner, Alberich is the Nibelung who steals the magic gold from the Rhine maidens; he is a darker character than his predecessors. outermost of the five major satellites of Uranus. It was discovered in 1787 by the English astronomer Sir William Herschel, who had found Uranus in 1781. The mean distance of the satellite from the centre of Uranus is about 583,520 kilometres (361,780 miles), and its orbital period is 13.46 days. Oberon's estimated diameter is 1,630 km (1,010 mi), and its mass is about 6.9 10-5 that of Uranus. The satellite is thought to consist of water ice and possibly a small amount of frozen methane and rocky material. Photographic images transmitted by the U.S. Voyager 2 spacecraft in 1986 revealed that Oberon's surface is heavily cratered like that of the Moon. A few of the numerous bright craters appear to have been flooded by some kind of dark lavalike material.