It Does Make Sense If You're Not A Complete Idiot, GUY!

Jared, Oriana and Ned talk about Jared’s choice of topic: the late 14th century Middle English poem Pearl. Surviving solely in the same manuscript as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and presumed to be by the same anonymous author, Pearl has long been valued as another scarce surviving example of a poem from that period from the North-West Midlands dialect of Middle English. Its subject matter, at once theologically didactic, imaginative in its language, extremely technically complex and often obscure and strange in its portrayals of grief and redemption, clearly appealed to Tolkien, who worked on a modern English translation of it that was published posthumously along with Sir Gawain and Sir Orfeo, along with accompanying notes and details. It has remained one of his own least-known works even as part of that wider collection, but does offer a variety of unexpected connections to his own beliefs and creative preoccupations. How tough exactly is this particular dialect of Middle English to understand, and how did that impact what Tolkien was trying to do in his translation? What does the exact obscurity of the relationship between the narrator and the titular figure mean in terms of possible interpretations of the poem? What further parallels and points of inspiration can be teased out in particular about the poem’s dwelling on death, grief and memory and how those subjects are explored in Tolkien’s written work? And just how exasperated does the pearl maiden sound after a while?