Tolkien's 'Beloved' _Pearl_

Abstract: This essay explores Tolkien’s life-long engagement with the fourteenth-century, Middle English, dream vision poem called Pearl. It examines the inspiration he took from the poem through reading, reciting, copying, editing, translating, and teaching it to undergraduate students at the University of Leeds and Merton College, Oxford University. Milestones in Tolkien’s work on Pearl include his edition of it, produced with E.V. Gordon and Ida Gordon for Oxford University Press (1953), and a metrical translation of it that he worked on from 1920s onwards, which was published with Allen & Unwin in London and Random House in New York through the efforts of his son and posthumous editor, Christopher Tolkien, in 1975. Tolkien’s interpretations of Pearl, which included his view that the poem was an elegy with minor allegories within it, are relevant to medieval scholarship, both then and now, and to Tolkien’s own legendarium. The role and imagery associated with the Pearl Maiden in the poem clearly influenced Tolkien’s own “Pearl Maidens,” Lúthien Tinúviel and Elwing the White, while the central symbol of the poem, the pearl, influenced Tolkien’s representation of the Silmarils.