Pearl and the Fairies of Romance: Hermeneutics and Intertextuality in a Fourteenth-Century Religious Dream Vision

This article focuses on the parallels that can be drawn between the characters and landscapes of the fourteenth-century Pearl poem and the fairy characters and otherworlds that frequently appear in works of medieval romance. It argues that the Pearl-poet is consciously engaging with readily identifiable fairy themes and motifs, made popular through a wide range of romances and other sources, in order to help propagate a certain ambiguity within the poem: one that feeds into the broader epistemological themes that are present within the text. More specifically, this article shows that the poet's manipulation of these motifs forms part of the broader unraveling of the poem, in which both the dreamer's and the reader's ability to comprehend the nature of the vision develops as the poem progresses. Drawing on two works in particular, the fourteenth-century alliterative romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Chrétien de Troyes's twelfth-century French romance Le Conte du Graal, this article argues that Pearl parallels these texts in the way that they utilize otherworldly conventions to inhibit both the protagonist's and the reader's ability to rationalize the events taking place within the poem. By identifying the poet's use of fairy conventions in Pearl, a poem that consistently draws attention to the limits of human knowledge, this article examines, from a fresh perspective, the poet's exploration of ineffability and of the divide between material and spiritual modes of existence.