Pearl Poet - Conjectured Biography

Conjectured Biography

The language of the poems shows that the poet was a contemporary of Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, and William Langland, who are sometimes (following the suggestion of academic John Burrow) collectively called the Ricardian Poets in reference to the reign of Richard II of England. All four poems of the Cotton Nero A.x manuscript are in the same Middle English dialect, localised to the area of north-western Staffordshire and south-eastern Cheshire, in the English midlands. This may merely indicate the dialect of the scribe responsible for copying the poems, but there is good evidence that the dialect of poet and scribe were very similar. It is, therefore, thought most likely that the poet was a native of east Cheshire or west Staffordshire and was writing in the latter part of the 14th century, and internal evidence indicates that all four works were probably written by the same author.

Any other information must be deduced from the poems' themes, as there is neither a definite authorial attribution within them nor any 'tradition' as to the author's identitity (as with Langland and Piers Plowman). The poet would seem to be exceptionally conversant with learning, shows a deep knowledge of technical vocabulary about hunting and the court, vividly describes the landscape of the region, and has an interest in poverty as a Christian virtue. However, the writer of the Cotton Nero A.x poems never refers to contemporary scholarship as Chaucer, for example, does; the poems show much more of a tendency to refer to materials from the past (the Arthurian legends, stories from the Bible) than any new learning, so it is perhaps less possible to associate him or her with the universities, monasteries, or the court in London. Despite this, the Pearl Poet must have been educated and probably of a certain social standing, perhaps a member of a family of landed gentry. J. R. R. Tolkien and E.V. Gordon, after reviewing the allusions, style, and themes of Gawain and the Green Knight, concluded in 1925:

He was a man of serious and devout mind, though not without humour; he had an interest in theology, and some knowledge of it, though an amateur knowledge perhaps, rather than a professional; he had Latin and French and was well enough read in French books, both romantic and instructive; but his home was in the West Midlands of England; so much his language shows, and his metre, and his scenery.