Emendations made metri causa do not always figure in the list of editorial emendations provided at pp. 794–800. Any word supplied or deleted is, of course, included, as are even trivial occasions where the scribe has (e.g. by omitting a letter or a contraction sign) produced an implausible form of the word we assume was intended. But in a normalized-spelling edition, it would not make sense to include all changes to manuscript forms of words. For example, in the last thirteen stanzas of Sir Gawain, modifications of the following kind do not figure in the list of emendations: to ensure the unstressed syllable required at line ending, historically justified final -e has been supplied – in, for instance, faste (2215: adverb), lyghte (2220: infinitive), paye (2247: < OF paie), herte (2277, 2438: < OE heorte), myghte (2291: past tense), raghte (2297: past tense), maye (2298: subjunctive), nekke (2310: OE hnecca), hente (2323: past participle), tryste (2325: plural imperative), nighte (2347: dative), alse (2360, 2513: a variant form of als used at line ending; cf. manuscript alce at 2492), laste (2497: weak and dative adjective as noun); line-ending bihous (2296) has been emended to behoves. In most cases these emendations are supported by forms and spellings found elsewhere in the manuscript. Final -e has similarly been supplied in order to ensure the b-verse has its required long dip (of two or more syllables) in the following cases: greme (2251: regularized to the form with etymological -e that the poet always elsewhere uses), starte (2286: infinitive), comlyche (2411: weak adjective), gostlyche (2461: adverb), wyste (2490: past-tense plural); and manuscript venquyst (2482) has, for the same reason, been emended to the recorded alternative form venquished.
Punctuation, capitalization and word division follow modern practice. (There is no punctuation in the manuscript and few capitals, while word division is not always clearly marked, as spacing is irregular.) Patience and Cleanness are not always printed in the quatrains in which they are here presented, but there can be no doubt that the poet, like a number of others in the alliterative tradition,50 wrote in four-line units.51 The scribe marks the beginning of every fifth line with two strokes in the left margin, and, since this is the same mark he uses in Pearl and Sir Gawain to signal what rhyme proves to be clearly a new stanza, we have interpreted the symbol as similarly marking off sections of text in the unrhymed poems. The sense, moreover, characteristically falls into four-line units. The quatrains in which we have laid out these poems thus clarify sense and structure, and provide the same welcome subdivision in long poems as do the rhyme-based stanzas in Pearl and Sir Gawain.
The on-page footglosses are fuller for Sir Gawain than for the other poems, as we have assumed this will usually be the first of the four poems (and sometimes the only one) which students will read and that, since it is deservedly famous, it may be read by non-specialists who have had no experience or training in Middle English. We have therefore, for Sir Gawain, footglossed anything that might cause difficulty to a modern reader. With the other poems, the footglosses are more sparing and used chiefly as a supplement to the Glossary – to elucidate features of syntax and construction that might remain obscure even when individual words are understood or recognized, or to alert readers to ‘false friends’ (words for which the Glossary might not be consulted because they look familiar, but which have a sense different from that which they bear in Modern English). Otherwise, it is, for the texts other than Sir Gawain, generally only very unusual words that are footglossed, or those which occur only once in the manuscript, while for lexical elucidation in other cases the student is referred to the Glossary.
The endnotes are devoted to more detailed discussion of cruces, vocabulary, style, interpretation, sources, analogues, and to other matters not necessary to the explication of the immediate sense and significance, which is given in the footglosses (and in the Glossary). The Bibliography contains all material we have anywhere cited. Each of the poems is preceded by a Foreword which discusses genre, form and literary art and which ends with a few suggestions for further reading.
Where the poet is versifying the Bible, the equivalent passages from the Authorized Version are quoted serially at intervals – in bold italics, so that those wishing to compare the poem with its source can easily pick them out; where relevant, words or phrases from the Latin Vulgate the poet himself would have been following are also given (in italics); a slash divides AV from Vulgate chapter or verse numbering where the two diverge and where it is thought desirable to cite both. Since the endnotes are full and frequent, cross-references to them are only in exceptional cases included in the footglosses.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We are grateful to the British Library for giving us permission to edit the poems from the original manuscript. We also wish to extend our very particular thanks to our colleagues John Burrow and Jill Mann and to our copy-editor Kate Parker. All three went through the entire work with minute attention to detail, gave generously of their time and interest, and left the edition much improved by their efforts and advice.
PEARL
Foreword
Pearl is a narrative told in the first person, and its narrative form is that of the dream-vision: a mourner falls into unconsciousness over the grave of what is gradually revealed to have been a daughter who died before reaching the age of two; he is transported in sleep to a jewelled landscape in which he encounters this lost ‘pearl’, now one of the élite 144,000 virgin brides of the Lamb (as described in Revelation 14); in the ensuing dialogue, she attempts to replace his mortal with her own divine perspective, and finally leads him to a literal sight of the heavenly Jerusalem (described, following Revelation 21–2, as constructed of jewels); when he attempts on impulse to join her in this place by crossing the river which divides him from it and her, and which he has been told he cannot cross, his dream is broken, and he wakes, regretting his disobedience and resigning himself to the will of God.
The poem is remarkable for both the richness and sophistication with which it develops the central image of the jewel and for its complementary beauty and intricacy of form. Form and imagery are in fact closely interrelated. The image of the ‘perfect pearl’ is used to concatenate and mark the gradual progression from the human and earthly to the divine and glorious: it is, successively, what the child was to her father (1ff); the sign of her spiritual purity as a bride of the Lamb (271ff); the ‘pearl of great price’ (Matthew 13:45–6) which forms a scriptural figure of salvation and heaven (729ff); and the pearl of which each of the ‘pearly gates’ of the New Jerusalem consists (1037). Concatenation is also a feature of the verse form: one word is repeated from the last line of each stanza in the first line of the following one, this word remaining the same over five stanzas (in one case, six). This device divides the poem into different sections (marked by Roman numerals in the edited text) and confers upon each a lexical ‘key-note’ in the form of the refrain word. The ‘endeles rounde’ (738) perfection of the pearl (in all its varied significances) also finds a formal equivalent: the poem is itself circular, repeating in its last line the key words of its opening line, and its 101 stanzas (the same number as those of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight) also suggest a numerical equivalent to a cycle completed and rejoining its beginning at a higher level of significance. To create 101 stanzas in twenty sections, the poet had to make one section longer than the others: section XV, appropriately marked by the refrain words ‘never the lesse’, has six stanzas rather than the normal five. The numerical figure associated with perfection in the poem (144,000) is yet a further feature of its content that is imitated in its form – which is organized according to twelve-line stanza units and completes itself at line 1212 with an artistic appropriateness that must have been primarily for the poet’s private aesthetic satisfaction, since no indication of line numbering is given for verse in this, or any English, manuscript. In these ways, the poem pays tribute to the different kinds of perfection of the pearl and its ‘preciousness’ (to her father while she lived, and, in spiritual terms, to the God who glorified her and to whom she now belongs).