The Discourse of Fairyland in the Dream Vision of the Middle English Pearl

Abstract

The Middle English poem Pearl is a mixture of a number of genres. Opening like an elegy, with its initial stanzas heavily indebted to courtly love poetry, it proceeds towards a dream vision that launches into a theological debate concluded by an eschatological vision of the city of New Jerusalem. Pearl is obviously a religious poem, but, as Ad Putter has observed, the kind of religious and dreamscape imagery it contains, based on biblical sources, may also have influenced the writers of medieval romances such as Sir Orfeo or Thomas of Erceldoune in the construction of their secular otherworlds (2007: 237–41). The two romances in question are tales of fairy encounters, and the following article aims to identify major areas of convergence with the genre of fairy romance in Pearl.