Notes
1According to The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, Tolkien worked on his translation of Pearl at roughly the same time he wrote The Hobbit, since some stanzas were broadcast in 1936, and he began preparing the manuscript for publication in 1944, during the composition of The Lord of the Rings (14, 94, 114, 316-318, 440, 449). Although there is no evidence that Tolkien intended Gollum as a counterpart to the Jeweler, I believe that Pearl was among the numerous texts forming the semi-conscious literary background for both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. For that reason, I will quote primarily from Tolkien’s translation, reverting to the Middle English text when it furnishes further parallels not apparent in Tolkien’s version.
Works Cited
Didache. c. 110. Trans. and ed. Cyril C. Richardson. Early Christian Fathers. Ed. Cyril C. Richardson. New York: Touchstone-Simon, 1996. 171-179.
Pearl. Ed. Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Waldon. The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript: Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Berkeley: U of California P, 1979. 53-110.
Tolkien, J. R. R. The Hobbit. 1937. New York: Ballantine Books, 1992.
_____________. The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien. Ed. Humphrey Carpenter and Christopher Tolkien. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000.
_____________. The Lord of the Rings. 1955. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1994.
_____________. Morgoth’s Ring: The Later Silmarillion, Part One. Vol. 10 of The History of Middle-earth. Ed. Christopher Tolkien. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1993.
_____________, trans. Pearl. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, and Sir Orfeo. Ed. Christopher Tolkien. New York: Ballantine, 1980. 99-132.