Supereffable

At two o’clock​ in the morning on 23 October 1731, ‘a great smoak’ began to pour from the rafters of Ashburnham House in Westminster. The library was on fire, which meant that English history was on fire. Ashburnham held the many rare manuscripts that had been donated to the nation by the antiquarian Robert Cotton, as well as the treasures of the royal manuscript collections. The flames from a fireplace had caught on the wooden mantelpiece and spread to the wainscoting. Hapless librarians were throwing water on the blaze; the city fire engines were nowhere to be seen. Eventually Mr Casley, the deputy librarian, dashed out of the building cradling the Codex Alexandrinus, a fifth-century Greek Bible. Others remained, throwing books out of the windows as fast as they could. The next day, with Ashburnham in ruins, boys from Westminster School were picking up charred manuscript fragments as souvenirs.

There were almost a thousand manuscripts in the collection, organised into a series of ‘presses’ or shelving units, each one taking its name from the bust of a Roman emperor that stood on top. Vitellius A.xv, the only copy of Beowulf, was scorched and damaged. Otho A.xii, a unique exemplar of the Old English poem The Battle of Maldon, was completely destroyed. Another volume pressed with Otho, an eighth-century Northumbrian Gospel, was mostly gone; the cataloguers remarked hopefully that ‘Some Pieces of the Leaves of this old Book are preserv’d.’ In many cases, the fat from the lambskin vellum had been drawn out by the heat, so that the pages were roasted in their own juices. One unsalvageable codex, in the words of a modern librarian, resembles ‘an irradiated armadillo’. Though conservation efforts succeeded with a good number of the manuscripts, about a fifth of the collection was deemed to have been ‘lost, burned, or entirely spoiled’.

None of the manuscripts in the Nero press was harmed. Among them was the most mysterious volume of medieval English literature. Cotton Nero A.x is a small miracle: a quarto volume, about the size of a paperback, consisting of just 92 leaves. It contains four untitled English poems – 20th-century editors named them Pearl, Cleanness, Patience and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight – written in the alliterative style in a dialect of the West Midlands. The first and last of these poems are among the greatest poetic works written in Middle English. The author is unknown, the patron is unknown, the original owners of the manuscript are unknown. All we do know is that Cotton acquired the volume from another antiquary, Henry Savile, in the late 16th century. It contains twelve bizarre illustrations, added by another anonymous individual some time after the texts were completed. The Pearl Manuscript, as it is usually called, is the only surviving anthology of alliterative poetry, and the sole exemplar of the poems it contains.

There is no getting around the weirdness. We don’t really know what it is or what it was for. In his new study of the manuscript, Arthur Bahr embraces the mystery, spiritedly chasing after a book that will never let us catch up. He suggests that it is ‘a pedagogical compilation’, cleverly designed to provoke readers into reflecting on the limits and possibilities of meaning-making itself. It is not ineffable but ‘supereffable’, proliferating interpretations over the centuries. He has spent years wrestling with the damn thing and is still deeply in love with it: the book is dedicated ‘to the makers of the Pearl Manuscript’.

In Pearl, the narrator is beset with grief for a two-year-old child, his precious Pearl (the Latin for ‘pearl’ is margarita, leading many commentators to assume that the child’s name was Margery or Margaret). He can’t even bring himself to say that she was his daughter, just that she was closer ‘than aunt or niece’. He is obsessed with his loss and has come to visit her grave. ‘Allas! I leste hyr in on erbere [a grassy plot]/My privy perle withouten spotte.’ The burial mound is covered with aromatic flowers and he can’t avoid the thought that their sweet scents have sprung from her mouldering body. Overcome by sadness and the odours of the flowers, he falls into a reverie, waking to find himself in paradise. There, just across a stream, he spies a beautiful girl: ‘I knew hyr wel, I hade sen hyr ere.’ He is overcome with joy at seeing his Pearl again, but feels more intensely than ever the pain of their remaining apart. The maiden rebukes him on both counts: he can’t stay in paradise, and in any case, he is foolish for grieving something so fleeting as human life, compared to the everlasting joy of heaven.

The dreamer is stubborn in his sorrow. He can’t believe that heavenly joy will compensate for his grief. The maiden rehearses the parable of the workers in the vineyard: the ‘grace of God is gret inoghe’, she insists. She promises to show him the New Jerusalem, so that he can see for himself. The city is described in sumptuous detail, drawing on the poet’s deep knowledge of the Apocalypse in the Book of Revelation: all gold and glass and gems, set into twelve layers of foundations, with twelve fruit trees that bear fruit twelve times a year. Seeing the maiden there together with a bloodied Jesus, the Lamb of God, the dreamer is driven crazy with the need to cross the stream and be with her: ‘My manez mynde to maddyng malte.’ But as soon as he tries to wade across, he is jerked out of the dream and away from his daughter. He is left stranded with his regret: ‘Hade I … ȝerned no more þen watȝ me geuen [had I yearned for no more than was me given]’ then he might have stayed longer, understood more of the mystery of divine grace. The poem ends: ‘Amen. Amen.’

The two much shorter poems that follow, Cleanness and Patience, are clever and neat, but turn on imaginative retellings of biblical parables – Belshazzar witnessing God’s ‘writing on the wall’, Jonah’s encounter with the whale – and don’t leave as much room for the exploration of feeling. But Gawain, the last and longest poem, is an epic that mirrors Pearl, enveloping the reader in the fear, courage and regret of its eponymous hero. Unlike the other three poems, Gawain is a romance, in the Arthurian tradition. As well as being learned in religious matters, the poet clearly had intimate experience of working in a great household and a keen eye for the trappings of honour. He describes appearances, glances across banquet tables, the way an impressive horse or fine jewellery draws the attention of the court. His fantasy has the texture of real life.

Gawain is also a gripping tale. The Yuletide feast at Camelot is interrupted by a mysterious and powerful Green Knight, who challenges one of the knights of the Round Table to deal him a free blow – on condition that he will be allowed to deal one in return a year later. Gawain volunteers and beheads the knight, only to watch him pick up his head and ride off, cheerfully promising to see him next Christmas. In one of the most moving sequences of the poem, the year melts away with the passage of the seasons, Gawain knowing all the while that he faces certain death. But he is steadfast, and true to his word, and sets off to meet his doom. His journey takes him into the wilderness – beyond north Wales and somewhere past the Wirral, the poet tells us – and to a mysterious castle. Gawain is warmly welcomed by the lord, who tells him that he is very close to the Green Chapel where the knight resides, and entreats him to stay for the Christmas festivities before journeying on. The lord shares the bounty of his daily hunt; meanwhile, the lady of the castle tries to seduce Gawain each morning. He honourably refuses to betray his host’s hospitality.

On the last day before he is due to face the knight, Gawain partially succumbs to the lady and accepts her girdle, which she claims will protect him from harm. He goes to meet the knight and extends his head to receive the blow, but at the last his courage fails: he flinches at the swing of the knight’s axe. The knight mocks him, and goes to swing again, but then the whole saga turns out to have been a ruse. The knight was his host at the castle: he had set up the test to see if Arthur’s knights were all they were cracked up to be. The Green Knight is truly impressed with Gawain, comparing him to other knights as a pearl to a dried pea. But since Gawain failed in his bravery and honour just a little, the knight scores his neck with his axe-blade to complete the bargain.

Gawain, however, is aghast. He goes back to Camelot and tells them the whole story, filled with shame at his failure of courage. To his surprise, Arthur and the knights are delighted with him, laughing off his confession and making the girdle into their badge of honour. The story ends at this ambiguous moment: Gawain lauded by his friends, but tormented by his sense of failure. Appended after the last line is the inscription HONI SOYT QUI MAL PENCE (‘shame on him who thinks evil of it’), the motto of the Order of the Garter, founded by Edward III in 1348. The meaning complicates; we are left to reflect on the nicked neck of blemished perfection.

Any book made by hand is unique, but the Pearl Manuscript’s claim to uniqueness is unparalleled: the manuscript appears never to have been copied or circulated, nor to have been known to anybody except the people who owned it. This is even stranger than it may at first seem. In the medieval world, all literary production depended on copying. Texts of many different genres – poems and songs, medical recipes, land conveyancing guides, prayers, charms, sermons – were in continual circulation, passed between friends and neighbours, sent back and forth with messengers, even posted publicly in marketplaces and on church doors. Someone with a bit of money might have a scribe copy their favourites into a blank volume, perhaps organised by theme; eager literati borrowed booklets or whole books and made copies for their own reference; scribal workshops turned out booklets of popular texts that could be purchased ‘off the shelf’ from stationers and bound into miscellanies. This combination of patronage, commerce and amateur enthusiasm drove the copying of vast numbers of texts and made them widely available even without the kind of ‘publication’ we are accustomed to.

Piers Plowman, the other major poetic work of the later-14th-century alliterative tradition, survives in more than fifty copies and fragments (it is very long, and not everyone wanted the whole thing). The poem appears to have been known in some form to John Ball, one of the leaders of the Great Rising of 1381. Copying always changed texts: scribes made deliberate corrections and accidental mistakes and often translated into their own dialects. Scholars no longer understand these changes as corruptions of a hypothetically pure original, but as critical responses to texts that were never truly stable. Texts produced in manuscript culture were open-ended and unfinished by their very nature. Piers Plowman survives in four major versions, one of which is believed to contain revisions made by the probable author, William Langland, trying to purge the text of its more radical political implications after 1381.

Amid all this busy copying, the Pearl Manuscript remained unknown – perhaps even hidden. In later generations, though it was recognised as ‘old’ and accordingly valuable, its vernacular strangeness was cause for disregard rather than inquiry. The librarians, with their precious Greek Bibles, just weren’t that interested. Cataloguing the Cottonian manuscripts in 1802, the director of the British Museum described the manuscript as a ‘poem in old English on religious and moral subjects; with some paintings rudely executed’. It was not until 1829, when Frederic Madden was truffling for Arthurian legends, that he realised there were four distinct poems in the manuscript; he lamented ‘the oblivion in which for so long a period such a remarkable composition should have remained’. He made a transcript, and at the behest of Walter Scott – Madden wrongly thought the manuscript and its author were Scottish – had it published by private subscription for the Bannatyne Club. Even after all this trouble, the reading public showed no enthusiasm. Madden remarked that one of the publishers he had approached, John Murray, ‘never even took the trouble to answer the letter!’

The Pearl Manuscript makes disciples of those who do discover it. Revisiting the poems, I found myself ensnared again by the language and frustrated by the impossibility of conveying their strange beauty. And yet the work is always slipping from your grasp. It shrinks from recognition, now more than ever. It is almost unapproachable as art, written in a language and an alphabet only distantly recognisable as English, expressing an alien thought-world shaped by the boar hunt and the biblical parable. There are also the strange illustrations to consider, some of which were imposed on leaves that had already been lined for text. These images, in the view of the manuscript’s modern editors, are ‘notably crude … presumably the work of an artist of limited talent’, yet the play of word and image is still essential to the reading experience. Bahr suggests that the manuscript is like a Book of Hours, intended to create a private multimedia devotional experience.

The first image, which precedes the text, shows the dreamer of Pearl sinking into his reverie, in a meadow surrounded by flowers, next to what is conventionally regarded as a pool. It’s true that the drawing lacks the refinement of the illuminations in the best literary manuscripts. Bahr accepts the interpretation that it was rather careless of the artist to have drawn flowers growing on the surface of the pool, but argues that the image is more sophisticated than it seems, and is in fact referring to depictions of the Fountain of Narcissus such as are found in some manuscripts of the Roman de la rose (a text explicitly cited in Cleanness). To my eyes, there is a much simpler explanation: the pool is in fact the maiden’s flowering burial mound, described in the opening scene of the poem. Not everything is a mystery.

The British Library, which houses the manuscript, has put tight restrictions on researchers’ access to it. Bahr, a professor at MIT, was allowed to view it only fleetingly in the latter stages of his research. He is good-humoured about it: ‘I had settled down slightly from the first rush of excitement and was better able to let the manuscript guide me towards a version of the suffraunce (‘‘sufferance, suffering, patience’’) that the poem [Patience] itself proposes: to submit to external contingency.’ But he also spotted something: parts of the parchment bear the traces of warty growths from the skin of the sheep that was killed to make it. These disfiguring marks ‘argue for accepting things as they come, which itself is an argument for accepting the poem’s conclusion’. The manuscript continues to radiate meaning.

Given the changeable nature of so much other 14th-century literature, the poems in the Pearl Manuscript are curiously perfect. Pearl is arranged into 101 twelve-line stanzas grouped into twenty sections of five, marked by a common refrain in the last line of each stanza; new sections begin by echoing the refrain of the preceding line. This concatenating pattern is mirrored in many other features of the poem, but also in the manuscript as a whole: all four poems end with lines that refract images and words from their openings. Form is a recurring motif: the perfect sphere of the pearl in Pearl, the ‘fayre formeȝ’ of Cleanness, the singular ‘poynt’ of Patience and the lengthy excursus on the pentangle – the hero’s chosen symbol – in Gawain. The poems delight in their own trickery. Pearl lays frequent emphasis on the number twelve; the poem itself is traditionally reckoned to be 1212 lines long. To get to this number, the poet had to add an extra stanza to one of the sections. He did so in the fifteenth, in which the refrain is ‘never þe les’. The third section of stanzas – fifteen minus three equalling twelve – has the refrain ‘ay more and more’. Gawain has a highly complex and variable metrical form, but it mirrors Pearl in also having 101 stanzas; it includes five ‘extra’ lines that extend beyond the last alliterative long line to make a total of 2530, or 2525 plus five. The pentangle again.

Just over thirty years ago, in a feat of astonishing scholarly acuity, Donna Crawford worked out that the thirteen (twelve plus one) decorated initials that adorn Cleanness at seemingly random intervals in the poem’s structure were in fact spaced out according to a series of complex geometrical formulations. The intervals between the first and fifth capital, and the fifth and the ninth, are both 344 lines; the interval between the first and seventh, and the seventh and the eleventh, are both 556 lines: 556:344 expresses the golden ratio. Once you spot this, patterns abound in the intervals, making a series of symmetries. Crawford thought it odd that the poem is 1812 lines long: had the poet left off at 1800, the many geometries could have been aligned to produce a perfect rectangle of 1800 x 900 (the sum of 344 and 556). But had the poem been geometrically ‘perfect’, the intervals of the lines would not have added up to produce the geometries in the first place.

There is a fine line between genius and insanity. For nearly two hundred years, literary scholars have been driven out of their wits trying to torture more information from this small, inexplicable manuscript. Cotton Nero A.x has been poked and prodded and multi-spectrum-imaged. The patterns in the poems made them a target for quantitative analysis as early as 1930, when J.P. Oakden (with the ‘assistance’ of Elizabeth Innes – much of the hard graft of early computational work in English literature was done by women) attempted to calculate the frequency of various forms of alliteration across a raft of Middle English poetry. Oakden found that 63.7 per cent of Pearl’s lines alliterate, and that the poet violated the ‘laws of stress’ more frequently than most of his contemporaries.

One poor sucker devoted years of his life to measuring lexical frequency in Pearl in order to prove statistically that the other poems had not been written by the same poet; then a few years later two scholars coded a programme to count the syllables between each alliterating word in order to prove that he was wrong (of course he was). It’s painful to think of the hours devoted to these obsessive games, and the tissue of flimsy associations they have generated. Another anonymous alliterative poem that survives in a later manuscript has the name ‘Massey’ written in the margin. If we match this with the name ‘Hugo de’, written in a margin of the Pearl Manuscript, then perhaps the poems were written by a man called Hugo de Massey! And if you change the spelling of his surname to ‘Masci’, then the numerical value of the letters adds up to 101. Coincidence?

Medieval literary scholarship has always had to be historicist, simply to understand what its texts are talking about and what they’re trying to do. It is interesting and perhaps useful to know that the lovely compound word ‘luf-daungere’ (something like ‘lovesickness’), which appears in the first stanza of Pearl, is otherwise unattested in Middle English, and that the scribe’s handwriting looks self-consciously archaic by the standards of the late 14th century. But no amount of knowledge about medieval literary culture can make the Pearl Manuscript tell us what it means. Everyone has to speculate at some point. There is no textual evidence that the maiden in Pearl was ‘really’ called Margery, or, if we’re being strict, that she was the daughter of the narrator. These are reasonable deductions that have hardened into conventions. And yet the fussy, ferreting work of making context for the poems can become an end in itself, a quest for certainty which fails to see that, on some level, the manuscript was designed as a trick.

Bahr’s book is part of a recent wave of literary scholarship that focuses on the material and formal qualities of texts as a means of generating new readings. Confronted with some lacuna in the manuscript, Bahr refuses to beat a retreat to context or scepticism: ‘We can choose instead to delight.’ He is ready for the charge that it is anachronistic to accord contemporary aesthetic responses the same explanatory weight as those of a hypothesised medieval audience, since this is a vision of criticism where the goal is not to decode texts, but to expand them, to make them mean more through each new reading – ‘ay more and more’. Despite the deep learning on show, it can sometimes stretch one’s suffraunce. If everything in the manuscript can radiate meaning – from the warty growths to the punctuation marks to the British Museum insignia stamped on the opening folio – regardless of whether the poet or the manuscript makers themselves attached any meaning to it, then the risk is of magnifying trivialities. But gradually I was won over. Against the pseudo-certainties of historicism, Bahr’s speculative readings are compelling precisely because they admit the essential mystery of the manuscript, rather than trying to explain it away.

Bahr’s looser approach brings interpretative rewards, too. The ‘fact’ that there are 1212 lines in Pearl actually depends on counting a ‘missing line’ in one of the stanzas of the eighth section. This is the only place in the poem where the tight ababababbcbc rhyme scheme is broken, and none of the other poems in the manuscript omits text in this way. The idea that there is a ‘missing’ line has become scholarly convention: in the very careful standard edition it is marked with asterisks. Bahr suggests that the line is not ‘missing’ but was deliberately omitted by the poet. The caesura certainly comes at a critical moment in the poem, when the dreamer begins to chafe at the maiden’s descriptions of divine grace. Everyone in heaven, she says, is like a queen or king; each soul is a limb of Christ. The dreamer argues that this is arrogance bordering on heresy:

Cortaysé, quoþ I, I leve
And charyté grete, be yow among;
Bot my speche þat yow ne greve
* missing line *
þyself in heven over hy þou heve
To make þe quen þat watz so ȝonge

[‘Courtesy,’ I said, ‘and great charity
Are among you, I believe, but –
I hope my language does not grieve you –
* missing line *
You raise yourself too high in heaven
To make yourself queen, who was so young.’]

The interruption comes just as the dreamer seems to take a beat, judging the maiden’s reaction to his bold remark. Our eyes blink open to see a poet standing before us, asking pardon for his audacity; the poem breaks its perfect form precisely at the moment that the arrogation of divine perfection is held open to question. The symmetries that appear through the poems, Bahr argues, revel in ‘an aesthetics of anti-exactness’. We will never find out what perfection is, whether earthly beauty must embrace its own inadequacy. The poet asks us to live in the space between the two.