Professor Edward Condren: On the Pearl Poet

Professor Edward Condren

English at UCLA

(Borrowed from UCLA, June 14, 2006)

By Googling, I located online an enquiry posed by Professor Condren on Drexel University's Math Forum back in June 1999 when he was researching the material that became his book. Here are some details that he provided on his interpretation of the entire manuscript of the Pearl Poet's four poems:

A unique fourteenth century manuscript, British Library Cotton Nero A.x., has four poems, two of which are the brilliant Pearl and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. It has always been thought to be a mere anthology, probably by the same author. My book argues that it is in fact a single artifact unified by the same mathematics that, from the Neo-Pythagoreans onward, have been held to demonstrate the unity of all creation. The line counts of the four poems are, respectively, 1212, 1812, 531, and 2531. This highly artful arrangement, minus the signature twelves in the first half and signature 31s (the tenth prime as the Middle Ages reckoned primes) in the second half, gives us two halves of 3000 lines each. More intriguing still, the two outer poems divided by the two medial poems give the Golden Section. The first poem, Pearl, has 20 sections of 5 stanzas each, with each stanza containing 12 rhyming lines. Moreover, the first line of each stanza replicates the last line of the preceding stanza, with the first line of the poem echoing the last line of the poem. It seems clear to me that this poem's 1212 lines create a verbal dodecahedron: 20 vertices; 12 faces; each face a five-sided pentagon. The pentagon, of course, is highly dependent on the phi ratio. The three remaining poems seem 2-D, rather than 3-D. In other words, the poet may have conceived them as the three inscribed planes. The first of these remaining three, Purity, is constructed almost entirely of phi-related sections which encode a five-pointed star -- another phi-dependent figure -- which happens to be the main symbol on Sir Gawain's shield. The next poem I haven't entirely cracked yet (hence my query about the size of the inscribed rectangles). It's a retelling of the story of Jonah. But its 5 sections have intriguing sizes: 60, 184, 60, 104, 123. When we remove the overages, which total 31 (4 + 4 + 23), we are left with two 60s, two 100s, and 180. This last is the radius of the circumscribed circle surrounding the five-pointed star laid out in Purity.

Obviously, this is technical stuff, and I haven't had time to delve into it beyond checking just enough to learn that the "Golden Section" and the "phi ratio" are two names for the same thing, the "Golden Ratio," which was known as the "Divine Proportion" in the Middle Ages. Assuming that the Pearl Poet really was encoding this into his poem, the question then becomes: What does it all mean?

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I presume that Condren tells us in his book. From the book description at Amazon, I infer that the Pearl Poet's manuscript of four poems is intended to reflect the cosmos, though what this means in its particulars would require my reading Condren's book, which I may well do