J.R.R. Tolkien’s translation of the medieval poem Pearl was titled Pearl.
Pearl is a late-fourteenth-century Middle English dream vision preserved in the same manuscript as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Tolkien translated both poems, but his Pearl translation was published posthumously in 1975 in the volume Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl and Sir Orfeo, edited by E. V. Gordon and Norman Davis.
The poem presents a grieving narrator who dreams of meeting a maiden across a symbolic river. Their dialogue explores loss, innocence, heavenly reward, and the limits of human understanding. Tolkien’s translation attempts to preserve the poem’s alliterative and stanzaic qualities while making its Middle English content accessible to modern readers.
A common mix-up is to identify Tolkien’s translation by the name of the collection or by Sir Gawain, the better-known companion text. Pearl is the specific title of the work he translated from Middle English.