SOURCE: Perryman, Judith. “Lore, Life, and Logic in The Owl and the Nightingale.” Dutch Quarterly Review of Anglo-American Letters 14, no. 2 (1984): 97-109.

In the following essay, Perryman explores the debate in The Owl and the Nightingale by focusing on the traditional characteristics associated with these birds, their respective methods of argumentation, and the poem's overall concern with contention, arbitration, and judgment.

The early thirteenth-century Middle English work The Owl and the Nightingale, the first of a number of bird debates in English, is an outstanding and interesting poem, none the less because there has been so much controversy about its meaning.¹ Though the interpretation of it may be troublesome, its humour and lively argument give it great appeal. The birds as they reveal themselves as characters are at once infuriating and likeable, cantankerous and restrained, timid, angry and exultant. They seem like squabbling children who are to be understood...