A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien, First Edition. Edited by Stuart D. Lee.© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Tolkien as Editor

Tom Shippey

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As far as we know, it was never in Tolkien’s mind to write a critical monograph, a work of literary criticism or literary history such as W. P. Ker’s Epic and Romance (1897) or H. M. Chadwick’s The Heroic Age (1912). Tolkien would have been the ideal author for an account (none has ever been written) of the medieval literature of his favorite counties in the West Midlands, but the thought seems not to have occurred to him. Such critical articles as he did write are mostly either discussions of single words and phrases, or else responses to special invitations: both categories are care-fully discussed by Michael Drout (2007, 115–120, 134–145). For whatever reason, however, Tolkien’s conception of his professional role centered, not on criticism and interpretation, but on editing, with translation as a more personal by-product of his editorial work.

In the modern academic world, editing is often regarded as a low-prestige occupa-tion, not requiring the literary skills for a successful monograph. Tolkien would not have agreed. He might well have replied that mere critics can side-step difficult places, especially in ancient texts in little-known languages. Editors, however, especially if they are also glossators, have to come to a conclusion about the meaning of every word. And it is only through this that one may hope – to use Tolkien and Gordon’s phrase – to come to “an appreciation [of a text] as far as possible of the sort which its author may be supposed to have desired” (SGGK v). Editing is the foundation, the most important part of bringing ancient works and forgotten authors back to life. All the rest is merely superstructure.

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Tolkien accordingly committed himself to 11 editorial projects during his profes-sional career, which are dealt with individually below. One has to admit that his success rate in these endeavors was not high. Two of the 11 appeared only posthu-mously (Exodus and Finn and Hengest). Two more had only a limited aim and limited circulation (see Tolkien 2004b, 2008c, and 2008d). Two were completed and pub-lished under the names of E. V. Gordon (1953) and his widow Ida L. Gordon (1960). A further two proved abortive. Although Tolkien worked on them, sometimes for years, and may have come close to completion on both (see Lee 2009 and further comment below), both projects were abandoned and his work on both appeared to be lost (once again, see further comment below). Of the remaining three, although Tolk-ien’s edition of an important manuscript of Ancrene Wisse was awaited for over 30 years, when it did appear in 1962 (AW) it proved an anti-climax.

The bright spot in the list is certainly the 1925 joint edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, produced in collaboration with Tolkien’s Leeds colleague E. V. Gordon (SGGK). Although Sir Gawain had been edited previously, it remained little known. Tolkien and Gordon’s edition, by contrast, immediately made what many would call the greatest English poem of the Middle Ages accessible to generations of students. Although there have been several later editions, Tolkien and Gordon’s, updated by Tolkien’s Oxford successor Norman Davis in 1967, is still widely used. One may well think that it was this edition which clinched Tolkien’s election to the Chair of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford the year it was published (see ch. 1). At that point, in 1925, Tolkien, rather than his former tutor Kenneth Sisam, appeared to be the up-and-coming young man of English philological studies.

This was a striking reversal, given that the first of Tolkien’s 11 editorial projects had been A Middle English Vocabulary, printed separately in 1922, but originally intended to be (as it eventually became) the “Glossary” to the texts edited by Sisam for his 1921 anthology, or “Reader,” Fourteenth Century Verse and Prose.1 It was the graduate assistant of 1919, however, who became the Oxford Professor of 1925. Nevertheless, the seeds of much trouble might well be seen in this first collaboration. It is obvious that a “Reader,” a selection of texts to be used by undergraduates, is not much use without a glossary, but that is what Oxford University Press initially had to publish, because of Tolkien’s delay in delivering the work he had been assigned. Late or non-delivery was to become a pattern. It was especially infuriating to Sisam, who had been passed over for his former pupil, and who then, as an employee of Oxford University Press, had to deal for many years with Tolkien’s missed deadlines and complex excuses. His annoyance was expressed in several letters, and it was shared.2 The ill-feeling created no doubt had a part in making Tolkien unpopular among sections of the Oxford community, an unpopularity of which he was himself aware.3

One has to ask, rather bluntly, what was Tolkien’s problem? What were his inten-tions? And, with rather more discrimination, and some hope of answering the ques-tions just raised, what accounts for his very different editorial practices in those works which he did complete?

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The Task of a Glossator

Much can be deduced from the “Note” with which Tolkien prefaced his Middle English Vocabulary (MEV).4 It should be said first that the whole point of Sisam’s “Reader” was to introduce undergraduate students to as wide a range of Middle English texts as possible. There was no such thing as Standard English in the fourteenth century, and dialect divisions were far deeper than in later periods. Even common pronouns like “she” and “them” might appear, for instance, as “ho” or “hem.” An undergraduate reading any of Sisam’s 17 different texts, then, might be looking up different forms of the same word again and again.

Tolkien’s MEV dealt with this by coding word-meanings to Sisam’s texts by item and line number. Some words appeared in only one text. Thus the entry for “gryndel” (which occurred only in Sir Gawain, text no. 5 in Sisam), read:

Gryndel, adj. wrathful, V 270; Gryndelly, adv. wrathfully, V 231. [? Back-formation from *grindlaik (gryndellayk Sir Gaw. 312), O[ld] N[orse] grimmd + leik-r; cf. ON grimm-leikr.]

The entry not only gave the meaning of the word, it also suggested a derivation from one of the languages which contributed to or provided evidence for Middle English (Old English, Old Norse, Old French, Middle Dutch, etc.). In this way the student was also given some sense of the developing history of the language.

But while gryndel was a hard word in one way (not found in modern English), it was an easy one in another sense, for it occurred only twice in the “Reader.” How should one deal with far more common words, words still familiar? Tolkien expressed his conviction very firmly in his prefatory “Note” (unpaginated):

This glossary does not aim at completeness, and is not primarily a glossary of rare or ‘hard’ words. A good working knowledge of Middle English depends less on the pos-session of an abstruse vocabulary than on familiarity with the ordinary machinery of expression – with the precise forms and meanings that common words may assume; with the uses of such innocent-looking little words as the prepositions of and for; with idiomatic phrases . . . These are the features of the language which an English reader is predisposed to pass over . . . [So] I have given exceptionally full treatment to what may be called the backbone of the language.

It is, as always, hard to argue with Tolkien, but sometimes the effort of resisting the argumentative flow has to be made. Peter Gilliver, Jeremy Marshall, and Edmund Weiner, claiming that the charge of “dilatoriness” leveled against Tolkien is in this case “entirely mistaken,” note that Tolkien’s glossary contains some 4740 entries, nearly 6800 definitions, almost 15,000 text references, “every one of which would have to be individually identified,” and 1900 cross-references (2006, 35). In those pre-computer days, it must have taken a lot of index cards.

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So much is true. But what happens if one moves away from words like, for instance, “Fairi, -y, Feyré, Faierie (XII), n. faery. Fairyland .  .  .” – seven citations from two different texts, with an alternative meaning “magic” – to a word like “Ȝe, pron. 2 pl. nom. you .  .  .”? For this Tolkien gives 35 citations to most of Sisam’s texts, taking up 24 close-set half-lines (the “Glossary” was printed in double columns). There is potentially valuable information in the remark about differentiation from þou, but just the same, few students would have needed to recognize that “ȝe = ye = you” more than once. The entry on Do(n), Doo makes the point even more clearly: 64 half-lines, ending with the note that the word derives from Old English dón. Nearly all of this is obvious. It is true that idioms might catch one out. Tolkien notes that ded come means “fetched” (not “did come”), that I haue at do means “I have something to do.” Especially useful (and explaining his remark about “innocent-looking” preposi-tions) is his comment, under Ȝou, that ȝou to means “for yourselves”: so that John Ball’s warning to the rebellious peasants of Essex, loke schappe ȝou to on heued, and no mo means “see you set up one chief for yourselves and no more.” These are exceptions, however. Most uses of these common words needed only one translation plus much more selective citation.5 My guess is that in its many decades of use, a high propor-tion of Tolkien’s thousands of text references have never been looked at once.

Tolkien may or may not have been dilatory, but his own self-accusation was that he was a “niggler,” someone who spends (wastes) time on unnecessary detail. This was the problem with his next follow-up project, the disastrous “Clarendon Chaucer.” The idea here was simple: to provide an anthology of selections from Chaucer for use in schools, along the lines of Fourteenth Century Verse and Prose, with no more introduction and annotation than would enable the works to be read in Middle English. Sisam’s view was that the texts would be taken from W. W. Skeat’s already existing Oxford edition, so they would require no work at all. The notes would be explanatory, not scholarly. What we thought we knew of the sad results has been set out by Christina Scull and Wayne Hammond, rather defensively (Reader’s Guide 153–156), and more neutrally by Gilliver (2008, 64–70), but in brief Tolkien was coopted into the project as glossator in 1922; was thought by Sisam to have given up in 1924; continued to receive deadlines and letters from the Press for many years; and eventually pulled out in 1951, offering his notes to anyone who could use them, after which (as far as anyone knew) they disappeared. But while this present volume was in preparation, and thanks to the persistence of John M. Bowers, all Tolkien’s materials for this project have been rediscovered: page proofs corrected by Tolkien, notes by Tolkien, proofs of Tolkien’s glossary and notes on language, and testimonials for the “Introduction” by Tolkien’s co-editor George Gordon. Further search by Peter Gilliver uncovered George Gordon’s long, handwritten “Introduction” itself.6

Much of this material will no doubt eventually be published, but it will now inevitably function as a coda to Tolkien studies, not, as intended, a stimulus to Chaucer studies. Without being unduly censorious, one has to concede that Tolkien could have handled the project better. Clarendon successfully published several school editions of Chaucer tales without Tolkien’s involvement, two of them from Sisam in

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1923 and 1927, while in 1979 Norman Davis once again continued Tolkien’s work by bringing out his Chaucer Glossary. It is hard to resist Gilliver’s still-valid conclusion that “when Tolkien started to write, he couldn’t help writing about what he thought was worth writing about, rather than writing what he had been asked to write” (2008, 70).

While this was proceeding, Tolkien was working on the edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, not a selection but the whole poem, and this time he had what seems to have been an ideal collaborator in E. V. Gordon, described by Tolkien as “an indus-trious little devil” (see Anderson 2003). Whatever the relationship between the two men (see ch. 1), they did succeed in driving the project to a successful completion. It is thought that the division of labor was for Gordon to provide the bulk of the explana-tory notes, and probably of the “Introduction,” while Tolkien took care of establishing the text, providing (once again) the glossary, and probably writing the commentary on the poem’s language.7 These latter tasks were ideally suited to Tolkien’s talents; they were in some respects easy, in others engagingly challenging.

Establishing the text cannot have given Tolkien much difficulty. Sir Gawain exists in only one manuscript, so different readings did not have to be checked and decided between. The manuscript was written by a scribe who seems to have been close to the poet in time and space, and so to have understood the poem and the dialect of the poem. Tolkien made about 170 corrections to the poem’s 2530 lines, including some added in reprints after 1925, but the majority are trivial, doing no more than correcting slips of the pen. So, in line 629 emdeleȝ was altered to endeleȝ, “endless”; in lines 705 and 930 clapel and claplayneȝ were corrected to chapel, chaplayneȝ; doublets like þy þy in line 2247 and he he in line 2305 were reduced to þy and he. Sometimes a larger change was indicated by a failure to maintain alliteration: at line 958 the scribe wrote that the old lady, Morgan le Fay, was Chymbled ouer hir blake chyn with mylkquyte vayles, but this gives only two alliterating syllables, not three, and Tolkien emended to chalkquyte. Similarly he corrected the in-context meaningless tag in erde, in line 881, to inurnde, “adorned.” Elsewhere Tolkien straightened out some confu-sions: the man who copied the poem seems, not unreasonably, to have been deceived several times by the scenes of marked gender-reversal, with the large and bearded host kissing Gawain publicly, while the beautiful hostess makes unladylike sexual advances to him privately. In lines 1389, 1770, 1872, Tolkien changed ho, “she,” to he, prynce to pryncece, and conversely he to ho, thus saving the joke each time.

Even these brief examples, however, show also the difficult part of Tolkien’s assign-ment. Chymbled is not a common word. Tolkien’s glossary entry, which follows pre-cisely the format of his 1922 MEV, reads “chymbled, pp. bound, wrapped up, 958. [Cf. ON. kimbla.]” By contrast *inurnde is treated as a variant form of enn(o)urned, with three line references and three meanings offered, while the word originates, Tolkien suggested, from “OFr. aourner, with altered prefix.” One of the charms of the poem has been, ever since Tolkien and Gordon brought it back into English cultural life, its mixture of high-status French words, often to do with dress, or armor, or the aristocratic sports of hunting and flirtation, with words which (if they survived) would

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now be lower-class Northernisms excluded from Standard English and often derived from Norse:8 words like snart, “bitterly,” from Old Norse snarr + neuter ending, or snitered, “came shivering down, 2003. Cf. Norw[egian] dial[ect] snitra, shiver with cold.” The poet seems to have had no sense of the “cultural cringe” with respect to French found in the fourteenth century as in the twentieth; he used French, Norse, and English words just as he found them convenient. As he would do with Ancrene Wisse, Tolkien very much appreciated such signs that gentility could still be a native quality, had not been entirely erased by the Norman Conquest and the imposition of a French ruling class.

One final advantage for Tolkien was that while the poem’s vocabulary was “rich . . . approximately as many distinct individual words as there are lines in the poem: a new word for every line,” there was no call for him to save space. He could declare – in direct contrast with his “Note” to the 1922 MEV – that “In the Glossary complete-ness is aimed at” (SGGK 133). He could look at every word and inject all his linguistic learning into the etymological derivations. For this generations of students and schol-ars have been grateful.

False Starts and Dialect Studies

The natural follow-up to this success would have been an edition of the poem Pearl, found in the same manuscript as Sir Gawain, and surely written by the same man. Tolkien’s admiration for the poem was signaled by his 1924 poem “The Nameless Land” (published in 1927), which imitates the otherwise unique meter and stanzaic structure of Pearl, and also draws on its vision of a strange paradisaical land. We do not exactly know what went wrong. While Gordon and Tolkien remained in contact, after Tolkien’s move to Oxford they were no longer in daily contact, which Tolkien seems to have needed; and Gordon died young in 1938. The edition did appear, under E. V. Gordon’s name, in 1953. In it Gordon’s widow Ida states that it was Tolkien’s idea, once “he found himself unable to give sufficient time to it,” that Gordon “should continue the work alone. This he did, and at the time of his death in 1938 the edition was complete.” Publication was delayed, however, and when it eventually appeared 15 years later Ida Gordon had made “extensive alterations . . . considerable rewriting.” She adds on the same page: “My warmest thanks must go to Professor Tolkien, who had the original typescript for some time and added valuable notes and corrections; he has also responded generously to queries” (Gordon 1953, iii).

Further acts of generosity by Tolkien will be noted below, but one wonders quite what was meant by “for some time.” Years? A decade? Be that as it may, it is no longer usually possible to separate out Tolkien’s contribution from that of E. V. or Ida L. Gordon, although pp. xi–xix of the 1953 “Introduction,” on the poem’s “Form and Purpose,” were reprinted as Tolkien’s work alone in the “Introduction” to his 1975 volume of translations (see Tolkien 1995d). I have suggested elsewhere that the long note on line 115, stroþe-men, sounds very Tolkienian (Shippey 2000, 204), as do several

Tolkien as Editor 47

detailed notes on Northern and other dialect forms, see those on lines 51, 107, 358, 609–610, etc., but this can only be speculation.

Another project associated with the Gordons was to provide a joint edition of two Old English poems, The Wanderer and The Seafarer, found close together in the Exeter Book, one of the most important manuscripts of Old English poetry. It would be a joint project, but Tolkien would take the lead role for The Wanderer and Gordon for The Seafarer. Both poems were already well known, for they had been printed in Henry Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Reader (many editions from 1876), and were staples of the Oxford English course, partly because they appealed directly even to a modern taste (see chs. 2 and 15). The poems are, however, extremely difficult lexically and grammatically. Tolkien’s projected edition might then have been original and valuable if it had appeared in the 1930s. It is thought that Tolkien was close to finishing it, and may have sent his materials to Gordon, but if so, they have disappeared (Anderson 2003, 19). His extensive unpublished notes on the poem survive, but as Stuart Lee com-ments, “Simply collating these does not an edition make” (2009, 197). The poem continued to be personally important to him. Lee notes his reading of five lines from it at the close of his 1959 “Valedictory Address” to Oxford; the same lines formed a model for the Rohirric poem quoted by Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings (see also ch. 12).

The Seafarer was also deeply significant personally to Tolkien. The seven lines of Old English verse in Lost Road (84) are a collage of Seafarer lines, and Ælfwine’s five Old English lines are also reminiscent of the poem (Lost Road 44, 103, 203). As with Pearl, an edition of The Seafarer did eventually appear, completed by Ida Gordon in 1960. This time, however, she noted that while her “first intention” had been “to bring into final form” the “uncompleted draft” of the joint edition of both poems, matters changed so quickly that in the end she decided only to edit The Seafarer and to revise it much more thoroughly. Significantly, she published this edition under her own name, not her husband’s. She noted that her edition “incorporates much of the original material, esp. in the Notes,” and thanked Tolkien “for some notes given to me with his usual generosity” (Ida L. Gordon 1960, vii). Her heavy revision has however left no clear trace of Tolkien’s influence: unless it be the notes on Anglian/Mercian forms for words in lines 52 and 69, close to the focus of Tolkien’s personal interest.

In contrast with these abortive collaborative projects, in 1929 Tolkien did make a solo breakthrough in academic studies with his article on two early medieval texts, Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiðhad. This was in effect a statement about dialect purity (see also ch. 16). What Tolkien had noticed, and then proved to the hilt, was that two manuscripts, one of Ancrene Wisse and one of Hali Meiðhad (and several associated female saints’ lives), were written in exactly the same dialect but in different handwrit-ing. In medieval conditions, this could not have come about by accident or coinci-dence. The two scribes had been taught to write the same way. There was, then, even in the era of Norman-French dominance, a holdout area of England where English was still not just spoken, but written, and written as taught in a school of some kind. This holdout area – one has to say, a model for “the Shire” – was moreover in the

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West Midlands, very close to what Tolkien regarded as home, and was linguistically continuous with Old English from the same area. All this was, for Tolkien, particularly exciting, personally but also philologically: for if there was one thing which got phi-lologists of Tolkien’s time excited, it was a manuscript which gave a form of one particular dialect, preferably written by the author himself, but in this unique case copied out by scribes using a fixed form of what might very well have been the authors’ dialect as well – that fixed form being labeled, by Tolkien, as “AB language” (see further Zettersten 2006).

Tolkien’s article led the EETS to establish as a priority editions of the many manu-scripts of the Ancrene Riwle, or “Rule for Anchoresses,” which in Tolkien’s manuscript was more accurately called Ancrene Wisse, “Guide for Anchoresses.” Remarkably, this English work had been translated into both Latin and French – translations then nearly always went the other way – and two editions of such versions appeared from the EETS in 1944. English texts appeared in 1952, 1954, and 1956, with another French one in 1958.9 Tolkien’s edition (AW) did not appear, however, until 1962, 33 years after his initial breakthrough; and when it did appear it was out of line with EETS policy. With just one exception, all other editions in this series of texts, includ-ing six more published after 1962, contain introductions by the editors. Tolkien’s has only a brief “Preparatory Note,” with a ten-page “Introduction” by N. P. Ker. Why did Tolkien not publish the results of what must have been by this time his extensive study of the manuscript and its language? The next EETS edition of the Riwle, E. J. Dobson’s 1972 edition of what he thought (disagreeing with Tolkien) was probably the oldest copy of the work, has an editorial introduction 165 pages long. Why did Tolkien not produce something on a similar scale?

One might say, “because he was writing The Lord of the Rings,” and to that there is no answer. Tolkien was also, however, “niggling” again. In his “Prefatory Note” to the 1962 edition he states that, “Owing to the regularity of the hand it has been possible to preserve the lineation of the manuscript” (AW vi). In other words, Tolkien’s printed edition follows the manuscript line by line. The textual notes at the bottom of each page are moreover all but entirely concerned with detail about initials, under-linings, capital letters, marginalia. There are virtually no emendations or corrections in what is a long text, far longer than Sir Gawain. Tolkien clearly thought that this particular scribe knew what he was doing, so that his work was best left alone; while he also wanted to come as close as he could to reproducing in print the appearance of his manuscript. The EETS did not agree with him. Tolkien was creating a lot of extra work, not only for himself. Scull and Hammond’s long account of the to-and-fro of correspondence (Reader’s Guide 44–49) takes Tolkien’s part and claims that his arguments were “strongly worded, eloquent and logical” (47), but as said above one sometimes has to dig in one’s heels against Tolkien’s argumentative tide. His letters of 1936 and 1958, defending line-by-line transcription, could well have been answered – had Tolkien not been an Oxford Professor.

This is exactly what did soon happen, with reference to Tolkien’s hitherto unchal-lenged 1929 opinions. Just after Tolkien’s edition came out, Angus McIntosh (1963)

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tacitly dismissed Tolkien’s views on the importance of dialect purity, while in 1986 McIntosh quoted Tolkien’s 1929 paper at some length and, respectfully but firmly, answered its claims point by point.10 That is the way academic study is supposed to work, but Tolkien would have had more academic impact if he had produced his edition earlier, without unnecessary detail, and with a substantial supporting appara-tus, as found for instance in G. T. Shepherd’s partial edition of the same manuscript (1959).

Possibly, however, such a supporting apparatus has been hidden from us by Tolk-ien’s characteristic “generosity,” mentioned twice above. In 1936 one of his graduate students, Simonne d’Ardenne, brought out an edition of one of the female saints’ lives written in “AB language” and from the same manuscript as Hali Meiðhad. This is, Gordon wrote in his review, “the ideal treatment of a Middle English text” (1937, 134). It contains text, translation, emended text, a complete account of “AB lan-guage,” a glossary, and etymological notes on many words. Although it was published first as her thesis by the University of Liège, so that her name alone appeared, as likewise in the subsequent EETS edition, d’Ardenne herself agreed that the edition was a joint product by herself and Tolkien.11 Gordon must have known this when he wrote his almost ecstatic review. Among the things he says which went to the heart of what Tolkien would have aimed at are: “The editor is above all a critic .  .  . who knows the right use of scholarship” (Gordon 1937, 134). He quotes d’Ardenne (or possibly Tolkien, see Drout 2007, 127–128) as declaring: “We can indeed get from AB a very good idea of what Anglo-Saxon would have become, had none of the inva-sions and dynastic changes of the preceding three centuries ever occurred” (1937, 134). Gordon went on to add, surely cheered on by Tolkien:

And it is a good form of language, neater, more careful, and weightier than the English we have now. It is the chief attraction of this group [of “AB” texts] that it preserves the pure tradition of Anglo-Saxon England. (135–136)

Gordon ended his review with the question, perhaps intended hopefully, “When can we look for more of such work?” Not, alas, from Tolkien. One should add that he no doubt also gave a great deal of assistance to another work by one of his graduate students, Mary Salu, who published a translation of Ancrene Wisse, based on the Cam-bridge manuscript, with a “Preface” by Tolkien which states his conviction that this was “possibly the oldest surviving copy” and made by a scribe “perfectly at home with the language.”12

Tolkien’s other two editorial projects of the 1930s were both also concerned with issues of dialect consistency. Chaucer’s The Reeve’s Tale is set in Trumpington near Cambridge, but has among its characters two Northern students, whose dialect forms part of the tale’s comedy (see also ch. 16). In 1931 Tolkien read a paper to the Philo-logical Society, printed in 1934, centered on the issue of dialect; while in July 1939 he recited his own version of the tale, which was issued as a pamphlet, as an Oxford

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“Summer Diversion,” in which the students’ dialect had been “corrected” to what Tolkien thought Chaucer had intended.13 One simple example of the dialect comedy is that one of the students says, of their college administrator, “Our manciple, I hope he wil be deed / swa werkis ay the wangis in his heed” (Tolkien 2008d, 177). In Southern English, the first line would be rude. In Northern English, however, hope just meant “suppose, expect”; werkis also did not mean “works” but “hurt,” for to the Northerners the -is verbal ending is a plural form. No-one knows now what wangis are: “back-teeth”? In his 1934 article Tolkien argued that only true philologists could appreciate the joke and with it Chaucer’s artistry; the “father of English literature” was on the side of “lang.” not “lit.” (see Tolkien 2008c). But the joke had been spoiled, Tolkien argued, by scribes who had not understood it and had replaced accurate dialect Northern features by more familiar Southernisms. Tolkien accordingly rewrote sec-tions of the tale with the aim of restoring philological accuracy, thus creating a kind of partial edition.

The changes, to a non-philological eye, are not substantial – the major one being that Tolkien omits a total of some 29 lines which describe or allude to the students’ sexual assaults on the miller’s wife and daughter, writing in or adapting a couple of lines to save rhyme. That apart, Tolkien deleted terminal -e endings which he thought would not have been pronounced, both in Chaucer’s own English and in the students’; marked those he thought would have been pronounced with ë; and often replaced y by i, assuming that the former is a mere spelling convention. One Northernism he marked more regularly than Chaucer was the use of long a, not rounded, as in Chau-cer’s English and ours, to o. Chaucer noted this as a characteristic Northernism, for early on in the students’ speech we have na swayn, meaning “no servant,” as well as ham (changed by Tolkien to haam) for “home.” But elsewhere Chaucer (or his scribes) forgot, so that we have in various places geen, neen, for “gone, none,” altered by Tolkien to gaan, naan. Tolkien also altered to to til (though not consistently, see line 174). He changed some verbal forms, so that are we dryve becomes er we dreuen; I wil becomes I sal; and man sal becomes man suld.

One standard test for Middle English dialect is present tense verb endings. John’s men sayth is clearly wrong, for -th endings are Southern, but is confirmed by the rhyme word fayth: Tolkien changed to by my fay . . . men say, though even that should argu-ably be sayis. He also kept clerkis sain, where the Midland -n ending is confirmed by the rhyme with swain. It was easier to be consistent over another standard test, chang-ing the Southern/Midland form hem to thaim. The past participle lorn was emended to lost at line 137 of Tolkien’s text, but retained two lines later, where lorn has to rhyme with corn. Simon Horobin (2001) has concluded that Tolkien was wrong to think that Chaucer was even aiming at complete consistency, though he also notes (2002) that Chaucer may have deliberately included forms designed to imitate the Reeve’s own Norfolk dialect. Tolkien was also wrong about the scribes, for while the scribes of some manuscripts “Southernized” Chaucer’s text, others “Northernized” it. The inconsistencies were probably original to Chaucer.

Tolkien as Editor 51

To end this section, Carl Hostetter’s exceptionally full reediting of Tolkien’s 1944 pamphlet edition of Sir Orfeo makes it possible to summarize the work relatively briefly (Tolkien 2004b). Though the poem has been preserved in three manuscripts, Hostetter shows that “Tolkien’s Middle English version .  .  . was based on Kenneth Sisam’s edition” in the “Reader” which Tolkien had glossed 20 years before. The germ of it may indeed have been a speculative note by Sisam in which he restored a number of cases of final -e, as belonging to an earlier form of English, thus improving the poem’s meter. In a brief “editorial note” Tolkien stated that the poem was originally composed “in the South-East of England (that is probably in Essex)” but had been “infected” by forms from other areas (Tolkien 2004b, 89, 88, 104). This differs only slightly from the conclusion of A. J. Bliss’s later detailed study, which is that the original dialect was that of Westminster-Middlesex (Bliss 1966, xx). Tolkien seems in fact to have made little effort to return the language of his edition to the suggested Essex origin. Though he thought that “the original appears to have used the old native form hye or he for sche and they (thai)” (Tolkien 2004b, 104) he did not reintroduce them to his text. Most of the 400+ alterations from Sisam’s text recorded by Hostetter are either: replacements of y by i (merely a spelling change); additions of final -e (as opposed to the frequent deletions in The Reeve’s Tale); or changes made for the sake of a more regular meter, though these are often justified by readings from the two manuscripts other than the one used as a base by Sisam, see lines 64, 180, 194, 419, etc. Tolkien’s mini-edition was a teaching text only, designed perhaps to make the poem slightly more accessible for the naval cadets who (for some reason) had been assigned to study it. Hostetter notes that Tolkien’s modern English translation was based on this Middle English version, citing several cases where the former agrees only with the latter, not with Sisam (Tolkien 2004b, 86–88). Both were probably written at the same time, in 1944.

Imaginative Reconstructions

The last two works to be considered are Tolkien’s edition of the Old English poem Exodus, and his edition of the Old English Finnsburg Fragment together with lines 1063–1159 of Beowulf, which give an elliptical account of the same event, the so-called “Finnsburg Episode.”. Both were published posthumously, Exodus being put together from Tolkien’s notes by Joan Turville-Petre, Finn and Hengest (FH) by A. J. Bliss.14 Though Tolkien never saw them into print himself, he worked on both projects for many years. Between 1928 and 1937 he gave six full lecture courses at Oxford on the problems of Finnsburg, coming out of retirement to give his lectures again in 1963. Tolkien started lecturing on Exodus even earlier, in 1926; in 1932 he mentioned in a letter that he would very much like “to tackle a proper edition” of it (Reader’s Guide 681). The posthumous editions preserve many years of thought.

52 Tom Shippey

They are also Tolkien’s most ambitious editions. In editing the text of Sir Gawain he made few changes, virtually none to the text of Ancrene Wisse. With the three Old English poems, however, he made scores of changes (especially to Exodus), amounting sometimes to rewrites. The reason for this different approach is obvious. Tolkien thought that the scribes of Sir Gawain and Ancrene Wisse were close to the authors in place and time, and understood the languages of the works they were copying. By contrast, Tolkien regarded it as established fact that Beowulf was written in “the age of Bede,” the early eighth century (see MC 20). But the one copy we have was made about the year 1000, nearly three centuries later: plenty of time for mistakes and misunderstandings to arise. He thought it likely that Exodus was of similar date (see Shippey 2000, 161–163). The case of the Finnsburg Fragment was even worse, for there we have no manuscript copy at all, only a transcript made by George Hickes some time before 1705, a time when knowledge of Old English had all but vanished: Hickes barely understood what he was writing. Tolkien accordingly treated all three works with great freedom, as well as learning and imagination – something which has not appealed to conservative scholars (see Reader’s Guide 681–682; Drout 2007, 124–125).

There is moreover an irony in the general lack of academic response to Finn and Hengest. The essence of Tolkien’s “Reconstruction” of the event recorded in the poems is that it was a historical event, remembered because it was an important one, part of the movement which brought the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes to Britain in the fifth century, and led to the creation of England. In 1936, however, Tolkien had argued so persuasively against taking Beowulf as a historical document that by the 1980s it had become an article of scholarly faith that it was useless as history. As remarked twice already, sometimes one has to dig in one’s heels against Tolkien’s argumentative flow, which (very obviously in 1936) may have had an immediate and personal motive – proclaiming creative autonomy for the writers of fantasy.

The fight at Finnsburg, nevertheless, tells the story in its two versions of a fight in Frisia, in which a group of Danes, or “Half-Danes,” are treacherously attacked at night by Frisians and Jutes, though it is the Jutes, in Beowulf, who are given the major part of the blame. What caused the attack, what the Jutes are doing in Frisia, what are the details of the deal eventually made between the Frisian king Finn and the surviving Danish leader Hengest – all these have been given multiple and con-tradictory solutions over the years. Tolkien’s solution, very briefly, was that there were Jutes on both sides, attackers and defenders. In World War II terms, Hengest (in English tradition, a Jute not a Dane) is what one might call a “collaborator Jute,” who has accepted the Danish take-over of Jutland. The treacherous attackers are “Free Jutes in exile,” taking shelter in Frisia while planning a come-back. Though these two groups meet on neutral territory, there is naturally bad blood between them. The vital event, Tolkien suggested – in the long “Glossary of Names” and the even longer “Textual Commentary” which formed main parts of his edition – was the death of Garulf recorded in the Fragment, for he was the last relic of the old Jutish royal dynasty.

Tolkien as Editor 53

Tolkien supported this view with many emendations. He thought the meter of the Fragment was so irregular that words and phrases had to be added to fill out defective lines: his version of the poem is three lines longer than anyone else’s. He added a line to Beowulf also, to deal with what seems a grammatical failure. His editing is often daring: in the Fragment he suggested the rare words hlencan and þindað for Hickes’s landa, windað. It is sometimes peremptory: after a bold rehandling of a difficult passage in the Episode, Tolkien wrote “I do not see the value of discussing any other view” (FH 98). As in 1936, one may sometimes suspect a personal motive. Tolkien suggested that the name of the Danish chief, Hnæf, would have been Hnefi in Old Norse, that this might be related to the form Hniflungar, and that this was the original form of what became the “Nibelungs,” in which case Hnefi “must once have been a figure of importance in legend” (FH 52). Tolkien also noted, however, that the name might have become the modern surname “Neave,” borne of course by his own Aunt Jane! So Tolkien was related, if remotely, to ancient heroes himself. Tolkien’s overall view of events is most easily recovered from the ten pages of text-and-translation and the four-page “Reconstruction” which close the edition. The whole story has also been told along strongly Tolkienian lines in a “young adult” novel, Hengest’s Tale (1966), by Jill Paton Walsh, who read English at Oxford, though apparently not when Tolkien was giving his Finnsburg lecture courses.15

When it came to Exodus Tolkien was even bolder (see also ch. 2). He swapped two sections in the poem over, so that lines 93–107 in the manuscript in his text follow lines 108–124: not his own idea, but bold nonetheless. Elsewhere he repeatedly altered words so that they became more foreboding, more suggestive of pre-Christian mythol-ogy. One example on which he had already expended great erudition was the Sigelwara land of line 69, which Tolkien emended in his text to Sigelwarena, and noted in his commentary could well be Sigelhearw(en)a, the land not of “the Sundwellers” but of the fire-demons. In line 46 most would read hergas on helle as “hellish armies,” but Tolkien thought the scribe had misread the whole line, writing in both “Hell” and “Heaven” because they were words he was familiar with; Tolkien saw the hergas as “heathen fanes” (as in modern place-names like Harrow), changed on helle to onheldon, “toppled,” and replaced heofon by heof, “lamentation.” At line 488 (487 in Tolkien) most editors see no need to change the word pað, meaning “path,” but Tolkien wrote “certainly an error” (Exodus 73), corrected to wað, noted that the Devil a bið on waðe, is always on the prowl, and translated “onrush.”

His most daring solution may have been at line 202, where the poet appears to be describing the Israelite dismay at the approach of the Egyptian army. The manuscript reads here wælnet weredon, which would ordinarily mean “deadly nets defended.” Defended what? And how is that dismaying? Could wælnet mean “battle-nets,” that is, mail shirts? Tolkien decided that the words did not make sense however they were glossed. Weredon was just wrong: read wyrgdon, from the rare verb wyrgan = Latin strangulare, and translate “deadly toils cut off escape” (24). As with the word wæl-ceasega, with its hints of “the necromantic practices of the female followers of Odinic magicians” (50), wyrgdon has a pagan history behind it.

54 Tom Shippey

This the eighth-century poet might well have known, living as he did not long after the peaceful overthrow of paganism in England. Nearly three centuries later, most of them filled with warfare against violently pagan Vikings, the manuscript scribe not only did not know but had every reason not to want to know. Tolkien valued the Exodus poem, then, both for its memories of a vanished mythology, and as a sign of the entirely successful triumph of Anglo-Saxon Christianity. A good idea of the effect of Tolkien’s changes can be gained by reading his translation of the poem, and then a more conservative translation such as S. A. J. Bradley’s (1982).

A final point is this. As is rare among editors, Tolkien habitually translated what he edited. He did it in the two editions just discussed, he did it also for Sir Gawain and Sir Orfeo, as also for Pearl, in SGPSO, and for poems whose translations are still unpublished (Beowulf and The Battle of Maldon among them). Tolkien saw this activity as an integral part of the editor’s task. If a glossator has to consider every word, a translator has to translate every line, every sentence. One may then think that the poem meant something different, but at least one knows what the translator thought it meant. Space forbids any consideration here of the aesthetic qualities of Tolkien’s translations (always into the same meter as the originals), but they can be a valuable guide to his editorial opinions. Translating, like glossing, keeps an editor honest.

1 See further Hammond and Anderson (1993, 1–2, 281–282).

2 See the 1924 and 1953 letters from Sisam quoted by Peter Gilliver (2008, 65–66, 69); Eugène Vinaver’s 1967 comment quoted in Anderson (2003, 24); Ida L. Gordon’s letter of 1982 likewise quoted by Anderson (2003, 16).

3 He hints at it in his 1944 story “Leaf by Niggle” (see Shippey, 2000, 265–273).

4 For further discussions of Tolkien’s work in Middle English see ch. 16.

5 Tolkien seems to have been aware of this, see his 1921 letter complaining about “recording forms that could be eliminated” quoted by Gilliver (2008, 64).

6 I owe this information to a private communica-tion from Dr Bowers, in which he also acknowl-edges the very material assistance given by the Oxford University Press archivist Martin Maw, and by Peter Gilliver.

7 Hammond and Anderson (1993, 285). Douglas Anderson kindly informs me (private com-munication) that the ultimate source for this

is an unpublished letter of 1967 from Tolkien to N. R. Ker.

8 Tolkien commented appreciatively on several such examples in his 1928 “Foreword” to Haigh, xiii–xviii.

9 Zettersten (2006, 18–19) lists 12 EETS edi-tions, to which one should add a thirteenth, published 2009.

10 McIntosh (1986, 30) quotes and answers Tolkien (1929, 111).

11 Scull and Hammond note several acknowl-edgements of the fact (Reader’s Guide 202).

12 Tolkien (1955a, v). Salu must presumably have had access to Tolkien’s then unpublished transcript to make her translation.

13 Both the 1934 paper and the 1939 pamphlet have now been reprinted in Tolkien Studies (see Tolkien 2008c and 2008d).

14 The two volumes are discussed more exten-sively than is possible here in Shippey (2007), 175–186.

15 Her maiden name, however, was Bliss. I do not know if she was related to Tolkien’s editor Alan Bliss.

Notes

Tolkien as Editor 55

References

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Bliss, A. J., ed. 1966. Sir Orfeo. 2nd edn. London: Oxford University Press.

Bradley, S. A. J., ed. and trans. 1982. Anglo-Saxon Poetry. London: Dent.

d’Ardenne, S. R. T. O., ed. 1936. Þe Liflade ant te Passiun of Seinte Iuliene. Liège. Reprinted in 1961 by EETS, Original Series 248. London: Oxford University Press.

Drout, Michael. 2007. “J. R. R. Tolkien’s Medieval Scholarship and its Significance.” Tolkien Studies, 4: 113–176.

Gilliver, Peter. 2008. “The Word as Leaf: Tolkien as Lexicographer and Philologist.” In Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings: Sources of Inspiration, edited by Stratford Caldecott and Thomas Honegger, 57–84. Zurich and Bern: Walking Tree Publish-ers. [Gilliver’s “Part 1” is 59–70.]

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Gordon, E. V., ed. 1953. Pearl. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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Horobin, Simon. 2001. “J. R. R. Tolkien as a Philologist: A Reconsideration of the North-ernisms in Chaucer’s Reeve’s Tale.” English Studies, 82: 97–105.

Horobin, Simon. 2002. “Chaucer’s Norfolk Reeve.” Neophilologus, 86: 609–612.

Lee, Stuart D. 2009. “J. R. R. Tolkien and The Wanderer: From Edition to Application.” Tolkien Studies, 6: 189–211.

McIntosh, Angus. 1963. “A New Approach to Middle English Dialectology.” English Studies, 44: 1–11.

McIntosh, Angus. 1986. “General Introduction.” In Angus McIntosh, M. L. Samuels, and Michael Benskin, A Linguistic Atlas of Later Middle English, vol. 1, 2–36. 4 vols. Aberdeen: Aber-deen University Press.

Shepherd, G. T., ed. 1959. Ancrene Wisse, Parts Six and Seven. London: Nelson.

Shippey, Tom. 2000. J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century. London: HarperCollins.

Shippey, Tom. 2007. “A Look at Exodus and Finn and Hengest.” In Roots and Branches: Selected Papers on Tolkien, 175–186. Zurich and Bern: Walking Tree Publishers.

Zettersten, Arne. 2006. “The AB Language Lives.” In The Lord of the Rings 1954–2004: Scholarship in Honor of Richard E. Blackwelder, edited by Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull, 13–24. Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press.