TOLKIEN’S EDITION OF ANCRENE WISSE – DELAYED BY THE SILMARILLION AND A PRINTERS’ STRIKE
TOLKIEN, John Ronald Reuel (editor) and Neil Ripley KER (introduction). Ancrene Wisse. The English Text of the Ancrene Riwle. Edited from MS. Corpus Christi College Cambridge 402. (Early English Text Society No 249. 1962 (for 1960)). London: Vivian Ridler at Oxford University Press for The Early English Text Society, 1962.
Octavo (219 x 138mm), pp. [2 (blank l.)], xviii, 222, [1 (imprint)], [1 (blank)], 8 (Early English Text Society titles). Half-tone frontispiece printed recto-and-verso with facsimiles. Original brown cloth, upper board lettered and with Early English Text Society device in gilt within blind-ruled frame, spine lettered and ruled in gilt, lower board with blind-ruled frame. (Extremities lightly rubbed and bumped, some very faint marking.) Provenance: price on half-title neatly cancelled in ink by [?]bookseller – later ownership signature on front free endpaper.
First edition, one of 3,000 copies. Ancrene Wisse, Tolkien’s edition of the source manuscript, MS Corpus Christi College Cambridge 402, was even longer in the making than ‘Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiðhad’ (1929), his seminal article on the subject. Tolkien is known to have mentioned the edition in correspondence as far back as 1936, and in a letter to Stanley Unwin of March 1945, he described the book as ‘all typed out’ – probably, as Hammond and Anderson conjecture, only referring to the MS text proper. In 1952 Tolkien called this his ‘overdue professional work, which he was attempting to finish in the midst of other writing and with The Lord of the Rings, soon to be published, distracting his attention’.
The years passed until ‘Robert Burchfield, […] the editorial secretary of the [Early English Text Society], “gently bullied” Tolkien until the typescript was submitted – which, in the event, was not merely a typescript, but included initial letters elegantly drawn by Tolkien. […] A printers’ strike prevented proofs from being sent to Tolkien until June 1960, when he was “in full tide of composition for the Silmarillion, and had lost the threads of the M[iddle] E[nglish] work” (letter to Rayner Unwin, 31 July 1960)’ (Hammond and Anderson). Further delays meant that Tolkien likely did not correct the final proofs until January 1962, and on ‘19 December 1962, in a letter to his son Michael, he reported that “my Ancrene Wisse … got between covers this week at last”’ (loc. cit.). Thus, entirely inadvertently, Ancrene Wisse was one of Tolkien’s few academic publication after 1940.
W.G. Hammond and D.A. Anderson, J.R.R. Tolkien, B25.
£150
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