He sent Burchfield the corrected proofs at last at the end of August.
On 11 October 1960 Burchfield sent Tolkien an introduction on palaeographical aspects of MS CCCC 402 that N.R. Ker had completed. One month later, Norman Davis lunched with Tolkien, and having judged that there was no prospect of anything further from him for the introduction, gave permission that this could now go to press. But Tolkien had merely been distracted by other business, and replied with six pages of comments on Ker’s text early in the new year; these were accommodated, though the introduction was already set in type. Tolkien now also decided to write a supplementary introduction, which in the event became only a preface. During 1961 he made further comments on what Ker had written, correcting a serious error, and he proceeded to revise proofs under pressure of reminders from Burchfield. His progress was slowed by fibrositis and arthritis, but also by the unexpected discovery of editorial alterations, largely to do with capitalization, that Ker had made to the transcription of the Cambridge manuscript before it was set in type. When Tolkien finally delivered corrected proofs on 23 January 1962 he objected strongly to these changes, which had been made without his knowledge or consent. Burchfield defended Ker’s actions, which had been done without consulting the editor for lack of time, but agreed that the finished book should follow Tolkien’s instructions.
Because there had been so many delays already, Tolkien was not shown the final proofs as further revised. He was not to know also that the Early English Text Society wished to have Ancrene Wisse in print in 1962 (it was published officially in December of that year; see further, Descriptive Bibliography B25) to coincide with the publication by George Allen & Unwin of a Festschrift in Tolkien’s honour (English and Medieval Studies Presented to J.R.R. Tolkien on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday), a mark of the esteem in which he was held by his colleagues. Burchfield himself was a contributor.
Reviewers of Tolkien’s Ancrene Wisse uniformly welcomed its appearance and noted its long gestation. It was greeted, however, with disagreement over its methods and manner of presentation, notably its retention of original line-endings, and some small errors were pointed out. Arne Zettersten in English Studies 47 (1966) noted ‘a certain change or even improvement in editorial matters’ relative to earlier editions of Ancrene Riwle texts published by EETS (p. 291). In 1976 Zettersten edited the Magdalene College, Cambridge manuscript of Ancrene Riwle (Pepys 2498); later he stated that Tolkien gave him ‘splendid advice’ in regard to this work (see Zettersten, ‘Discussing Language with J.R.R. Tolkien’, Lembas Extra (2007), p. 21).
Tom Shippey takes a firm stance against Tolkien’s approach to the Corpus Christi College manuscript in ‘Tolkien as Editor’, in A Companion to J.R.R. Tolkien, ed. Stuart D. Lee (2014). With only one exception, he notes, all of the EETS editions of Ancrene Riwle except Tolkien’s include introductions by their editor (the exception is R.M. Wilson’s edition, noted above). Shippey assigns Tolkien’s failure to provide an introduction in part to the time he devoted to The Lord of the Rings, but also to his ‘niggling’ – wasting time on unnecessary details – and to his insistence on line by line reproduction. Moreover, Tolkien’s ‘textual notes at the bottom of each page’ are
all but entirely concerned with detail about initials, underlinings, capital letters, marginalia. There are virtually no emendations or corrections in what is a long text. … 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 the manuscript. The EETS did not agree with him. Tolkien was creating a lot of extra work, not only for himself.
Shippey suggests that EETS might have resisted ‘Tolkien’s argumentative tide’, and that his views on line by line transcription ‘could well have been answered – had Tolkien not been an Oxford Professor’ (p. 48). Tolkien ‘would have had more academic impact if he had produced his edition earlier, without unnecessary detail, and with a substantial supporting apparatus’ (p. 49).
Useful introductions to Ancrene Riwle and related texts are Medieval English Prose for Women: Selections from the Katherine Group and Ancrene Wisse, ed. Bella Millett and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne (rev. edn. 1992), and Yoko Wada, ed., A Companion to Ancrene Wisse (2003). See also Arne Zettersten, ‘The AB Language Lives’ in The Lord of the Rings, 1954–2004: Scholarship in Honor of Richard E. Blackwelder, ed. Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull (2006); and ch. 16 (‘The AB Language: A Unique Discovery’) in Zettersten, J.R.R. Tolkien’s Double Worlds and Creative Process: Language and Life (2011).
Ancrene Wisse see Ancrene Riwle
Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiðhad. Essay, published in Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association 14 (1929), pp. 104–26. See further, Descriptive Bibliography B12.
SYNOPSIS
Tolkien argues that the language of Ancrene Wisse (Corpus Christi College, Cambridge MS 402, see *Ancrene Riwle) is ‘either a faithful transcript of some actual dialect of nearly unmixed descent [from Old English, unadulterated by the effects of the Norman conquest], or a “standard” language based on one’ (p. 106). It is self-consistent and individual, and ‘identical, even down to minute and therefore significant details, with the language of MS. Bodley 34’ (p. 107) which contains the texts of the *Katherine Group, Hali Meiðhad (an appreciation of ‘holy maidenhood’ or virginity) among them. (Tolkien’s essay may be a development of one he listed as forthcoming in his June 1925 application for the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, The Second Weak Conjugation in the Ancren Riwle and the Katherine-Group.)
Tolkien theorizes that ‘the (English) originals of these works were in [a common] language (AB), they both belonged to nearly the same time, one not far removed from that of the actual manuscripts’ under consideration, ‘and they both belonged to the same (small) area)’, which he localizes to Herefordshire (p. 114). ‘Language (AB)’, usually termed by others the ‘AB language’, is so called after the standard sigla for the two manuscripts in question.
To support his argument, Tolkien intended to provide ‘a sample of a minute comparison’ of the texts, but this proved ‘impossible of satisfactory accomplishment within a very little space’. Instead he analyzes the manuscripts in regard to their treatment of ‘the verbs belonging to the 3rd or “regular” weak class, descended from O[ld] E[nglish] verbs with infinitive in -ian, or conjugated on this model’ (p. 117).
CRITICISM
In ‘Tolkien as Editor’, in A Companion to J.R.R. Tolkien, ed. Stuart D. Lee (2014) Tom Shippey describes Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiðhad as
a breakthrough in academic studies. … What Tolkien had noticed, and then proved to the hilt, is that two manuscripts, one of the Ancrene Wisse and one of Hali Meiðhad (and several associated female saints’ lives), were written in exactly the same dialect but by different handwriting. In medieval conditions, this could not have come about by accident or coincidence. 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 … was moreover in the West Midlands, very close to what Tolkien regarded as home, and was linguistically continuous with Old English from the same area. [pp. 47–8]
In