In the next few years he worked with various students, notably an Oxford B.Litt. candidate, *M.E. (Elaine) Griffiths, to prepare a partial transcription of MS CCCC 402, a nearly complete glossary, and an index. He also prepared a complete vocabulary and grammar of its language.
In late 1935 Tolkien was formally engaged by the Early English Text Society to edit MS CCCC 402 for publication, as part of a proposed series of editions of Ancrene Riwle texts. (For the history that follows, see also Chronology, especially entries from Autumn 1935, January 1936, 5 February 1956, and 30 March 1959 et passim.)
Almost at once Tolkien entered into a dispute with the governing committee of EETS as to whether the various manuscripts in the series should be transcribed line by line, exactly as written in the original text. The Committee argued that this approach was unnecessary and would take up too much space; a uniform page design was more important, for consistency and economy. Tolkien disagreed, in part because his transcription of MS CCCC 402, then much advanced, had been made line by line, and the thousands of references already in its glossary and index were keyed to folio and line in the manuscript, not to the typeset pages of the book planned by EETS. To alter these would have meant considerable expense of time and labour. But also, as Tolkien pointed out, a printed text which does not reproduce the precise order of its source will not serve a scholar interested in the finer points of the original manuscript. A line-by-line transcription, on the contrary, has
enormous advantages – in giving a clue to the relative vertical association of words in corrupt passages, as well as indicating the places where special alterations, paleogr[aphical] forms, omissions and other errors are likely. To this is added the facility of reference in those places where, however careful the present edition, a future worker will inevitably be obliged to collate with the manuscript. [draft letter to A.W. Pollard, c. 16 January 1936, Tolkien Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford]
This argument continued for more than a year. The Secretary of EETS, *Mabel Day, herself later an editor of one of Ancrene Riwle texts, bore much of the burden, until in May 1937 a subcommittee devoted to Ancrene Riwle, and in August 1937 the full EETS Committee – their members perhaps weary of the debate (though still not without objection) – at last agreed to follow Tolkien’s view.
Tolkien hoped to finish his transcription of the manuscript quickly from the set of rotographs, then collate it against the original at Cambridge. But he found it difficult to arrange access to the library at Corpus Christi College, and other matters demanded his attention, not least the publication of *The Hobbit in September 1937. Before long, the Second World War halted many projects, although from 1942 to 1949 work on the edition which had been abandoned by Elaine Griffiths was taken up by M.B. Salu. The latter completed the index as well as a successful thesis on the grammar and phonology of the text. Salu later made a Modern English translation of MS CCCC 402, which was published in 1955 as The Ancrene Riwle with a brief preface by Tolkien; see further, Descriptive Bibliography B23.
In Michaelmas Term 1946, now as the Merton Professor of English Language and Literature officially concerned with Middle English studies at Oxford, Tolkien began to lecture on Ancrene Riwle and its language. In March 1948, faced with serious dental problems, he offered to hand over his still uncollated transcriptions of MS CCCC 402 if some other scholar would be willing to complete the edition for EETS. In the event, he was not replaced, and except for the production of specimen pages in August 1948 no further action seems to have been taken for eight years. One assumes, lacking evidence to the contrary, that Tolkien simply was left to get on with the work as best he could, though the continuing delay to its completion must have been an embarrassment to him, as he himself had been appointed to the EETS Committee in 1938 and to the Ancrene Riwle subcommittee in 1945.
By February 1956 Tolkien’s edition became the concern of *R.W. Burchfield, who had succeeded Mabel Day as EETS Secretary. At that time Burchfield was also officially a D.Phil. candidate under Tolkien’s supervision, and the two were on friendly terms. At Tolkien’s suggestion Oxford palaeographer *N.R. Ker was approached to write an introduction to the edition (Ker had introduced R.M. Wilson’s 1954 edition of a different Ancrene Riwle manuscript at Cambridge), while Tolkien himself was to aim to deliver his finished transcription by Michaelmas Term that year. Apart from other demands on his time, however, there was still too much work to be done on the manuscript in Cambridge to complete it by autumn, and arthritis had begun to make it hard for him to type or to use a pen. In May 1957 Burchfield became concerned that several of the EETS editions of Ancrene Riwle were delayed, not only Tolkien’s, and suggested that deadlines be imposed. On 31 March 1958, at a meeting which Tolkien did not attend, the EETS Committee voted to require him to deliver his book by the end of the following June, or the Society would issue a straightforward facsimile of MS CCCC 402 rather than his transcription. Spurred by this decision, Tolkien devoted more concentrated attention to the task, in particular during the month of August 1958. Even so, he did not deliver a typescript to EETS until September of that year.
When acknowledging receipt of the book R.W. Burchfield now unfortunately took the opportunity to express his personal view, which he suggested would be held also by other officials in EETS, that Tolkien’s edition should be printed in the same style as the other editions of Ancrene Riwle already issued by the Society, not in a line by line transcription. He carefully laid out his reasons, which had much to do with consistency and aesthetics, but apparently was unaware of the heated debate that had occurred long before he had become Secretary, or that it had been agreed twenty years earlier that Tolkien’s edition, at least, should appear as its editor wished.
Tolkien replied to Burchfield at once and at length, evidently in more than one letter. A draft of what was surely the longest of these, accompanying three pages of comments on printer’s specimen pages, contains a mass of detail and close argument, as well as calculations of spacing and lines per page, accompanied by fabrications of typeset pages made by Tolkien on his typewriter to illustrate his points. Although the finished version of his letter appears not to survive, and typically in correspondence Tolkien restrained his final remarks having vented his feelings in draft, it is clear from comments that he and Burchfield later made, and from the effect of the document, that his argument was compelling. He pointed out that the manuscripts of Ancrene Riwle were inconsistent by nature; that the aesthetics of a printed text were in the eye of the beholder (for his part, he found much that was unattractive in the versions of Ancrene Riwle published by EETS thus far); and that contrary to Burchfield’s view that line-end features of the manuscript could be dealt with in an introduction,
the place of the line-ending is an important feature, palaeographical, textual, and linguistic, at least as important as other features carefully attended to. In any case I think it would be an advantage to have at least one version presented in a form bearing a closer relation to the manuscript arrangements; and the specially important and beautiful MS A [MS CCCC 402, the chief manuscript of Ancrene Riwle] seems a reasonable choice. [Tolkien Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford]
On 27 September Burchfield gracefully withdrew his opposition and renewed the support of the EETS Committee for Tolkien’s views.
On 22 March 1959 Burchfield informed Tolkien that his introduction was now wanted by 28 May. It was not a good moment: Tolkien had recently had an operation for appendicitis, and his wife was also ill. Proofs of the text were now expected in June or July; but then the printers went on strike, and proofs did not reach Tolkien until a year later, in early June of 1960, by which time he was again occupied with other things. His introduction still was not ready on 24 June 1960, and when visited by his colleague *Norman Davis, now Director of EETS, Tolkien declared himself unable to complete it, and that he would give Davis his notes to be passed on to N.R. Ker to use if he wished. Tolkien felt too unwell also to correct proof; but then he suddenly rallied. As he wrote to Rayner Unwin:
I am in fact utterly stuck – lost in a bottomless bog. … The