Tolkien on Chaucer, 1913-1959

Abstract This book makes available J. R. R. Tolkien’s career-long writings on Chaucer from his 1913 undergraduate essay on the poet’s language to his 1959 retirement lecture about the medieval poet’s place on the Oxford English syllabus. It includes annotated versions of his landmark 1934 article “Chaucer as a Philologist: The Reeve’s Tale” and his late Chaucer-inspired piece “Middle English Losenger” originally published in 1953. Early work with the Oxford English Dictionary introduced him to the range of Chaucer editions. Published for the first time here are commentaries from his unpublished Clarendon edition Selections from Chaucer’s Poetry and Prose, his study “Chaucer and the Alliterative Tradition”, his 1947 lecture to the Oxford Dante Society, some newly discovered letters about Chaucer, and his experimental edition of the Reeve’s Tale produced for Oxford’s Summer Diversions in 1939 and then expanded for teaching Navy cadets in 1944. Selections are included from his Oxford lectures on the Clerk’s Tale and the Parlement of Foules after he became Merton Professor in 1945. A complete transcription of his late lecture The Pardoner’s Tale: The Story and Its Form shows Tolkien’s realization that he had told much the same story of men fighting to the death over a gold treasure at the core of The Lord of the Rings. The book makes these steady connections between Tolkien’s Chaucerian writings and his fantasy novels.