First edition, one of 3,000 copies. The Ancrene Wisse (or Ancrene Riwle, MS Corpus Christi College Cambridge 402) attracted Tolkien’s study throughout his career (cf. Hammond and Anderson, B12). In 1929 - some years after starting work on the subject and three years after he took up his professorship in Oxford - Tolkien published an article on the subject, which his biographer described thus: ‘Tolkien never lost his literary soul. […] He brought to […] his subject a grace of expression and a sense of the larger significance of the matter. Nowhere is this demonstrated to better advantage than in his article (published in 1929) on the Ancrene Wisse, a medieval book of instruction for a group of anchorites, which probably originated in the West Midlands. By a remarkable and subtle piece of scholarship, Tolkien showed that the language of two important manuscripts […] was no mere unpolished dialect, but a literary language, with an unbroken literary tradition going back to before the Conquest’ – the so-called ‘AB language’ of the West Midlands (Humphrey Carpenter, Tolkien: A Biography (London, 1977), p. 134).

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.