Tolkien as Editor

Abstract

This essay considers the 11 editing projects which Tolkien took on during his professional career. Tolkien regarded editing, and glossing, as the sine qua non of medieval studies, more important than and fundamental to any later production of academic monographs. Nevertheless, his projects had a variable (but low) success rate. Factors which affected the latter include Tolkien's views, sometimes later challenged, on the competence or otherwise of the scribes who produced the manuscripts he was editing, and his philological concern for dialect origins and dialect purity.

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