Holy Maidenhood! It's Ancrene Wisse!

 

[Like this first imprint, but glossier and browner.]

So today I got, quite unexpectedly early (delivery was listed for August 12^th or later) what I had ordered for my special birthday gift this year: Ancrene Wisse, [“also known as the Ancrene Riwle or Guide for Anchoresses); it is an anonymous monastic rule (or manual) for female anchoresses (someone who, for religious reasons, withdraws from secular society so as to be able to lead an intensely prayer-oriented, ascetic, or Eucharist-focused life) – Wikipedia], written in the early 13th century, published by the Early English Text Society in 1962,  but most importantly for me, edited by and with a preface from J. R. R. Tolkien. It is ‘illustrated’ by two photo-reproductions of pages of its beautiful script.

          This has to be the most attenuated object of my Tolkien veneration. It has nothing to do with Middle-earth or the Legendarium. For the 222 pages of Middle English religious instruction, there is exactly two-and-one-third pages of a preface from the Professor, mostly linguistically technical in nature. The volume itself, though the only information supplied is a first publishing date is 1962, is almost certainly a more recent reprint. Reading it all (with my 30 years distance from one college class in Middle English – I was hoping for a modern English crib on one side, but no such luck; it was obviously produced for serious students already familiar with the language) would undoubtedly prove more difficult than reading The Old English Exodus (which collects J.R.R. Tolkien's text and translation of the Old English poem that is known as Exodus. They are accompanied by a commentary that has been produced by editing his notes for a series of informal lectures delivered to a specialist class in Oxford in the 1930s and 1940s. Although dated 1981, the book was actually published in January 1982. 3,000 copies were printed and it has not been reprinted. – Tolkien Gateway. The only other scholarly work by Tolkien that I do not have, because a copy runs to almost $2000 these days). My feelings about and reasons for getting this volume are almost as torturous as this paragraph.

But what of such difficulties? I felt compelled to own a copy of Ancrene Wisse, and at $40 it was in my range. I now intend to somehow copy and append Tolkien’s essay Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiðhad, from the 1929 Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association, vol. 14; then I should have everything Tolkien published on the subject in one place. Excelsior!