HarperCollins reprints English and Medieval Studies (25.04.11 by Pieter Collier) - Comments

It is surprising to see how time can fly. I wished I could say that it was mainly because I was having a good time! Sadly enough since January I have been working a lot, had some big decisions to make at my company and was facing many problems on all fields. Glad to say that somehow all is back to normal, but still have a lot of catching up to do. So let us start today by looking to some of the more interesting books that will be released this year.

Last year I was asked by David Brawn to scan a dustjacket from English and Medieval Studies, Presented to J. R. R. Tolkien on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday. Since I felt that the jacket on my edition was not of the finest quality I pointed him to a fine copy that was available on Abebooks. It was a good thing, since now that I see the result it really looks amazing.

Presented to J. R. R. Tolkien on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday, with dedicatory verses by W. H. Auden, this book was originally released in 1962 by Allen & Unwin. I believe it is wonderful to see that now after 50 years HarperCollins honors this moment by reprinting this wonderful book. The most amazing thing is that the book actually carries "George Allen and Unwin Ltd" on the front of the jacket, and I don't see any mention of HarperCollins on the front - so we can probably expect a perfect reproduction of the original first edition. Since it is now long out of print it is nice to see that HarperCollins reprints this book and making it available to a wider public.

Professor J. R. R. Tolkien retired in 1959 from the Merton Professorship of English language and Literature in the University of Oxford, which he had held since 1945. Before that he had been Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford and Professor of the English Language in the University of Leeds.

In recognition of the great contributions to English philology and medieval literature that he made over this long period, twenty-two former pupils, friends and colleagues from this county and abroad have combined to offer him a volume of studies in honour of his seventieth birthday in 1962.

The essays mainly deal with subjects close to his own interests – the character and the metre of Old English poetry, the Ancrene Riwle, Piers Plowman, Chaucer, various more general aspects of medieval literature, and some of the links between Old Norse and English.

The book is edited by Professor tolkien's successors in his two Oxford chairs, C. L. Wrenn and Norman Davies, and includes the following essays:

- The Old English Epic Style by A. Campbell
- The Appreciation of Old English Metre by A' J. Bliss
- King Alfred’s Last War by M. E. Griffiths
- Six Questions of Old and Middle English Morphology by C. E. Bazell
- Studies in Late West Saxon Labialization and Delabialization by Pamela Gradon
- The Bodmer Fragment of Ælfic’s Homily for Septuagesima Sunday by N. R. Ker
- A Neglected Manuscript of British History by S. R. T. O. d'Ardenne
- ormulum: Words copied by Jan van Vliet from parts now lost by R. W. Burchfield
- Norse Alliterative Phrases in the Ormulum by E. S. Olszewska
- The Affiliations of the manuscripts of Ancrene Wisse by E. J. Dobson
- God and Man in Troilus and Criseyde by T. P. Dunning
- Chaucer’s Translation of the Bible by W. Meredith Thompson
- God’s Wenches and the Light that Spoke (a note on Langland’s kind of poetry) by Nevill Coghill
- The Anthropological Approach by C. S. Lewis;

tolkien's autograph

The original edition of English and Medieval Studies, Presented to J. R. R. Tolkien on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday had blue boards with tolkien's autograph printed on it, another authograph was printed under the frontispiece photograph of J.R.R. Tolkien - and is one of the fascimile signatures that tend to be wrongly seen as an original Tolkien autograph. I wonder how HarperCollins will reproduce it in this edition and if it will increase or decrease the problem with ebay sellers thinking they are offering a genuine autograph.

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