First edition, early issue of Tolkien’s A Middle English Vocabulary, bound with Sisam’s Fourteenth Century Verse and Prose as issued by the publisher. Before starting work on his edition and glossary of Sir Gawain & the Green Knight (1925), Tolkien compiled this Middle English vocabulary – his first substantial, stand-alone publication in the field. Aiming neither at completeness, nor to provide ‘primarily a glossary of rare or “hard” words’, Tolkien explains his rationale thus: ‘A good working knowledge of Middle English depends less on the possession of an abstruse vocabulary than on familiarity with the ordinary machinery of expression […]. So in making a glossary for use with a book itself designed to be a preparation for the reading of complete texts, I have given exceptionally full treatment to what may rightly be called the backbone of the language’ (‘Note’, A Middle English Vocabulary, p. [3]). ¶¶

The ‘book’ which this vocabulary was to accompany is a selection of texts for ‘newcomers to the fourteenth century’ (Fourteenth Century Verse & Prose, p. xliii) edited by Tolkien’s former Oxford tutor Kenneth Sisam (1887-1971), one of the most renowned scholars of Old and Middle English of the twentieth century. A few years later, however, in 1925 ‘Tolkien was elected to the Rawlinson and Bosworth chair of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, defeating his former tutor Kenneth Sisam in a close vote’ (ODNB). ¶¶

Sisam had finished Fourteenth Century Verse & Prose before Tolkien’s A Middle English Vocabulary was ready, and therefore Sisam’s work was first published in October 1921 without A Middle English Vocabulary. Tolkien’s work was completed some months later, and A Middle English Vocabulary was published on 11 May 1922 in an edition of 2,000 copies, priced at 4s. 6d. Some of the 2,000 sets of the sheets of A Middle English Vocabulary were bound in wrappers and sold separately, and others were bound with Sisam’s Fourteenth Century Verse & Prose (as originally intended), first appearing in this form on 8 June 1922. The remaining sets of sheets from this first printing were kept, as was customary, ‘in sheets until there was demand for the binding’ (Hammond and Anderson p. 1) and issued as required over the following months. ¶¶

Hammond and Anderson identify different states of sheets of the first separate issue of A Middle English Vocabulary based on the title page and the final page of the text (which they mis-identify as p. [168], rather than p. [164]). Like a copy they identify as a ‘later impression’ (p. 1), this copy has the words ‘Printed in England’ printed from type at the foot of the title page, below the frame, and does not have ‘corrigenda to Sisam’s Fourteenth Century Verse & Prose’ printed beneath the index on p. [164]. Interestingly, although Hammond and Anderson describe a frame of 186 type-ornaments (i.e. 57 at left and right, 36 at top and bottom) in most of the states of the title-page they record, in this copy of A Middle English Vocabulary the title-page, unusually, has a frame formed of 184 type-ornaments (i.e. only 56 at left and right) – an arrangement they note only in a copy offered by a Californian bookseller in 1980. Since this copy of A Middle English Vocabulary is bound with sheets of Sisam’s Fourteenth Century Verse & Prose dated 1923 on the title page and without advertisements at the end, it seems likely that it is accompanied by a slightly later impression of Tolkien’s glossary, but one with a permutation of issue-points not recorded by Hammond and Anderson. The bibliographers do, however, note a similar copy of the combined volume with ‘the title page [of Fourteenth Century Verse & Prose] dated 1923 and plain wove front and back endpapers’ which is bound with ‘apparently a first impression of the glossary’ (p. 282). ¶¶

W.G. Hammond and D.A. Anderson, J.R.R. Tolkien, B3a.