A previously unpublished translation by J. R. R. Tolkien is offering new insights into his decades of work as a scholar of medieval English. Entitled Soul’s Ward, the ten-page typescript translates an early thirteenth-century religious work that Tolkien studied, edited and taught during his academic career.
The translation has now been published in The Review of English Studies in a critical edition prepared by Andoni Cossio and Nelson Goering. Their research reconstructs the history of the document, examines Tolkien’s extensive work on the medieval text and dates the surviving translation to the second half of the 1950s.
The work was carried out through TRANSMEL (Translation, Transmission, and Transformation in Medieval English Literature), a research project led by Rafael J. Pascual at the University of Granada.
A translation found in a drawer
The document, titled “Soul’s Ward”, contains a modern English rendering of a 13th-century homily that Tolkien examined as part of his philological research into medieval dialects. Image courtesy University of Granada
Although Soul’s Ward has never previously been published or publicly discussed, the typescript itself first resurfaced more than 40 years ago. In 1983, Alan Bliss, one of Tolkien’s former students, found it while clearing out his office at University College Dublin. The translation was inside an envelope labelled “Tolkien, Soul’s Ward” that had belonged to Bliss’s predecessor, Thomas Patrick Dunning, another former student of Tolkien.
Bliss recognised Tolkien’s typing and handwriting and sent the document to Christopher Tolkien. In a note written in 1985, Christopher explained that he had not previously known of the translation and believed the typescript dated from the 1950s.
The document was eventually preserved among Tolkien’s academic papers at the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford. Its existence was recorded in the library’s internal catalogue, but the translation remained unknown to the wider academic community until the work of Cossio and Goering.
The surviving document is a ten-page, single-sided typescript containing additions and corrections in Tolkien’s handwriting. It appears to be a carbon copy, while the location of the original top copy remains unknown. Despite the handwritten changes, the researchers believe that the revised typescript represents a largely finished translation.
It is not known why Tolkien gave the translation to Dunning. The researchers suggest that Dunning, a Catholic priest and specialist in medieval English homilies, would have been well qualified to assess it. No correspondence about the translation has been found, however, and the typescript contains no comments from Dunning.
What is Sawles Warde?
Tolkien’s Soul’s Ward is a translation of Sawles Warde, a Middle English prose homily dating from the early thirteenth century. Its title can be understood as “The Guardian of the Soul” or “The Keeping of the Soul.” The medieval work is a relatively free adaptation of the Latin De custodia interioris hominis. It appears to have been written for a religious audience that included anchorites and enclosed nuns.
Sawles Warde presents the human body as a household or fortified residence containing the precious treasure of the soul. Reason is the master of the house, while Will is its frequently unruly mistress. The Five Senses serve as members of the household who must be carefully supervised to prevent sin from gaining entry.
Reason is assisted by four daughters representing the cardinal virtues. Prudence guards the entrance, Strength removes anything that attempts to enter unlawfully, Moderation controls the household, and Justice judges its members. Together, they defend the soul against the vices directed by the Devil.
The allegory also includes messengers who describe the contrasting consequences awaiting the soul. These vivid descriptions may have been among the elements that particularly attracted Tolkien to the text, according to Cossio and Goering.
Tolkien’s approach to the translation
Picture of author J.R.R. Tolkien during the 1920s.- Wikimedia Commons
Tolkien translated Sawles Warde into fluent but deliberately archaic modern English, using forms such as “thou” and their corresponding verbs. His version generally follows the medieval text closely, although he occasionally added words or details to make its imagery clearer.
He did not attempt to reproduce the elaborate patterns of alliteration found in the Middle English original. Instead, his priority appears to have been communicating its meaning and imagery clearly to modern readers.
This approach resembles Tolkien’s work on several other medieval texts. His translations of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl and Sir Orfeo were published posthumously in 1975, edited by Christopher Tolkien. His prose translation of Beowulf, accompanied by his commentary and lectures on the poem, followed in 2014.
Tolkien spent around 30 years developing the first version of his translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. His careful, sometimes perfectionist approach helps explain why so many of his translations, lectures and editions remained unpublished during his lifetime.
His academic interest in early Middle English was equally extensive. Tolkien produced an edition of Ancrene Wisse, a thirteenth-century guide for female religious recluses, published by the Early English Text Society in 1962. He also contributed substantially to Simonne d’Ardenne’s edition of the medieval life of St Juliana, another text associated with the same linguistic and literary tradition as Sawles Warde.
Evidence of a lost Tolkien edition
The research into Soul’s Ward reveals that the translation was only one part of Tolkien’s much larger project on Sawles Warde. He also prepared a critical edition comparing the three surviving medieval manuscript versions of the homily. These are found in Oxford’s Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 34, and in two manuscripts now held by the British Library: MS Royal 17 A. xxvii and MS Cotton Titus D. xviii.
Tolkien used the Bodleian manuscript as the principal basis for his translation because he considered its version less corrupt and closer to the original. He supplemented it with readings from the other two manuscripts, noting several of these choices in footnotes.
The completed critical text from which Tolkien worked has apparently been lost. Nevertheless, 148 folios of his accompanying textual notes survive, along with draft translations, a lecture on the work and other research materials. These records demonstrate the considerable amount of time Tolkien devoted to the homily.
There was even a plan for Tolkien and d’Ardenne to publish an edition of Sawles Warde through the Early English Text Society. The organisation apparently agreed to the proposal in 1960, but the edition never appeared.
Dating Soul’s Ward
Tolkien probably first encountered Sawles Warde while studying at Exeter College, Oxford. He later taught the text at Oxford in 1949 before returning to it in 1956 and teaching it for several more terms before his retirement.
A title page associated with an early draft of the translation and commentary bears the date May 1956. Because the complete typescript incorporates revisions to this draft, Cossio and Goering conclude that the surviving version was produced later, probably as Tolkien resumed lecturing on the text during the second half of the decade.
Other physical evidence supports this dating. Tolkien made corrections on the opening page with a red ballpoint pen, a writing instrument he is known to have used during the 1950s. Notes written on printed papers dated March 1955 also show that he was still revising his editorial commentary at that time.
Tolkien and medieval English
Sawles Warde belonged to a group of West Midlands texts that played a central role in Tolkien’s academic research. It was written in a form of early Middle English that he called “Language (AB),” now generally known as the AB dialect. Tolkien argued that this dialect represented a local literary standard. His study of it became one of his most influential contributions to Middle English scholarship, particularly through his research on Ancrene Wisse and the group of religious works preserved in MS Bodley 34.
The publication of Soul’s Ward therefore adds more than another title to Tolkien’s body of translations. It provides evidence of how he interpreted a medieval work that occupied years of his scholarly life, while revealing the scale of an unfinished editorial project that has largely disappeared.
For readers who know Tolkien primarily through The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, the translation also offers another route into the medieval literature and languages that shaped his career. As Cossio and Goering explain, “the publication of this translation allows for a clearer understanding of Tolkien’s knowledge and interpretation of Sawles Warde, and can furthermore serve as a gateway to the medieval text for general readers, much as his other translations have done. Moreover, it is clear that Tolkien also produced an edition of the text, as we shall see, and should this ever emerge, the translation will constitute a valuable resource for anyone wishing to edit that text in its turn.”
The article, “J. R. R. Tolkien’s Soul’s Ward: A critical edition of his unpublished translation of the early Middle English homily Sawles Warde,” by Andoni Cossio and Nelson Goering, is published in The Review of English Studies. Click here to read it.
A previously unpublished translation by J. R. R. Tolkien is offering new insights into his decades of work as a scholar of medieval English. Entitled Soul’s Ward, the ten-page typescript translates an early thirteenth-century religious work that Tolkien studied, edited and taught during his academic career.
The translation has now been published in The Review of English Studies in a critical edition prepared by Andoni Cossio and Nelson Goering. Their research reconstructs the history of the document, examines Tolkien’s extensive work on the medieval text and dates the surviving translation to the second half of the 1950s.
The work was carried out through TRANSMEL (Translation, Transmission, and Transformation in Medieval English Literature), a research project led by Rafael J. Pascual at the University of Granada.
A translation found in a drawer
The document, titled “Soul’s Ward”, contains a modern English rendering of a 13th-century homily that Tolkien examined as part of his philological research into medieval dialects. Image courtesy University of Granada
Although Soul’s Ward has never previously been published or publicly discussed, the typescript itself first resurfaced more than 40 years ago. In 1983, Alan Bliss, one of Tolkien’s former students, found it while clearing out his office at University College Dublin. The translation was inside an envelope labelled “Tolkien, Soul’s Ward” that had belonged to Bliss’s predecessor, Thomas Patrick Dunning, another former student of Tolkien.
Bliss recognised Tolkien’s typing and handwriting and sent the document to Christopher Tolkien. In a note written in 1985, Christopher explained that he had not previously known of the translation and believed the typescript dated from the 1950s.
The document was eventually preserved among Tolkien’s academic papers at the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford. Its existence was recorded in the library’s internal catalogue, but the translation remained unknown to the wider academic community until the work of Cossio and Goering.
The surviving document is a ten-page, single-sided typescript containing additions and corrections in Tolkien’s handwriting. It appears to be a carbon copy, while the location of the original top copy remains unknown. Despite the handwritten changes, the researchers believe that the revised typescript represents a largely finished translation.
It is not known why Tolkien gave the translation to Dunning. The researchers suggest that Dunning, a Catholic priest and specialist in medieval English homilies, would have been well qualified to assess it. No correspondence about the translation has been found, however, and the typescript contains no comments from Dunning.
What is Sawles Warde?
Tolkien’s Soul’s Ward is a translation of Sawles Warde, a Middle English prose homily dating from the early thirteenth century. Its title can be understood as “The Guardian of the Soul” or “The Keeping of the Soul.” The medieval work is a relatively free adaptation of the Latin De custodia interioris hominis. It appears to have been written for a religious audience that included anchorites and enclosed nuns.
Sawles Warde presents the human body as a household or fortified residence containing the precious treasure of the soul. Reason is the master of the house, while Will is its frequently unruly mistress. The Five Senses serve as members of the household who must be carefully supervised to prevent sin from gaining entry.
Reason is assisted by four daughters representing the cardinal virtues. Prudence guards the entrance, Strength removes anything that attempts to enter unlawfully, Moderation controls the household, and Justice judges its members. Together, they defend the soul against the vices directed by the Devil.
The allegory also includes messengers who describe the contrasting consequences awaiting the soul. These vivid descriptions may have been among the elements that particularly attracted Tolkien to the text, according to Cossio and Goering.
Tolkien’s approach to the translation
Picture of author J.R.R. Tolkien during the 1920s.- Wikimedia Commons
Tolkien translated Sawles Warde into fluent but deliberately archaic modern English, using forms such as “thou” and their corresponding verbs. His version generally follows the medieval text closely, although he occasionally added words or details to make its imagery clearer.
He did not attempt to reproduce the elaborate patterns of alliteration found in the Middle English original. Instead, his priority appears to have been communicating its meaning and imagery clearly to modern readers.
This approach resembles Tolkien’s work on several other medieval texts. His translations of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl and Sir Orfeo were published posthumously in 1975, edited by Christopher Tolkien. His prose translation of Beowulf, accompanied by his commentary and lectures on the poem, followed in 2014.
Tolkien spent around 30 years developing the first version of his translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. His careful, sometimes perfectionist approach helps explain why so many of his translations, lectures and editions remained unpublished during his lifetime.
His academic interest in early Middle English was equally extensive. Tolkien produced an edition of Ancrene Wisse, a thirteenth-century guide for female religious recluses, published by the Early English Text Society in 1962. He also contributed substantially to Simonne d’Ardenne’s edition of the medieval life of St Juliana, another text associated with the same linguistic and literary tradition as Sawles Warde.
Evidence of a lost Tolkien edition
The research into Soul’s Ward reveals that the translation was only one part of Tolkien’s much larger project on Sawles Warde. He also prepared a critical edition comparing the three surviving medieval manuscript versions of the homily. These are found in Oxford’s Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 34, and in two manuscripts now held by the British Library: MS Royal 17 A. xxvii and MS Cotton Titus D. xviii.
Tolkien used the Bodleian manuscript as the principal basis for his translation because he considered its version less corrupt and closer to the original. He supplemented it with readings from the other two manuscripts, noting several of these choices in footnotes.
The completed critical text from which Tolkien worked has apparently been lost. Nevertheless, 148 folios of his accompanying textual notes survive, along with draft translations, a lecture on the work and other research materials. These records demonstrate the considerable amount of time Tolkien devoted to the homily.
There was even a plan for Tolkien and d’Ardenne to publish an edition of Sawles Warde through the Early English Text Society. The organisation apparently agreed to the proposal in 1960, but the edition never appeared.
Dating Soul’s Ward
Tolkien probably first encountered Sawles Warde while studying at Exeter College, Oxford. He later taught the text at Oxford in 1949 before returning to it in 1956 and teaching it for several more terms before his retirement.
A title page associated with an early draft of the translation and commentary bears the date May 1956. Because the complete typescript incorporates revisions to this draft, Cossio and Goering conclude that the surviving version was produced later, probably as Tolkien resumed lecturing on the text during the second half of the decade.
Other physical evidence supports this dating. Tolkien made corrections on the opening page with a red ballpoint pen, a writing instrument he is known to have used during the 1950s. Notes written on printed papers dated March 1955 also show that he was still revising his editorial commentary at that time.
Tolkien and medieval English
Sawles Warde belonged to a group of West Midlands texts that played a central role in Tolkien’s academic research. It was written in a form of early Middle English that he called “Language (AB),” now generally known as the AB dialect. Tolkien argued that this dialect represented a local literary standard. His study of it became one of his most influential contributions to Middle English scholarship, particularly through his research on Ancrene Wisse and the group of religious works preserved in MS Bodley 34.
The publication of Soul’s Ward therefore adds more than another title to Tolkien’s body of translations. It provides evidence of how he interpreted a medieval work that occupied years of his scholarly life, while revealing the scale of an unfinished editorial project that has largely disappeared.
For readers who know Tolkien primarily through The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, the translation also offers another route into the medieval literature and languages that shaped his career. As Cossio and Goering explain, “the publication of this translation allows for a clearer understanding of Tolkien’s knowledge and interpretation of Sawles Warde, and can furthermore serve as a gateway to the medieval text for general readers, much as his other translations have done. Moreover, it is clear that Tolkien also produced an edition of the text, as we shall see, and should this ever emerge, the translation will constitute a valuable resource for anyone wishing to edit that text in its turn.”
The article, “J. R. R. Tolkien’s Soul’s Ward: A critical edition of his unpublished translation of the early Middle English homily Sawles Warde,” by Andoni Cossio and Nelson Goering, is published in The Review of English Studies. Click here to read it.
Subscribe to Medievalverse
Related Posts