Scholars have published J.R.R. Tolkien’s previously unreleased translation of Sawles Warde, a 13th-century Middle English allegory, revealing that the author of The Lord of the Rings spent years preparing a full critical edition of the text that was accepted for publication in 1960 but never appeared in print.
The translation appears in The Review of English Studies, published by Andoni Cossio and Nelson Goering as part of the TRANSMEL project at the University of Granada, led by Rafael J. Pascual. The paper is available via its DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgag038. Coverage of the discovery also appeared at Medievalists.net.
In 1983, the scholar Alan Bliss found a 10-page typescript in an office at University College Dublin, tucked in an envelope labeled “Tolkien, Soul’s Ward.” The envelope had belonged to Thomas Patrick Dunning, a Catholic priest and former student of Tolkien’s. Bliss passed it along, and Christopher Tolkien received it in 1985. It has been held at the Bodleian Library in Oxford ever since. Scholars now date the text to the second half of the 1950s, with a May 1956 draft showing corrections in red ballpoint pen.
Sawles Warde (“The Guardian of the Soul”) is a prose homily written for recluses and nuns. Its central conceit is an allegory of the human body as a household: Reason is the master of the house, Will is the mistress, and the Five Senses are members of the household staff. Four cardinal virtues, Prudence, Strength, Moderation, and Justice, defend the house against the Devil’s vices. It is a vivid, psychologically acute piece of writing.
What connects this text so directly to Tolkien is its dialect. Sawles Warde belongs to the AB language tradition, the West Midlands Middle English dialect that also produced Ancrene Wisse, the guide for anchoresses that Tolkien edited for the Early English Text Society in 1962. Tolkien spent decades working in this type of medieval literature, and his translation of Sawles Warde fits within that scholarly commitment. He rendered the text into fluent, deliberately archaic modern English.
The publication also reveals the scope of what Tolkien intended. He did not merely translate the text: he prepared a complete critical edition, comparing three medieval manuscripts (Bodley 34, Royal 17 A. xxvii, and Cotton Titus D. xviii) and producing 148 folios of notes. The Early English Text Society accepted that edition in 1960. It was never published. Whether that was Tolkien’s own decision, a consequence of his other commitments during the years he was finishing The Lord of the Rings and struggling with The Silmarillion and considering a rewrite of The Hobbit, or simply one more project overtaken by time, we don’t know.
