A ten-page typescript buried in the Bodleian Libraries, complete with Tolkien’s own handwritten revisions, has emerged as a genuine scholarly discovery. Soul’s Ward, Tolkien’s previously unpublished translation of the early Middle English homily Sawles Warde, has now been published as a critical edition in The Review of English Studies by Oxford University Press (June 8, 2026).
The find belongs to Dr. Andoni Cossio, a Visiting Fellow at St Catherine’s College Oxford, who encountered the typescript while researching Tolkien’s academic life in the Bodleian’s collections. His reaction speaks for itself: “I opened the box and could hardly believe my eyes. Among the materials was a translation by Tolkien that, as far as we could tell, nobody had publicly discussed before.” Cossio co-edited the critical edition with Dr. Nelson Goering of the University of Oslo.
Sawles Warde is a 13th-century allegorical homily from the Katherine Group, picturing the soul as a household under siege from Vice. It belongs to the AB language, a distinctive early Middle English dialect that Tolkien named. His landmark 1929 essay “Ancrene Wisse and Hord Meles” remains the foundational study of this dialect group, and his deep familiarity with its rhythms fed directly into the historical texture of his invented languages. Sawles Warde and its kin gave Middle-earth part of its linguistic soul.
That context makes this more than a curiosity. This is a window into Tolkien the medievalist at work: translating, revising, annotating. The typescript had gone largely unnoticed among his papers until Cossio’s archival research surfaced it.
The full critical edition is available now via Oxford University Press. The Telegraph was among the first to cover it.
