Publisher's Synopsis
Presented to J. R. R. Tolkien on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday, with dedicatory verses by W. H. AudenProfessor 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.
