J. R. R. Tolkien unpublished medieval translation revealed

A previously unpublished translation by J. R. R. Tolkien has been revealed, providing new insights into his academic career as a scholar of medieval English. The ten-page document, titled ‘Soul’s Ward’, is a modern English rendering of a 13th-century religious homily originally known as ‘Sawles Warde’.

The translation has been published in ‘The Review of English Studies’ in a critical edition prepared by researchers Andoni Cossio and Nelson Goering. Their research, conducted through the TRANSMEL project led by Rafael J. Pascual at the University of Granada, dates the typescript to the second half of the 1950s.

The manuscript’s history involves a decades-long period of obscurity. It was rediscovered in 1983 by Alan Bliss, a former student of Tolkien, while clearing an office at University College Dublin. The document was found in an envelope belonging to Thomas Patrick Dunning, another former student. Although the existence of the document was noted in the internal catalogue of the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford, it remained unknown to the broader academic community until this recent publication.