Discuss Letter from J.R.R. Tolkien to John Johnson on 14 February 1921

The salient differences are, I would guess, 1) that Sisam's Fourteenth Century Verse & Prose is a selection of texts that are often extant in more than one manuscript produced by numerous different scribes in different times and places, and so would have considerable variation in dialect and orthography; while SGGK is extant in a single manuscript; and 2) that Sisam's reader is intended more for literary study, while Tolkien and Gordon's edition of SGGK is more like a critical edition and meant for more philological study (in addition to literary). So:

1) Not normalizing forms across so large and various selection of texts as Sisam's would be burdensome to its more literary-minded audience, and/or for the glossarist, since either the student must guess or search for the headword under which variants are grouped, or the glossarist must list and cross-reference each such form in entries that would often amount to nothing more than "X: see Y". This would necessarily bulk up the glossary, and complicate its use, to little or no purpose for most readers. (It is for this reason that most Old English texts are likewise normalized in primers and readers and their glossaries.)

2) For something more like a critical/philologically-oriented edition, especially of a single text like SGGK that has no cross-manuscript variants and really only a relatively few internal, scribal variants, retaining the MS spelling in each case does serve a philological purpose, without adding undue bulk or complexity to its glossary.

Carl

I sometimes wish we could like comments on this forum. Thank you so much for such a thoughtful and thorough explanation.

It not only answers my query on Tolkien's position here, but also answered the question I didn't know I needed answering until you did, which is why there is a distinction between various editions and the approach taken in respect to different texts.

Thanks, Carl, much appreciated.