Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1925. First thus. First printing of Tolkien's edition. Octavo. xxviiv, 211 pp. Complete, with the errata slip, frontispiece, and plate capturing Cotton MS Nero A.x. Folio 91a. A lovely, Near Fine copy. Lacking the dust jacket. Spine a trifle faded. Pencil ownership inscription, dated 1929, to upper free endpaper, and a bit of faint contemporary pencil marginalia. A clean, bright example of a book that is difficult to find in such attractive condition.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a 2500-line poem preserved in a fourteenth-century manuscript housed in the British Museum (Cotton Nero A.x). Rediscovered by Sir Frederic Madden, Keeper of Manuscripts at the British Museum, the poem was first printed in 1839. It has since become one of the best-known Arthurian legends and has been widely reinterpreted in literature, art, theater, and film. Tolkien's scholarly edition, his second published book, reproduces the poem in its original language and supplements it with a lengthy introduction, a bibliography, a glossary, and sixty pages of notes. This important edition "opened new fields of study and...remained standard, in revised form, throughout the twentieth century" (Oxford DNB).

Tolkien was inspired by Sir Gawain and the Green Knight throughout his life. In a 1953 lecture at the University of Glasgow, he called the poem "one of the masterpieces of fourteenth-century art in England, and of English literature as a whole...[I]t belongs to that literary kind which has deep roots in the past, deeper even than its author was aware...like Beowulf, or some of Shakespeare's major plays" (The Monsters and the Critics, p. 72). He also executed his own verse translation of the poem, which was published posthumously in 1975. Near Fine (Item #8288)