J. R. R. Tolkien’s A Middle English Vocabulary was compiled to accompany Kenneth Sisam’s anthology of fourteenth-century verse and prose. Before he was famous as a novelist, Tolkien was a philologist, and this glossary reflects the meticulous scholarship that underpinned his life’s work on medieval language and literature.
The vocabulary defines the words of Middle English texts with care for sense, etymology, and grammatical form, serving students who read Chaucer’s contemporaries in the original. It is a valuable reference for anyone studying the language of late medieval England, and a fascinating window into the linguistic expertise that later shaped Middle-earth.