"A
collection of three medieval English poems, translated by Tolkien for
the modern-day reader and containing romance, tragedy, love, sex and
honour.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Pearl are two
poems by an unknown author written in about 1400. Sir Gawain is a
romance, a fairy-tale for adults, full of life and colour; but it is
also much more than this, being at the same time a powerful moral tale
which examines religious and social values.
Pearl is apparently an
elegy on the death of a child, a poem pervaded with a sense of great
personal loss: but, like Gawain it is also a sophisticated and moving
debate on much less tangible matters.
Sir Orfeo is a slighter romance, belonging to an earlier and different tradition. It was a special favourite of Tolkien’s.
The three translations represent the complete rhyme and alliterative schemes of the originals." (harpercollins.com)
"John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born
on the 3rd January, 1892 at Bloemfontein in the Orange Free State, but
at the age of four he and his brother were taken back to England by
their mother. After his father’s death the family moved to Sarehole, on
the south-eastern edge of Birmingham. Tolkien spent a happy childhood in
the countryside and his sensibility to the rural landscape can clearly
be seen in his writing and his pictures.
His mother died when he
was only twelve and both he and his brother were made wards of the local
priest and sent to King Edward’s School, Birmingham, where Tolkien
shone in his classical work. After completing a First in English at
Oxford, Tolkien married Edith Bratt. He was also commissioned in the
Lancashire Fusiliers and fought in the battle of the Somme. After the
war, he obtained a post on the ‘New English Dictionary’ and began to
write the mythological and legendary cycle which he originally called
‘The Book of Lost Tales’ but which eventually became known as ‘The
Silmarillion’.
In 1920 Tolkien was appointed Reader in English
Language at the University of Leeds which was the beginning of a
distinguished academic career culminating with his election as Rawlinson
and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford. Meanwhile Tolkien
wrote for his children and told them the story of ‘The Hobbit’. It was
his publisher, Stanley Unwin, who asked for a sequel to ‘The Hobbit’ and
gradually Tolkien wrote ‘The Lord of the Rings’, a huge story that took
twelve years to complete and which was not published until Tolkien was
approaching retirement. After retirement Tolkien and his wife lived near
Oxford, but then moved to Bournemouth. Tolkien returned to Oxford after
his wife’s death in 1971. He died on 2 September 1973 leaving ‘The
Silmarillion’ to be edited for publication by his son, Christopher." (harpercollins.com)