First edition. Octavo. Publisher’s green cloth, lettered gilt.
 
A bright, very good copy. Some wear to the spine ends and corners. Heavily annotated with scholarly annotations and markings throughout in pen and pencil. Hand cut tabs, cut from the edges of the pages, alphabetising the glossary to rear.
 
PROVENANCE: Enid G. Rolwison of The University of Sheffield,with her ownership inscription to the front free endpaper, and her annotations throughout.
 
One of 2,500 copies of the first edition of Sir Gawain And The Green Knight.
 
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was a ‘poem to fire [Tolkien’s] imagination: the medieval tale of an Arthurian knight and his search for the mysterious giant who is to deal him a terrible axe-blow. Tolkien was delighted by the poem and also by its language, for he realised that its dialect was approximately that which had been spoken by his mother’s West Midland ancestors’.
 
This copy was formerly in the library of the Yale-educated Canadian professor of English and Middle English scholar Aaron Jenkins Perry (1875-1952), whose edition of John Trevisa’s translation of the Dialogus inter Militem et Clericum was published by the Early English Text Society also in 1925. Perry appears to have acquired this copy in 1926 and he has annotated the text throughout.