What was J.R.R. Tolkien’s first published scholarly edition of a medieval text?

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was J.R.R. Tolkien’s first published scholarly edition of a medieval text, produced with E.V. Gordon.

The edition was published in 1925 by Oxford University Press. Tolkien and Gordon provided a Middle English text, glossary, notes, and an introduction to the fourteenth-century poem, which survives in a manuscript alongside Pearl, Patience, and Cleanness.

The poem tells of Sir Gawain, a knight of King Arthur’s court, who accepts a supernatural challenge from the Green Knight. Tolkien’s scholarship on language, manuscript evidence, and medieval literature complemented his imaginative writing.

This work is sometimes confused with Tolkien’s later essay “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” a highly influential lecture first delivered in 1936. Tolkien also translated Sir Gawain into modern English, but the 1925 scholarly edition was made with Gordon.