Literary lineage …

… Lost volume sheds new light on Tolkien’s devotion to Chaucer | Books | The Guardian. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

 The material now uncovered includes Tolkien’s eight-page “Introduction on Language”, in which he argued that Chaucer’s language should not be modernised. “His language is much further removed (in more than five centuries) from ours than appears at first sight, and the chief danger to those beginning the study of his works lies in underestimating not in exaggerating the degree of difference,” he wrote.