 | |
| Editor | Christopher Tolkien |
|---|---|
| Author | J. R. R. Tolkien |
| Illustrator | Bill Sanderson |
| Cover artist | Bill Sanderson |
| Language | English |
| Subject | Arthurian legend Literary criticism |
| Genre | Alliterative verse epic |
| Publisher | HarperCollins Houghton Mifflin Harcourt |
Publication date | 21 May 2013 |
| Publication place | United Kingdom |
| Media type | Print (hardback);Kindle ebook |
| Pages | 240 |
| ISBN | 978-0-544-11589-7 (hardback) 978-0-007-48989-3 (deluxe edition) |
| Preceded by | The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún |
| Followed by | Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary |
The Fall of Arthur is an unfinishedpoem by J. R. R. Tolkien on the legend ofKing Arthur. A posthumous first edition of the poem was published byHarperCollins in 2013.[1]
Tolkien wrote the poem during the earlier part of the 1930s, when he wasRawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon atPembroke College, Oxford. He abandoned it at some point after 1934, most likely in 1937 when he was occupied with preparingThe Hobbit for publication.[2] Its composition thus dates to shortly after hisThe Lay of Aotrou and Itroun (1930), a poem of 508 lines modelled on theBreton lay genre.
The poem had been abandoned for nearly 20 years in 1955, andThe Lord of the Rings had been published, when Tolkien expressed his wish to return to and complete his "long poem".[T 1] But it remained unfinished, nonetheless.[3]
The Fall of Arthur is written inalliterative verse, its fivecantos extending to nearly 1,000 lines which imitateOld English poetry's metre, as used in poems such asBeowulf; it is in Modern English inspired by high medieval Arthurian fiction. The historical setting of the poem is early medieval, both in form (usingGermanic verse) and in content, showing Arthur as aMigration periodBritish military leader fighting theSaxon invasion. At the same time, it avoids the high medieval aspects of the Arthurian cycle, such as theGrail and the courtly setting. The poem begins with a British "counter-invasion" to theSaxon lands (Arthur eastward in arms purposed).[4] The Tolkien scholarVerlyn Flieger notes that while some find it ironic that Tolkien should have written about a "Celtic" (British) hero in the style of Old English, in alliterative verse, and in the language of the enemy of the enemy, some 700 years had provided ample time for Arthur "to be assimilated into the English cultural imagination".[3]
The existing fragment of the poem tells thatKing Arthur comes home from a war to suppress a rebellion in his kingdom. He finds that things have changed in his absence. His queen,Guinever, has had an affair with the knight,Lancelot: she has renounced him; he remains loyal to Arthur. Their affair has, the reader learns in flashback, helped to break up Arthur's loyalRound Table fellowship of knights. Another knight,Mordred, is full of unsatisfied passion for Guinever, and hopes to become King. The poem hints that Arthur's ambitious pride hasfated him to fall, "a last assay / of pride and prowess, to the proof setting / will unyielding in war with fate."(I, ll. 15–17)
The existence of the poem became known publicly withHumphrey Carpenter's 1977biography of Tolkien.[5]
After Tolkien's death, his Arthurian poem came to be one of his longest-awaited unedited works. According to the Tolkien scholarJohn D. Rateliff,Rayner Unwin had announced plans to edit the poem as early as 1985, but the edition was postponed in favour of "more pressing projects" (includingThe History of Middle-earth, edited and brought to publication between 1983 and 1996), answering the demand for background onTolkien's legendarium more than his literary production in other areas.[6]
The bookThe Fall of Arthur, containing the part of the poem completed by Tolkien, and essays on the poem by his sonChristopher Tolkien, was published in the United Kingdom byHarperCollins, and in the United States byHoughton Mifflin Harcourt.[7]
Carpenter noted that the poem "has alliteration but no rhyme. [...] In his own Arthurian poem [Tolkien] did not touch on the Grail but began an individual rendering of theMorte d'Arthur, in which the king and Gawain go to war in 'Saxon lands' but are summoned home by news of Mordred's treachery. The poem was never finished, but it was read and approved byE. V. Gordon, and byR. W. Chambers, Professor of English at London University, who considered it to be 'great stuff – really heroic, quite apart from its value as showing how the Beowulf metre can be used in modern English'."[5] Carpenter cited a passage from the poem, to make the point that it is a rare instancein Tolkien's writings where sexual desire is given explicit literary treatment, in this case Mordred's "unsated passion" for Guinever:[5]
His bed was barren there black phantoms
of desire unsated and savage fury
in his brain had brooded till bleak morning
Hilary Dorsch Wong, reviewing the work for theWashington Independent Review of Books, describes the poem as "accessible, with a driving plot and engaging use of language."[8] She finds the principal characters "strongly fleshed-out"; in her view the poem's core consists of the interaction between the "lust-driven" Mordred and Guinever, along with the "backstory" of the deeply conflicted Lancelot's history with Guinever.[8] In her view, the poem offers "wonderful storytelling".[8]
On the other hand, Wong doubts whether Christopher Tolkien's detailed but dry chapters, which take up twice as much space as the poem itself, will appeal to many readers. She notes, for example, that while he shows which details his father took from each of the different medieval versions of the story, he "fails to draw conclusions from this information, or to make wider arguments about Tolkien's poem from it."[8] Similarly, his study of how the poem might have been finished includes some rather "tenuous" tracing of story elements to Middle-earth stories such as thevoyage of Eärendil and theFall of Númenor, which she presumes was aimed atTolkien fans.[8] Wong states that even though she considers herself a Tolkien fan, she found the chapter's lack of conclusions disappointing.[8] She similarly found the last chapter on the poem's evolution dull, with lengthy quotations illustrating the most minor of textual differences between drafts, but "few useful conclusions".[8]
Flieger, inTolkien Studies, writes that Tolkien's Arthur differs markedly from Malory's, Tennyson's, or his contemporaryT. H. White's; in her view, his Arthur is "at once older and sterner, less idealized, and decidedly less romantic", but true to Tolkien's own era.[3]
| Chrétien de Troyes e.g.Lancelot,Perceval 12th century | Malory Le Morte d'Arthur 15th century | Tennyson Idylls of the King 19th century | T. H. White The Once and Future King 20th century | Tolkien The Fall of Arthur 20th century |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| "colorful world of chivalry and courtly love" | "fully fleshed-out story of human intentions gone disastrously wrong" | "sermon on 'sense at war with soul', a flawed Round Table and an ideal king" | "bittersweet riff on war and human nature" | "a somber story whose overriding image is the tide, embodying the ebb and flow of events" |
She comments that missing from the poem are all the bright images ofCamelot, the tournaments, the knightly games ofchivalric love. Missing, too, are the magical elements, the wizardMerlin, the enchantressMorgan le Fay, theHoly Grail, the spiritualquest, the dream, the triumphant return home.[3] Instead, Tolkien chooses tragedy; Flieger comments that thetheme of "loss and doom" held a special attraction for him, as seen in his poem ofThe Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún, or in the repeated attention he gave to the tragic tale ofTúrin Turambar.[3]
I rememberRayner Unwin, when I got to meet with him in 1985, telling me about this as one of the forthcoming projects already in the works, but which wdn't be coming out until some more pressing projects (like the HISTORY OF MIDDLE-EARTH series, whose third volume I'd just picked up that same day).
| International | |
|---|---|
| Other | |
