“That Seems to Me Fatal”: Pagan and Christian in The Fall of Arthur

Of course there was and is all the Arthurian world, but powerful as it is, it is imperfectly naturalized, associated with the soil of Britain but not with English; and does not replace what I felt to be missing. For one thing its “faerie” is too lavish, and fantastical, incoherent and repetitive. For another and more important thing: it is involved in, and explicitly contains the Christian religion.

For reasons which I will not elaborate, that seems to me fatal. Myth and fairy-story must, as all art, reflect and contain in solution elements of moral and religious truth (or error), but not explicit, not in the known form of the primary “real” world.

—J.R.R. Tolkien (Letters 144)

In J.R.R. Tolkien’s famous letter to Milton Waldman, he rejects the Arthurian legend as a basis for a “mythology for England,”¹ primarily for three reasons: that it is British, not English, in origin; that its faerie was “lavish and fantastical, incoherent and repetitive”; and that it “explicitly contains the Christian religion”; he goes on to add about this last, “that seems to me fatal.” Given the context of the letter, and the fact that within a few paragraphs he describes his own mythology, it seems safe to infer that his words about Arthur applied to this too. This is the thesis of my essay. In The Fall of Arthur, Tolkien embraces the quintessential British story, brings it into line with his own distinctive faerie, and takes pains to emphasize the paganism of Arthur’s foes (for example, FA I, 6, 21, 41, et al.). Indeed, he adds a major section, his own distinctive contribution to the Arthurian legend, that depicts Arthur as leading a Christian army into pagan lands in a kind of preemptive strike, destroying “heathen” shrines and temples (cf. I, 41–42a), giving him what might almost be described as a crusader ethos; later in the poem Arthur raises as his banner the image of the Madonna and Child (IV, 126–28).²

I think the apparent contradiction can be reconciled by exploring the ways in which Tolkien has followed the time-honored tradition of altering the Arthurian myth to suit his own purposes. In particular, Tolkien eliminated from his Arthurian poem any mention of the Grail legend (which can fairly be described as lavish, fantastical, incoherent, and repetitive, at least as Malory tells it) as well as deleting the traditional pious ending for the survivors of Arthur’s court in convent, cloister, and crusading. Significantly, he replaced Caxton’s title for book 8, “The Death of Arthur,” with his own more ambiguous Fall of Arthur, which is more appropriate given that in Tolkien’s telling Arthur does not die and the focus is instead on the collapse of Arthur’s realm. Most strikingly, Tolkien rejects Malory’s account of Arthur’s end (burial at Glastonbury) by linking Avalon with Elvenhome, making Arthur a figure like King Sheave and Lancelot another of his questing mariners in the tradition of Earendel/Eärendil and Eriol/Ælfwine.

In the end Tolkien chose not to base his myth cycle on the Arthurian legend but instead made a place within his legendarium into which the Arthurian tales could be fitted. So the whole Matter of Britain becomes, conceptually, through the Lost Road, a subordinate element to the legendarium, another contributory stream to the great river that is the Matter of Middle-earth. Never let it be said that Tolkien lacked ambition!

Part 1: Objections

Given that Tolkien’s letter to Waldman provides his most comprehensive (if slightly cryptic) statement about how the Arthurian myth relates to his legendarium, and vice versa, it seems worthwhile to unpack his three major points and see how he addressed each in The Fall of Arthur.

I. British, Not English

First, there’s the matter of British versus English. Here Tolkien clearly identifies the Arthurian story as essentially Celtic, and his rejection of it on that basis suggests that his early plan had been to create his “mythology for England” primarily...