General Criticism: Other Works

The list of Tolkien works available to be written about gained an important addition in 2013 with the publication of The Fall of Arthur, edited by Christopher Tolkien (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013). This is a long but incomplete poem, in four full cantos and part of a fifth, totaling 954 lines as Tolkien left it, written in a modern English version of Old English half-line pair alliterative verse. It was probably written in the early 1930s. The topic is of course Arthurian, adapted from two 14th-century Morte Arthur poems. Though the plot is dominated by Arthur’s military campaigns, much of the critical attention surrounding this poem has focused on the unusually frank, for Tolkien, discussion of sexual matters: Mordred’s lust for and sexual threats to Guinevere in canto 2 and the retrospective description of her affair with Lancelot in canto 3.

In the published volume, the extant poem occupies about 40 pages (15–57). A brief editorial foreword (7–14) and textual notes (59–70) are followed by more substantive editorial materials. “The Poem in Arthurian Tradition” (71–122) discusses the poem’s relationship with its source materials, including Geoffrey of Monmouth and Malory. “The Unwritten Poem and Its Relation to the Silmarillion” (123–68) presents Tolkien’s outlines for further parts of the poem, again comparing them to source materials and also bringing in a possible equation of Avalon with Tol Eressëa, which would tie the poem in with the legendarium and make Arthur, and Lancelot, searchers for the West like Eärendil and Amandil. “The Evolution of the Poem” (169–220) discusses the textual history: earlier drafts and synopses of the completed material. An appendix, “Old English Verse” (221–33), consists largely of extracts from a 1940s lecture by Tolkien on that verse form, with editorial information on the lecture and a note that its presentation was accompanied by excerpts from The Fall of Arthur.

The first major article about the poem is a review, “Old and Middle English Influences in The Fall of Arthur” by Anna Caughey (Journal of Inklings Studies 3.2: 183–207). As her title suggests, Caughey is most interested in identifying influences. The alliterative meter and the use of kennings and other recurring metaphoric imagery makes the verse style closer to Old English than Middle English, though the poem’s plot is an attempt at a synthesis of two 14th-century lays, and some elements of its diction also come from these. Caughey notes other Middle English sources, including Geoffrey of Monmouth, and hints that modern influences may also be found. Caughey also notes the erotic intensity of the sexual references in cantos 2 and 3.

“Writing into the Gap: Tolkien’s Reconstruction of the Legends of Sigurd and Gudrún” by Tom Shippey (Revisiting the Poetic Edda: Essays on Old Norse Heroic Legend, ed. Paul Acker and Carolyne Larrington [New York: Routledge, 2013], 238–57) is a revision of a review of the Legend that appeared in Tolkien Studies 7 (2010): 291–324. At length and in detail, Shippey describes Tolkien as desiring to fill in a hole in the Eddaic cycle and Völsunga saga (in terms of plot coherence as well as the gap in the Eddaic manuscript) and how he rewrites the tale to do this. Tolkien brings in Gothic material, the subject of his lifelong interest, via the related poem “The Battle of the Goths and the Huns.” He uses the devices of compression, parallelism, and variation to make his modern English alliterative verse work effectively (250).

Rory McTurk reads “Tolkien’s Legend of Sigurd and Gúdrun: Creative Drama or Scholarly Exercise?” (Studies in English Drama and Poetry 3: 151–65) as a compromise between these two impulses. The scholarly exercise is the one to fill in the gaps missing from the Poetic Edda account of the legend and to reconcile it with the differing accounts in Snorri and Völsunga saga; the creative drama seeks to get the most emotional satisfaction out of the tale and to give it historical depth by framing it as a later account of long...