The Fall of Arthur by J.R.R. Tolkien (review)

‘The Fall of Arthur’ is a poem in alliterative meter which, if it had been completed, would have covered the events in Arthur’s life from his last campaign on the Continent to his death and apotheosis. As it is, 954 lines survive in 5 fitts or cantos which cover Arthur’s last continental campaign, the betrayal of Mordred, Lancelot in exile, the return to England with an army to regain the kingdom. The poem breaks off with a speech by Arthur counseling that they turn aside from confronting Mordred’s forces in Kent. The volume has a Foreword by Christopher Tolkien (pp. 7–14) who has edited the poem (pp. 15–57) and provided brief notes on the text (pp. 59–70) as well as three essays, ‘The Poem in the Arthurian Tradition’ (pp. 71–122), followed by ‘The Unwritten Poem and its Relation to The Silmarillion’ (pp. 123–68) and ‘The Evolution of the Poem’ (pp. 169–220). The volume ends with an ‘Appendix: Old English Verse’ which contains extracts from an unpublished lecture by Tolkien (pp. 221–33).

That Tolkien (like Milton and many others) had ventured to write a poem on Arthurian matters was known, but there were few clues to its nature and its handling of the subject matter. Humphrey Carpenter mentions ‘The Fall of Arthur’ in his J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography (1977, pp. 168–69; Rev. ed. 1987, p. 171) and he includes two quotations, one touching on Mordred’s desire for Guenevere (II.39–41) and the second on Guenevere’s ruthlessness nature (III.54b–56). There is a single mention of the poem in Carpenter’s edition of the Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien in a letter from 1955 (#165) in which Tolkien indicates that he still hopes to finish it (1981, 2^nd ed, 1995, pp. 217–21 at p. 219). In volume 1: Chronology of the two volume The J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide prepared by Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond (2006) which is a detailed chronicle of the events in Tolkien’s life based on his diaries, the poem is assigned to the early 1930s (p. 152), but otherwise little information is given about it. All the obscurities and guess work relating to the poem have now been taken care of forty years after the death of the author with this edition prepared his son and literary executor Christopher and which appears as the twenty-fifth volume of works from Tolkien’s hand to have appeared posthumously.

Tolkien had been interested in Arthurian literature since childhood although he ultimately became critical of various aspects of it (Carpenter, Biography, pp. 22, 35; 2^nd ed., pp. 30, 43; ‘Arthur and the Matter of Britain,’ Scull and Hammond, Tolkien Companion and Guide, Volume 2: Reader’s Guide, pp. 56–60). In 1925 Tolkien and his colleague at the University of Leeds, E.V. Gordon, published a major edition of the fourteenth-century alliterative poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Now in a second edition from 1967, ‘Tolkien and Gordon’ is still an essential reference work, especially with respect to its glossary which was Tolkien’s major area of responsibility. Tolkien left Leeds for Oxford in the autumn of 1925 and the following year he founded the Kolbítar, a club for reading Old Norse texts. In the late 1920s he appears to have tried his hand at writing Eddic heroic poetry, the result of which were the two texts edited by Christopher Tolkien and published in 2009 under the title, The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún. When he had completed these poems it appears his interest turned again to the Matter of Britain.

The first fitt of ‘The Fall of Arthur’ opens with Arthur heading off to war for the last time — not to conquer Rome as in the received versions of his story, but to protect it from...