The Fall of Arthur

J. R. R. Tolkien, Christopher Tolkien

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780007489947, 9780007489893
• eBook ISBN: 9780007489954
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Poetry
• Index: Literature

The world first publication of a previously unknown work by J.R.R. Tolkien, which tells the extraordinary story of the final days of England’s legendary hero, King Arthur.

The Fall of Arthur, the only venture by J.R.R. Tolkien into the legends of Arthur King of Britain, may well be regarded as his finest and most skilful achievement in the use of the Old English alliterative metre, in which he brought to his transforming perceptions of the old narratives a pervasive sense of the grave and fateful nature of all that is told: of Arthur’s expedition overseas into distant heathen lands, of Guinevere’s flight from Camelot, of the great sea-battle on Arthur’s return to Britain, in the portrait of the traitor Mordred, in the tormented doubts of Lancelot in his French castle.
Unhappily, The Fall of Arthur was one of several long narrative poems that he abandoned in that period. In this case he evidently began it in the earlier nineteen-thirties, and it was sufficiently advanced for him to send it to a very perceptive friend who read it with great enthusiasm at the end of 1934 and urgently pressed him ‘You simply must finish it!’ But in vain: he abandoned it, at some date unknown, though there is some evidence that it may have been in 1937, the year of the publication of The Hobbit and the first stirrings of The Lord of the Rings. Years later, in a letter of 1955, he said that ‘he hoped to finish a long poem on The Fall of Arthur’; but that day never came.
Associated with the text of the poem, however, are many manuscript pages: a great quantity of drafting and experimentation in verse, in which the strange evolution of the poem’s structure is revealed, together with narrative synopses and very significant if tantalising notes. In these latter can be discerned clear if mysterious associations of the Arthurian conclusion with The Silmarillion, and the bitter ending of the love of Lancelot and Guinevere, which was never written.

THE FALL OF ARTHUR

I
____________

How Arthur and Gawain went to war and rode into the East.

Arthur eastward in arms purposed
his war to wage on the wild marches,
over seas sailing to Saxon lands,
from the Roman realm ruin defending.
Thus the tides of time to turn backward	5
and the heathen to humble, his hope urged him,
that with harrying ships they should hunt no more
on the shining shores and shallow waters
of South Britain, booty seeking.
As when the earth dwindles in autumn days	10

and soon to its setting the sun is waning
under mournful mist, then a man will lust
for work and wandering, while yet warm floweth
blood sun-kindled, so burned his soul
after long glory for a last assay	15
of pride and prowess, to the proof setting
will unyielding in war with fate.
So fate fell-woven forward drave him,
and with malice Mordred his mind hardened,
saying that war was wisdom and waiting folly.	20
‘Let their fanes be felled and their fast places
bare and broken, burned their havens,
and isles immune from march of arms
or Roman reign now reek to heaven
in fires of vengeance! Fell thy hand is,	25

fortune follows thee – fare and conquer!
And Britain the blessed, thy broad kingdom,
I will hold unharmed till thy home-coming.
Faithful hast thou found me. But what foe dareth
war here to wake or the walls assail	30
of this island-realm while Arthur liveth,
if the Eastern wolf in his own forest
at last embayed must for life battle?’
So Mordred spake, and men praised him,
Gawain guessed not guile or treason	35
in this bold counsel; he was for battle eager,
in idle ease the evil seeing
that had rent asunder the Round Table.
Thus Arthur in arms eastward journeyed,
and war awoke in the wild regions.	40

...

Halls and temples of the heathen kings

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• The Fall of Arthur
• Notes on the Text of The Fall of Arthur
• The Poem in Arthurian Tradition
• The Unwritten Poem and its Relation to The Silmarillion
• The Evolution of the Poem
• Appendix: Old English Verse
• Footnotes
• Works by J.R.R. Tolkien
• About the Publisher