J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Fall of Arthur: A Timeless Journey?

Abstract

J. R. R. Tolkien has not been viewed as an author who found the Arthurian cycle of tales to be particularly pertinent to his wider legendarium. Although he preferred “English” to “British” mythology, his unfinished poem, “The Fall of Arthur”, written in the early 1930s and edited by Christopher Tolkien for publication by HarperCollins in 2013, is inspired by medieval Arthurian sources. At the same time, it is constructed in the Old English metre, which indicates Tolkien’s love of all things “Anglo-Saxon”. This article aims to show how the poem had an influence on Tolkien’s major work The Lord of the Rings, first published in 1954 to 1955. In both texts Tolkien is concerned with the issue of timelessness as a major theme, but there are also parallel ideas in the two works which show that his ideas on Arthurian legend did influence his major work of fiction. In recent years scholars have examined Arthurian themes in Tolkien’s writing, and this article includes an analysis of some of these authors in relation to both The Fall of Arthur and The Lord of the Rings. I conclude by suggesting that Tolkien’s use of themes from The Fall of Arthur in The Lord of the Rings has kept his Arthurian themes in circulation, and I agree with other scholars that even though The Fall of Arthur is an unfinished poem, it is a valuable contribution to the collection of Tolkien’s works.

Keywords:

• Tolkien
• legendarium
• Arthurian legend
• kingship
• timelessness
• gender
• Middle Ages
• Middle Earth
• Old English
• mythology of England

Notes

1 The poem was written in Old English or Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse, a poetic tradition common in England from the eighth to the fifteenth century and which was used by the authors of Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, two works which Tolkien knew well. The style consists of short verses with rhyming endings.

2 T. H. White’s The Sword in the Stone was published in 1938. This was followed by The Ill Made Knight in 1941. The third volume was The Once and Future King, published in 1958. A final volume, The Book of Merlin, only appeared in 1977 due to the anti-war stance of the author, which was evident in Merlin’s speeches in the book, and the publisher’s dislike of this theme.

3 On Tolkien and “The Song of Roland”, see Douglas Rudder (2011).

4 Although Mirkwood was a place in the Norse Sagas, it also appeared in William Morris’s The House of the Wolfings, published in 1896, a favourite text of Tolkien’s.