Fall of Arthur

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

The Fall of Arthur, the only J. R. R. Tolkien’s literary journey into the world of legends about Briton king Arthur, fully can be treated as his most refined and skilful achievement in his address to Old English alliterative verse. Here he has reconceived the ancient Arthurian legends and traditions introducing in them an all-encompassing feeling of threatening grandeur and predestination — whether he tells about Arthur’s campaign over the sea, to distant heathen lands, or about escape of Guinever from Camelot, or about the great sea battle on Arthur’s return to Britain, or he describes Mordred the traitor or Lancelot’s painful hesitation in his castle. But, unfortunately, The Fall of Arthur is among those few large epic poems that Tolkien did not finish in his day and it was published for the first time by his son, the faithful keeper of the great master’s inheritance, Christopher Tolkien. It is he who accompanies the poem with three illuminating essays that explore the Arthurian literary tradition, the evolution of The Fall of Arthur, represented in his father’s drafts, as well as the links between the poem and the world of Middle-earth.