The Fall of Arthur - out in May 2013?

[Troels Forchhammer]

Probably the greatest bit of Tolkien-related news for a long time has
been the leak that a new Tolkien book is being planned for 2013.
Amazon accidentally put up for pre-order /The Fall of Arthur/ by
J.R.R. Tolkien with an expected release date of May 2013. I first saw
this on the MythSoc list, with a link to the French Amazon site,
where the book is still up:
<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/mythsoc/message/23178>

This has, of course, instantly led to a lot of speculation, some of
which can be seen in a thread from Pieter Collier's (The Tolkien
Library) Facebook profile (also available for people without Facebook
access):
<https://www.facebook.com/pieter.collier/posts/10151096244088792>

Mostly the reaction has, however, been one of joy
<http://www.lotrplaza.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=244254>

But what /is/ this /Fall of Arthur/ all about?

/The Fall of Arthur/ is a long (unfinished at 954 lines) alliterative
poem that Tolkien composed in the thirties. Various drafts and
outlines are also extant. As late as 1955 Tolkien wrote that he still
hoped to one day complete the poem, but I know of no evidence that he
ever returned to it after abandoning it in the mid-thirties.

What little we know about it derive mainly from /J.R.R. Tolkien: A
Biography/ by Humphrey Carpenter (part 4 ch. VI ‘The Storyteller’, p.
224f in my 2002 HC paperback edition), who was given access to the
poem and from the /Reader's Guide/ (*Arthur and the Matter of Britain
p. 56) — volume II of Wayne Hammond and Christina Scull's excellent
/J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide/ (Carpenter doesn't mention the
length of the poem or the other associated texts). Carl Phelpstead in
his book /Tolkien and Wales/ (ch. 5 ‘Arthurian Literature’ p. 79f)
explains that ‘The unfinished poem has never been published or made
accessible to scholars’ and he continues to voice the opinion that,
since the publication of The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún, this poem
‘must now be the most eagerly awaited of unpublished writings by
Tolkien.’ An opinion that I find myself agreeing to.

First things first — Carpenter quoted a few lines from the poem in
his /Biography/. First about Mordred lusting for Guinever [sic]:
His bed was barren; there black phantoms
of desire unsated and savage fury
in his brain had brooded till bleak morning.
And then about Guinever herself:
.... lady ruthless
fair as fay-woman and fell-minded,
in the world walking for the woe of men
(I have emphasized the traditional pause, or caesura, between the two
half-lines in alliterative verse — for a discussion of alliterative
metre, see e.g. Christopher Tolkien's introduction to /The Legend of
Sigurd and Gudrún/.)

The metre of /The Fall of Arthur/ is natively English. Carpenter
cites R.W. Chambers saying that the poem shows ‘how the /Beowulf/
metre can be used in modern English’ and Hammond and Scull also says
that the poem makes use of the /Beowulf/ metre, while Phelpstead
writes that ‘The poem's title and metrical form suggest that a model
or inspiration must have been the fourteenth-century English
/Alliterative Morte Arthure/: written in alliterative metre’
referring to the so-called alliterative revival of the fourteenth
century. The metre of the alliterative revival was looser than the
original Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse forms (these differences are also
discussed in Carl Phelpstead's article ‘Auden and the Inklings: An
Alliterative Revival’ in /Journal of English and Germanic Philology/
vol. 103 no. 4, October 2004). I am not sure if Phelpstead believes
to detect this looser use in the few lines of The Fall of Arthur that
are published in Carpenter's Biography, though to my untrained eye
the only hint would be that the caesura is possibly not so marked in
all of these lines as was usual in the earlier Anglo-Saxon poems
(though I do believe that they are fully within the variation seen in
the old poems, and we should remember that Carpenter chose these
lines not for the metre, but for their content). In any case, I don't
think that it is important at this point to attempt to distinguish
the between the Anglo-Saxon alliterative metre and the metre of the
fourteenth century alliterative revival, since both are natively
English (which I think is the important part).

Carpenter mainly discusses the narrative of the poem, telling us that
Tolkien ‘did not touch on the Grail’ — this should also remind us of
Tolkien's own statements in the letter to Milton Waldman from 1951
(/Letters/ no. 131 p. 144) that one of the reasons why he was
dissatisfied with the Arthurian world was that ‘it is involved in,
and explicitly contains the Christian religion.’

I suppose that it is reasonable, based on Carpenter's description and
Tolkien's later statements about Arthur and the Matter of Britain, to
speculate that there will, in Tolkien's /The Fall of Arthur/, be
fewer and less explicit references to Christianity.

Carpenter also notes that Tolkien's /The Fall of Arthur/ is one of
the few places where Tolkien ‘deals explicitly with sexual passion’
(the reason for his quoting the first three of the lines) and also
that Tolkien's portrayal of Guinever (Tolkien's spelling) differs
from that of ‘most Arthurian writers’ by making her a more active
agent for woe (see the latter two and half lines quoted above). In
some of these things, we may be seeing hints of Tolkien trying to
address one of the other major points he lists against the Arthurian
world in his letter to Waldman, that ‘its ‘faerie’ is too lavish, and
fantastical, incoherent and repetitive’ — here we might see Tolkien
trying to bring the faërie back to some basic emotions, lust, power
etc.

Phelpstead mentions about the alliterative metre that it ‘clearly
appealed to Tolkien, and perhaps to his fourteenth-century
predecessors, because it was a ‘native’ English metre, unlike stress-
syllabic rhyming verse imported from France’ and though the small
samples in Carpenter's book are not sufficient to say for certain, it
seems unlikely based on the descriptions that The Fall of Arthur
would be following e.g. the fornyðirslag of the Sigurd and Gudrún
lays or any of the other skaldic metres of the Eddaic poems. This
lends some weight to Phelpstead's argument, and suggests to me that
Tolkien, with The Fall of Arthur might have been exploring a
different route to his great vision of a ‘mythology for England’ (to
use Carpenter's phrase — though, wouldn't it be great to one day
discover that Carpenter had indeed borrowed that phrase from some
unpublished letter by Tolkien?).

This is of course getting highly speculative — we know very little
about the details of the poem besides what is revealed by Carpenter:
that the poem is ‘an individual rendering of the /Morte d'Arthur/, in
which the king and Gawain go to war in 'Saxon lands' but are summoned
home by news of Mordred's treachery’ a description to which
Phelpstead draws some interesting parallels to the diverse traditions
of the Arthurian legends.

--
Troels Forchhammer
Valid e-mail is <troelsfo(a)gmail.com>
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