The Fall of Arthur

Tolkien, J.R.R. (Also known as ) (Edited by Christopher Tolkien.)

ISBN 10: 0544115899 / ISBN 13: 9780544115897

Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 978-0-544-11589-7, Boston

About this Item

[978-0-544-11589-7] 2013, 1st U.S. Edition. (Hardcover) Near fine in fine dust jacket. 233pp. Illustrations, notes, appendix. The spine is lightly worn at the bottom edge. "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 skillful achievement in the use of Old English alliterative meter, 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". Also known as . Book about King Arthur. Edited by Christopher Tolkien. (Fiction, Arthurian Legends, Legends, Poetry).

Seller Inventory # 154768

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Fall of Arthur
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 978-0-544-11589-7, Boston
• ISBN 10: 0544115899
• ISBN 13: 9780544115897
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included
• Seller catalogs:
  • Fiction

About this title

Synopsis

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 skillful achievement in the use of Old English alliterative meter, 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 Tolkien abandoned. He evidently began it in the 1930s, 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 unknown date, though there is evidence that it may have been in 1937, the year of 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 significant tantalizing notes. In these notes 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.

Review

Praise for The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún:

“This is the most unexpected of Tolkien’s many posthumous publications; his son’s ‘Commentary’ is a model of informed accessibility; the poems stand comparison with their Eddic models, and there is little poetry in the world like those” Times Literary Supplement

“The compact verse form is ideally suited to describing impact... elsewhere it achieves a stark beauty” Telegraph