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.
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