J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Fall of Arthur"

tom emerson: Two of the top corners of the dust cover were scrunched and damaged as if the book had been dropped and hit the corner edge. Normally I wouldn't care but I collect these books and like to keep them pristine.

United States on May 22, 2023

Nathan Wade: Master of fantacy and neo-mythology.

Australia on Mar 13, 2023

Shelley R.: Book arrived in good order. Excited to get this as I had not heard about an Arthurian book written by JRR Tolkien. Looking forward to reading it!

Canada on Mar 16, 2022

Malkirn: 10/10 Enjoy the beautiful style of writing employed to tell what is a captivating story

As someone who has read and studied the work and life of J.R.R. Tolkien for nearly two decades, one of the most important things I wish people knew about the authors of The Lord of the Rings was that he was so much more than just the author of The Lord of the Rings.

If you open up Wikipedia, you’ll find that J.R.R. Tolkien “was an English writer, poet, philologist, and university professor” and “served as the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon and Fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford, from 1925 to 1945 and Merton Professor of English Language and Literature and Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, from 1945 to 1959.”

To clarify, these positions mean that his academic expertise and responsibilities were tremendous and that his published work extends well beyond the realm of his fictional prose.

So when you look at the title The Fall of Arthur and see that it was written by J.R.R. Tolkien I don’t want you to be in any way surprised; the Arthurian legend and its many literary antecedents were smack-bang in the middle of Tolkien’s...

United Kingdom on Oct 25, 2021

Mr. J. L. Burns: I'm not accustomed to reading alliterative verse. So I can't really speak as to how well Tolkien pulled off that particular aspect of the writing.

However I can say that the story itself was engrossing and I found that the act of reading it in alliterative verse format gave it a certain quality of novelty which I found very appealing.

The only problem, which I knew going into it as the publisher makes no secret of the fact, is that the story is too short as Tolkien (like so many other works) never completed it before he died.

In my opinion a brilliant addition to any collection of Tolkien's work, or indeed of medieval literature.

United Kingdom on Aug 08, 2013

Modern Viking: "The Fall of Arthur" is J.R.R. Tolkien's unfinished contribution to the already considerable body of literature about the legendary British king. Composed as it is in imitation of Old English 'alliterative' verse, an often-used term Tolkien himself had reservations about, it is quite a challenge to read. At his best, Tolkien was capable of producing some truly great poetry, and he expended much thought and labour on "The Fall of Arthur", having, as his son describes in the Foreword, an "exact and perfectionist concern to find, in an intricate and subtle narrative, fitting expression within the patterns and rhythm and alliteration of the Old English verse-form." The result, while happily composed in modern English, is language so charged with meaning (and language charged with meaning is as good a definition of poetry as I can come up with) that I was only able to read it in short increments to have any hope of being able to take it in. While it may at first glance be of negligible appeal to any but Tolkien completists and those indiscriminately enamoured of Old English poetry, "The Fall of Arthur" may be found to have much to recommend it by those who make the effort to actually...

United Kingdom on May 30, 2013

John D. Cofield: With the publication of The Fall of Arthur one of J.R.R. Tolkien's most obscure works, mentioned briefly in a letter he wrote in the 1950s and referred to in a couple of paragraphs in Humphrey Carpenter's biography, at last sees the light of day. The Fall of Arthur is a fragment of a poem Tolkien apparently wrote in the early 1930s, according to Christopher Tolkien's excellent Foreword. At that time Tolkien had already been working for many years on the tales and poems which eventually became part of his best known legendarium dealing with Arda. Interconnected with and simultaneous to those tales was Tolkien's ongoing love of Norse and Anglo-Saxon poetry.

Tolkien's poem makes up only about 40 pages of this book of over 200 pages. The rest, all written by Christopher Tolkien, consists of notes clarifying some terms and place names, a lengthy essay "The Poem in Arthurian Tradition," an excellent study of "The Unwritten Poem" which connects The Fall of Arthur with elements from The Silmarillion, The Lost Road, and The Book of Lost Tales, another essay on "The Evolution of the Poem" in which Christopher analyzes the several manuscripts and fragments of The Fall of Arthur, and...

United States on May 24, 2013

John Raffauf: Readers who have an interest in Arthurian literature should find this interesting for its exposition of Tolkien's source choices. Those who are only interested in Middle Earth, may have trouble associating this book with the Tolkien they know. Christopher provides some help in bridging the gap. Those who are expecting a full-fledged Arthurian experience will be disappointed.

Most of the English speaking world knows of Arthur through Sir Thomas Mallory's 15th century version of the stories. With few exceptions, what appears in the popular media is based on Mallory. The exceptions generally ignore the vast earlier base of Arthurian literature, borrow a few names and incidents, and invent new relationships between the characters and create new narrative. The film King Arthur (2004) is a good example of this.

Tolkien made a conscious choice to focus on the most "English" aspects of the legends.

Arthurian literature before the 12th century would fit on part of one page. Geoffrey of Monmouth sparked interest in the Arthurian stories, starting around 1150, when Arthur was included in his History of the Kings of Britain. Monmouth gave us about 33 pages of Arthurian...

United States on May 24, 2013