J.R.R. Tolkien. The Fall of Arthur. Ed. Christopher Tolkien. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013.
Reviewed by: Alex Mueller (alex.mueller@umb.edu)
Imagine Sir Thomas Malory pouring over the alliterative poem before him, reveling in its contagious rhythms, until the cataclysmic fall of Arthur causes him to stop short. Arthur has just ravaged the Italian countryside, led his glorious knights to their deaths, and even ordered his enemy’s children to be tossed into the sea. What might happen, Malory wonders, if he were to replace these undesirable episodes of violence and tyranny with investigations of the psyches of his beloved Guinevere, her lover Lancelot, and the lecherous Mordred, all the while retaining the sonorous sounds of war through alliterative verse? For those of us who know Malory’s treatment of the Roman campaign, this speculation is easy to imagine, especially since he drew his material for this section directly from the alliterative Morte Arthure. If this is the first tale Malory composed, as Eugène Vinaver suggests, this challenge is answered with a compromise between prose and poetry, which embraces the psychological plotlines from his “French books” and jettisons the strict cadences of alliterative long lines.[1]
Almost five hundred years later, J.R.R. Tolkien must have
been grappling with the same question. And with the publication of The Fall of Arthur, we know that his
answer was strikingly different. Within this unfinished poem, we witness
Tolkien’s attempt to versify Malory’s conflation of the betrayals of Mordred
and Lancelot through the undulating dactyls of alliterative poetry. The result
is a militarized, yet dimly-lit, romance that offers unprecedented access into
the conflicted hearts of Arthur and Guinevere, who both yearn for the return of
the Lord of Benwick, Sir Lancelot. While Mordred’s aggressive pursuit of
Arthur’s queen sets the sovereign’s vengeance in motion, it is the transparent
musings of the illicit lovers that will grip Tolkien’s audiences.
Perhaps the poem’s most significant contribution to
Arthurian legend is its descriptions of Guinevere’s love for Lancelot. Whereas
most romances, such as Chrétien
de Troyes’ Chevalier de la Charrette,
privilege Lancelot’s ardent devotion, Tolkien imagines “Guinever the golden”
(II.27) fiercely guarding resplendent jewels of desire:
. . . But cold silver
or glowing gold greedy-hearted
in her fingers
taken fairer
thought she,
more lovely
deeming what
she alone treasured
darkly hoarded. Dear she loved him
with love
unyielding, lady
ruthless,
fair as fay-woman and fell-minded
in the world
walking for
the woe of men. (III.49-56)
With the “ruthless” disposition of The Hobbit’s Smaug the Golden, Guinevere avariciously prizes
Lancelot above all, causing “woe” for men and complicating her conventional restraint.
The stanza even concludes with the enigmatic, “Strong oaths they broke”
(III.62), which suggests a mutual violation, either of their love for each
other or their loyalty to Arthur. As editor Christopher Tolkien notes, an
earlier draft that read “Strong oaths she
broke” [my emphasis] had been replaced with “Strong oaths they broke” [my emphasis], providing further evidence that
Guinevere’s culpability was a central concern (184). Yet, in a previous draft
of his characterization of Guinevere as “fair as fay-woman” (III.75), Tolkien
labeled her “fair and faultless” (181) indicating an early agenda of
recuperation of this much-maligned queen.
A she-dragon “with gleaming limbs” (II.27) guarding her
hoarded love, nevertheless, is the image that remains. It is probable, I would
submit, that this symbol occurred to Tolkien in his reading of the alliterative
Morte Arthure. A dragon appears
promiscuously throughout the poem, representing both Arthur in his first dream
(786-832) and the Roman legions as a heraldic device (1251-2; 2026-7; 2052-7).[2] The Morte-poet’s obsession with descriptions of battle standards
reemerges in Tolkien’s amplification of the grandeur of battle through heraldic
ekphrasis:
Dragon-prowed
they drive over dark billows;
on
shores unguarded shields are gleaming
and
black banners borne amid trumpets. (I.157-9)
More than any other symbol, the dragon pervades the poem,
unfortunately to its detriment. In contrast to the variation and portability of
the alliterative Morte’s heraldic descriptions, “dragon-prowed”
is thrice-repeated and applied redundantly to Prydwen, Arthur’s ship (I.157;
II.8; IV.177). With the exception of the abrupt ending at Romeril, the needless
repetition of stock phrases such as “Dawn came dimly (III.193; IV.15) mark this
brief poem as unpolished work.
Christopher Tolkien, however, provides some solace to the
unsatisfied reader by appending to the poem a compelling section, “The
Unwritten Poem and its Relation to the Silmarillion,”
in which he attempts to reconstruct the future directions of the poem from the
nearly illegible notes left behind. In addition to a provocative discussion of
the connections between the Arthurian Avalon and the Silmarillion’s Tol Eressëa
(137-63), Christopher Tolkien demonstrates the early use his father was making
of the alliterative Morte. For
example, whereas Arthur’s lament over the death of Gawain in the Morte includes the lines “A! dowttouse
derfe dede, thous duellis to longe! / Why drawes thou so one dreghe? thow
drownnes my herte!” (130), one draft among his notes attempts a close
translation: “Ah, dread death thou dwellest too long, / thou drownest my heart
ere I die” (131).[3]
This exercise and the later drafts of the poem suggest that Tolkien was
interested in reducing the alliterative long lines of the Morte to the shorter staves of Anglo-Saxon verse. And in a
subsequent instance, he even inserts Beowulf
into the scene of Arthur’s mourning, in which Sir Iwain chides his king by
saying, “to weep as a woman is not wit holden / better vengeance than lament”
(132). Whereas the Morte provides the
first line, “To wepe als a woman, it es no witt holden,” the second line likely
comes from Beowulf’s speech to Hrothgar, “Selre bið æghwæm, / þæt his freond wrece, þonne he flea
murne” [Better is it for every man / that he should avenge his friend than he
should much lament] (132). Apparently, Tolkien was happily raiding two
alliterative word-hoards, remixing their content and rhythms for the best
possible effects.
Without
Christopher Tolkien’s accompanying commentary, The Fall of Arthur seems less remarkable, and at times disappointing.
This is no doubt why he chose to surround this short poem of 954 lines with so
much supplementary material. Yet, the amount of commentary, which ranges from a
“Foreword” and “Notes on the Text of The
Fall of Arthur” to essays on “The Poem in Arthurian Tradition,” “The
Evolution of the Poem,” and Old English Verse,” is excessive, especially for a
poem that had no previous public life. Taken as a whole, this book is comprised
of a commentary that often overwhelms – and is in danger of over-determining –
its text. While Tolkien enthusiasts will likely enjoy this new Arthurian
context for the Mirkwood of Middle-earth, I am reminded of Morton Bloomfield’s
clever characterization of Piers Plowman.
He says that experiencing this often-mystifying alliterative poem is “like
reading a commentary upon an unknown text.”[4]
Until now The Fall of Arthur has been
an “unknown text.” And while its commentary is often useful and provocative, it
fails to distinguish itself from the text, making it difficult for the
reader to evaluate the poem on its own merits.
Alex
Mueller
University of Massachusetts Boston
University of Massachusetts Boston
[1] Eugène Vinaver, ed., The Works of Sir Thomas Malory (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1947), I.xli.
[2] Line numbers refer to the following edition: King Arthur’s Death: The Middle English
Stanzaic Morte Arthur and Alliterative Morte Arthure, ed. Larry D. Benson,
rev. Edward E. Foster (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1994).
The full text is available here: http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/benson-and-foster-king-arthurs-death-alliterative-morte-arthur-part-i.
[3] Christopher Tolkien notes that his father used Edmund
Brock’s 1871 Early English Text Society edition, which is also the edition used
for quotations of the alliterative Morte in
this book.
[4] Morton W. Bloomfield, ‘Piers Plowman’ as a Fourteenth-Century Apocalypse (New Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press, 1962), 32.
