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.
