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| Wednesday, July 10, 2013 02:03 PM |
| Book Report - The Fall of Arthur |
 by Fëanor |
It's a new release from J.R.R. Tolkien! Yep, Christopher managed to scrape together enough text from his father's copious notes to make another book. This time it is a poem, written in contemporary English, but using Old English-style alliterative verse (the format of the original Beowulf), telling the tragic tale of King Arthur's defeat and death. I've been excited to read this ever since I first heard about it. Tolkien on Arthur?!? OMG!
Here's the thing: the book is 240 pages long, but about 200 pages of that are introduction and end notes from Christopher explaining the form of the poem, how it took shape, and where it sits in the context of his father's other work and in the context of other Arthurian texts. And the 40 pages of poem that are here are just the start of what was clearly meant to be a much longer work. I don't know what I was expecting - obviously if Tolkien had finished it completely it would have been published well before now - but I still found this a bit disappointing.
The fact that what we have of the poem is lovely and powerful almost makes it worse. It's really a shame he never got around to finishing this. I enjoy the alliterative verse form quite a bit, and Tolkien is an expert at it. The story is a familiar one, but Tolkien has an interesting take on it. In his hands, Arthur's world feels like one on the edge of a precipice - a dark, stormy place about to be swept aside in a rising tide of chaos and destruction. His characters stalk through the gloom, brooding and raging ineffectually. Although his Middle Earth works do have a bit of romance, they are entirely devoid of lust, so it's interesting to see a bit of that here, in the form of Mordred's desire for Guinevere.
Speaking of Guinevere, Tolkien's characterization of her is particularly unflattering. She's always the reason, in every telling of this story, for the rift between Arthur and Lancelot that ends up destroying everything, but most writers see her as ultimately blameless - a star-crossed lover and a lady from beginning to end - and give her a saintly, penitent end. Not Tolkien. He makes her selfish, grasping, and unfeeling. It seems like an unnecessarily harsh treatment of the character.
Fans of Tolkien's Middle Earth works will see a few interesting connections here, which Christopher helps highlight. Mirkwood makes a brief appearance in the text, although here the word seems to be used more as a kenning to describe a random dark forest, and not as the name of the specific wood that Bilbo Baggins once worked his way through. Tolkien's plan for the end of the story has a more direct connection: he meant to send Lancelot out in a boat to seek the injured (possibly dead?) Arthur where he lay in Avalon, and parallel this journey with that of Eärendil the mariner, when he went to Tol Eressëa seeking the help of the Valar.
This note from Christopher, as well as another that reveals his father had planned to write a time travel novel that tied in with his Middle Earth work (!), is interesting, as are some of the passages about alliterative verse and Arthurian scholarship. But as fans of Tolkien already know, Christopher's style is dense, dry, academic, and painfully precise, and it can make some of the appendices a bit of a slog. Particularly hard to get through are the parts where he's trying to describe the various different versions of the text he found in his father's notes and how they differ from each other. Trying to follow his A's and B's and LT's is like trying to put together a piece of IKEA furniture.
Disappointing in many ways, The Fall of Arthur is still a fascinating work and worth a look for die-hard fans of Tolkien or Arthur. |
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