The Fall of Arthur
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| Editor | Christopher Tolkien |
|---|---|
| Author | J. R. R. Tolkien |
| Illustrator | Bill Sanderson |
| Cover artist | Bill Sanderson |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Genre | alliterative poem; Arthurian legend |
| Publisher |
HarperCollins Houghton Mifflin Harcourt |
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Publication date
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21 May 2013 |
| Media type | Print (hardback); Kindle ebook |
| Pages | 240 |
| ISBN | (hardback) 978-0-007-48989-3 (deluxe edition) |
| Preceded by | The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún |
| Followed by | Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary |
The Fall of Arthur is the title of an unfinished poem by J.R.R. Tolkien, concerned with the legend of King Arthur. A first posthumous edition of the poem was published by HarperCollins in May 2013.
The poem is alliterative, extending to close to 1,000 verses imitating the Old English Beowulf metre in Modern English. Though inspired by high medieval Arthurian fiction, the historical setting of the poem is early medieval, both in form (using Germanic verse) and in content, showing Arthur as a Migration period British military leader fighting the Saxon invasion, while it avoids the high medieval aspects Arthurian cycle (such as the Grail, and the courtly setting); the poem begins with a British "counter-invasion" to the Saxon lands (Arthur eastward in arms purposed).
Tolkien, who was at the time Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke College, Oxford, wrote the poem during the earlier part of the 1930s. He abandoned it at some point after 1934, most likely in 1937 when he was occupied with preparing The Hobbit for publication. Its composition thus dates to shortly after The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun, a poem of 508 lines modelled on the Breton lay genre, written in 1930.
When the poem had been abandoned for nearly 20 years, in 1955 (after the publication of The Lord of the Rings was complete), Tolkien expressed his wish to return to his "long poem" and complete it in a letter to Houghton Mifflin, but in spite of this the poem remained unfinished.
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