The Fall of Arthur

by J. R. R. Tolkien

  In all the accounts of this war Sir Gawain is credited with the possession of a very singular ‘grace’, a faculty whereby his strength greatly increased towards noon and then again declined. When Lancelot perceived that this was so he dodged to and fro and avoided Gawain’s thrusts for a long time until his miraculous strength began to wane, whereupon Lancelot fell on him and gave him a great wound. (Incidentally the Mort Artu tells the story that during the time of Gawain’s recovery Arthur left the siege of Benwick and conducted his Roman campaign, in which the Emperor Lucius was slain; Malory of course ignored this, since he had already told the story in his tale of Arthur and the Emperor Lucius, see here.) But when Gawain was able to fight again all was repeated a second time with the same outcome, for Lancelot struck him in the place of the former wound. And even yet Gawain’s hatred was unappeased, but as he prepared for a third attempt news came from England that led Arthur to raise the siege of Benwick and return. That news was that Mordred had claimed to have received letters telling that Arthur had been slain in battle by Lancelot; that he had ‘made a parlemente’, and had had himself crowned king at Canterbury; and that he had declared that he would wed Guinevere, naming the day and preparing the bridal feast.

  To Mordred Guinevere masked her intention, but fled to London and took refuge from him in the Tower; and though he attacked it he could not take it, and there she remained. But now Arthur with a great navy was approaching Dover, and there was Mordred awaiting him.

  *

  Thus it had been brought about that while King Arthur’s seaborne campaign remained the precedent history had entirely changed. It was the love of Lancelot and Guinevere that in a long chain of causation brought the king’s departure from England (not ‘Britain’) to pass: from the intrusion of Agravain and Mordred to the death by burning imposed on Guinevere, from which Lancelot rescued her, but at the cost of his slaying of Gareth and Gaheris, whereby Gawain’s love of Lancelot is changed to insane hatred, to the banishment of Lancelot, and so to the expedition of vengeance against him in his lands in France. Congruence between the distinct traditions, exemplified by the alliterative Morte Arthure and the stanzaic Morte Arthur, is only reached when news reaches Arthur overseas of Mordred’s usurpation of the kingdom.

  It will be seen that in many features the third canto of The Fall of Arthur is much at variance, largely by omission, with Malory’s Tale of the Death of Arthur (as also with the stanzaic Morte Arthur). There is no suggestion that Lancelot’s killing of Gawain’s brothers was the crucial moment in the development of the tragedy; and it is certainly the case that what is vital to the story in the old versions, the relentless hatred felt for Lancelot by Gawain, his former devoted friend, is absent. In Canto III Gawain appears only (lines 29 ff.) in a portrait, expressly juxtaposed, to his advantage, with that of Lancelot which precedes it, and again in a reference (III.177) to his glory while Lancelot in Benwick ‘over leagues of sea / looked and pondered alone musing / doubtful-hearted’. But he plays no part in the narrative until the sea-battle on Arthur’s return. It is true that in Canto I Gawain, speaking ‘grave and slowly’, opposes Arthur’s desire to call upon Lancelot and his people for aid against Mordred (I.190.); but it seems that Gawain’s dissent arose from doubt of the loyalty of ‘Ban’s kindred’, and the measured tone of his words is far removed from the implacable anger of the Gawain of the old books.

  In The Fall of Arthur the narrative of events following Guinevere’s rescue from the fire is reduced to the words ‘far he bore her; / fear fell on men, none would follow after’ (III.83–4); and the entire story of the siege of Joyous Garde by Arthur and Gawain, the fierce fighting there, the intensity of Lancelot’s chivalric loyalty to the king, the intervention of the Pope – all this has gone.

  The conception, in the retrospective view of Canto III, of the breaking of the fellowship of the Round Table and the complexity of Lancelot’s loves and loyalties is thus rendered far simpler. With the absence of Gawain a dimension is removed. The gulf that opened between King Arthur and Sir Lancelot becomes more sharply defined, and is found to be impossible of resolution. This is clearly stated more than once:

  He his lord betrayed to love yielding,

  and love forsaking lord regained not;

  faith was refused him who had faith broken,

  by leagues of sea from love sundered.

  (III.15–18, repeated without the third line in III.140–2.)

  The rescue of Guinevere from the stake remains crucial in The Fall of Arthur, but not on account of the slaying of Gareth and Gaheris: rather it is on account of the reckless violence of Lancelot’s irruption on the scene, which was followed by a Túrin-like subsidence after a great rage, and led to a far-reaching penitence of spirit and attempt to undo the havoc he had caused, an agonizing recognition of guilt.

  His pride he repented, his prowess cursing

  that friends had felled, faith had broken. (III.90–1)

  Above all, ‘Strong oaths they broke’ (III.62): he must restore Guinevere to the king, seeking his mercy towards her and his own reacceptance.

  Neither in the stanzaic Morte Arthur nor in Malory’s tale is there any reference to Guinevere’s thoughts or wishes in the matter. Very different is her treatment in The Fall of Arthur, where her desires are analyzed, and where she finds this new Lancelot an unwelcome stranger whose disturbance of mind she cannot comprehend: ‘Strange she deemed him, / by a sudden sickness from his self altered’ (III.95–6). The same words are used of Lancelot: ‘Strange he deemed her / from her self altered’. But Lancelot’s loss was far greater than Guinevere’s; for ‘Though in wrath she left him, no ruth showing, / proud and scornful, dear he loved her’ (III.166–8). ‘In the courts of Camelot she was queen again, / great and glorious’ (III.113–14); while Lancelot as petitioner was by King Arthur rejected utterly, and banished to his dark reflections in another land. But the king, sad at heart, knew that he had lost the best of all his knights and many with him; and while he lamented this to Gawain when the news of Mordred’s treason reached them (I.180), Lancelot in Benwick, hearing rumours of approaching war, turned over in his mind conflicting thoughts of Arthur and Guinevere (III.143).

  With the absence of Gawain, the invasion of Benwick which he inspired in vengeance against Lancelot also disappeared in The Fall of Arthur. We do not see Arthur again until Canto IV, when Mordred on the sea-cliffs hears the cry of ‘A sail, a sail on the sea shining!’ (IV.117). But before the ‘Lancelot story’ enters in retrospective form in Canto III there is the wholly original Canto II, in which is told how the dying captain of a ship wrecked on the coast, a heathen sea-rover named Radbod in the pay of Mordred, reported to him that Sir Cradoc (as told in Canto I) had slipped out of Britain and followed the trail of King Arthur to warn him of the designs of Mordred against him; already Arthur was hastening back to Britain. With his last breath Radbod gave Mordred a tense account of the feverish preparations of warriors and ships (II.76–89).

  But the most remarkable aspect of Canto II of The Fall of Arthur is the emergence of Mordred as a fully imagined figure in the approaching calamity.

  In Canto I no more has been told of him than that his vigorous support of Arthur’s eastward campaign veiled a secret and evil purpose which is now revealed. Guinevere has not been named. Of his association with the queen Geoffrey of Monmouth had said only (see here) that after his victory over the Romans news reached King Arthur that she was living adulterously with Mordred. In the alliterative Morte Arthure (see here) Sir Cradoc told the king that ‘worst of all Mordred’s deeds he had wedded Guinevere and begotten a child’. In Malory’s version of the story (see here) the news that reached Arthur at Benwick was that Mordred had declared that he would wed Guinevere. In full Malory’s text reads:

  And so he made redy for the feste, and a day prefyxte that they shulde be wedded; wherefore quene Gwenyver was passyng hevy. But she durst nat discover her harte, but spake fayre, and aggreed to sir Mordredys wylle. And anone she desyred
of sir Mordred to go to London to byghe [buy] all maner thynges that longed to the brydale. And bycause of her fayre speche sir Mordred trusted her and gaff her leve; and so whan she cam to London she toke the Towre of London, and suddeynly in all haste possyble she stuffed hit with all maner of vytayle, and wel garnysshed hit with men, and so kepte hit.

  In Canto I of The Fall of Arthur Sir Cradoc says nothing of Guinevere; but in Canto II before Radbod the ship’s captain had delivered his tidings Mordred is seen looking out from a high window indifferent to the storm in which the ship foundered (II.18–31), for his mind was wholly absorbed in his desire for Guinevere; and when he had heard what Radbod had to tell, and had sent ‘messengers speeding / northward and eastward the news bearing’, he set out for Camelot. Guinevere heard the quick steps of this deeply sinister man as he came up the stair to her bower. At that fateful meeting Mordred offered her a choice that was no choice, between ‘slave or lady, wife or captive’ (II.154–5). Guinevere asked for time, but he would grant her little enough: ‘twixt bride and bond / brief be the choosing!’ She decided on immediate flight - but not to the Tower of London. She stole away in a dark cloak; and we see next the lights of Camelot fading behind her as she fled westward with a few companions, making for the castle of King Leodogrance, her father.

  Canto II ends with her thoughts of Lancelot: would he return? Canto IV begins with a bright morning on the borders of Wales, when the riders sent out by Mordred to hunt her down lose all trace of her.

  The queen they hunted with cold hatred,

  till their hope failed them amid houseless stones,

  halting hungry-eyed under the hills’ menace

  at the walls of Wales.

  Then follows the news of their failure delivered to Mordred by his squire Ivor, together with some advice out of season that enraged his master, as he stood in his camp on the coastal cliffs above Romeril (Romney in Kent), gazing at the empty sea: fearful lest Guinevere had sent a messenger to Lancelot, ‘love recalling /and his aid asking in her evil day’ (IV.96). At last the sails of Arthur’s navy were seen.

  Here one may look back to see how to this point my father had treated, and transformed, the narrative tradition that came to be known in later times in England from Malory’s last tale, The Death of Arthur.

  He preserved the ‘chronicle’ tradition of Arthur’s eastern campaign overseas, but totally changed its nature and purpose. Arthur defends ‘Rome’, he does not assault it.

  He retained the treason and usurpation of Mordred and his desire for Guinevere, but in a greatly developed portrait.

  He introduced (in a retrospect) the ‘romance’ legend of Lancelot and Guinevere (entirely unknown to the ‘chronicle’ tradition), but greatly simplified the complex motives, deriving from the French Mort Artu, and found in the English stanzaic Morte Arthur and in Malory’s last tale, by excising Gawain’s part. He preserved the sentence of burning passed on Guinevere and her rescue by Lancelot; but his banishment now arose as punishment for his relationship with the queen, and not from Gawain’s hatred of him for his slaying of Gareth. Lancelot is banished to Benwick, but Guinevere is restored to Arthur’s favour.

  The attack on Benwick by Arthur and Gawain was entirely excised, and the news of Mordred’s treason reached Arthur not at Benwick but in the distant east.

  *

  Malory’s Tale of the Death of Arthur (ii)

  I will now sketch the concluding narrative of Malory’s last tale, taking it up from where I left it (see here) with Arthur’s ships approaching Dover and Mordred awaiting him. Malory was now quite largely drawing on the English poem, the stanzaic Morte Arthur, for the detail of the narrative.

  Arthur’s host fought their way up from the beaches and with much bloodshed routed Mordred’s people. But Sir Gawain was found, lying in a boat, ‘more than halff dede’; and speaking to King Arthur he declared that through his pride and stubbornness he had caused his own death, for now he had been smitten in the place of the old wound that Lancelot gave him at Benwick; and that it was through him that Arthur suffered this grievous misfortune:

  for had that noble knyght, Sir Launcelot, ben with you, as he was and wolde have ben, thys unhappy warre had never ben begunne ..... And now ye shall mysse sir Launcelot. But alas that I wolde nat acccorde with hym!

  And before he died he called for paper and pen to write a letter to Lancelot beseeching him to return in haste to aid King Arthur against Mordred.

  Gawain was buried in the chapel in Dover Castle. But Mordred retreated to Barham Down in Kent, a few miles from Canterbury, and there Arthur came upon him: this battle ended with Mordred’s flight to Canterbury. Arthur then withdrew westward to Salisbury Plain, and the two hosts prepared for a further encounter. But Sir Gawain appeared to Arthur in a dream, saying that he had been sent by God to warn him against further fighting until a month had passed, by which time Sir Lancelot would come from France with all his knights. A treaty was then negotiated with Mordred to this end, but broken by a mistaken fear of treachery; and there followed the third and most savage battle lasting all day till nightfall, and ending with King Arthur and Sir Bedivere and Sir Lucan on the one hand, and Mordred on the other, standing amid vast numbers of slain men. But the king caught sight of Mordred ‘leanyng uppon his swerde amonge a grete hepe of dede men’; and racing towards each other Arthur ran Mordred through with his spear. Then Mordred knew that he had got his death wound, but with his last strength ‘he smote hys fadir, kynge Arthure, with hys swerde holdynge in both hys hondys, uppon the syde of the hede, that the swerde perced the helmet’, and with that Mordred ‘daysshed downe starke dede to the erthe’.

  Then Sir Bedivere and Sir Lucan, themselves severely wounded, carried the king to ‘a lytyll chapell nat farre from the see’. Hearing a great clamour from the battlefield, for robbers had come to pillage the slain, the two knights thought it best to carry the king further off, but as they did so Sir Lucan fell dead from his wounds. Then Arthur ordered Bedivere to take his sword Excalibur, to cast it into ‘yondir watirs syde’, and returning tell him what he had seen. Twice Bedivere went to the water, and each time he feigned that he had done what he was bidden; but each time King Arthur told him in anger that he lied. For a third time Bedivere went ‘unto the watirs syde’, and returning told truthfully that he had hurled the sword as far as he could, whereupon an arm had risen from the water, caught the sword and brandished it, and then drew it down and disappeared.

  Then, as the king commanded, Bedivere carried him on his back to the water’s edge, where ‘faste by the banke hoved [waited] a lytyll barge with many fayre ladyes in hit, and amonge them all was a quene’, she being Arthur’s sister, Morgan la Fée. Then Bedivere laid Arthur in the barge, and Morgan said (following the words in the stanzaic Morte Arthur) ‘A, my dere brother! Why have ye taryed so longe from me? Alas, thys wounde on youre hede hath caught overmuch coulde!’ But as the barge departed Bedivere cried out to the king asking what should become of him; and he answered:

  Comforte thyselff, and do as well as thou mayste, for in me ys no truste for to truste in. For I muste into the vale of Avylyon to hele me of my grevous wounde. And if thou here nevermore of me, pray for my soule!

  Next day, in his wandering Bedivere came upon ‘a chapell and an ermytage’ where there was a newly dug grave, concerning which the hermit told him that ‘a number of ladies’ had come at midnight and brought the body to him for burial (on this matter see here). Then Bedivere remained at the hermitage, which was ‘besydes Glassyngbyry’ (Glastonbury in Somerset), and lived with the hermit ‘in prayers and fastynges and grete abstynaunce’. But when Guinevere learned of all that had happened she ‘stole away’ and came to Amysbyry (Amesbury in Wiltshire), and there became a nun:

  and never creature coude make her myry, but ever she lyved in fastynge, prayers, and almes-dedis, that all maner of people mervayled how vertuously she was chaunged.

  When Lancelot in Benwick learned of what had come to pass in England, and had
received Gawain’s letter, in great haste he made ready a host and crossed the sea to Dover. There he found that he was too late. He visited in great grief the tomb of Gawain in the chapel of Dover Castle, and then he rode away westwards until he came to the convent where Guinevere had become a nun. When she saw him again she fell into a swoon, but recovering she said to the assembled nuns, in the presence of Lancelot:

  Thorow thys same man and me hath all thys warre be wrought, and the deth of the moste nobelest knyghtes of the worlde; for thorow oure love that we have loved togydir ys my moste noble lorde slayne. Therefore, sir Launcelot, wyte thou well I am sette in suche a plyght to get my soule hele [healing, health].

  In the words between them, which cannot be shortened or sketched, she remained adamant, refusing him when he said ‘I praye you kysse me, and never no more.’ And so they parted, ‘but there was never so harde an herted man but he wold have wepte to see the dolour that they made, for there was lamentacyon as they had be stungyn with sperys.’

  After Lancelot left Amesbury he came upon the hermitage where Bedivere now lived, and he stayed there, and led the same manner of life. Other knights of the Round Table came to join them there; and after six years Lancelot became a priest. One night he had a vision, in which he was told that he must go to to Amesbury, where he would find Guinevere dead, and that she must be buried by the side of King Arthur. With his companions Lancelot went on foot ‘from Glastynburye to Almysburye, the whiche is lytel more than thirty myle’, but they took two days, for they were weak and feeble from their lives of penance and fasting. When they reached Amesbury they learned that Guinevere had died only half an hour before; and they were told that she had said of Lancelot that