The Fall of Arthur
Page 11
About all the World are the Ilurambar, or Walls of the World. They are as ice and glass and steel, being above all imagination of the Children of Earth cold, transparent, and hard. They cannot be seen, nor can they be passed, save by the Door of Night.
Within these Walls the Earth is globed: above, below, and upon all sides is Vaiya, the Enfolding Ocean.
In the midst of Valinor is Ando Lómen, the Door of Timeless Night that pierceth the Walls and opens upon the Void. For the World is set amid Kúma, the Void, the Night without form or time. But none can pass the chasm and the belt of Vaiya and come to that Door, save the great Valar only. And they made that Door when Melko [Morgoth] was overcome and put forth into the Outer Dark; and it is guarded by Eärendel.
I have of course set out here all these passages, chosen from an immense body of writing, not for their own intrinsic significance, but to reinforce the remarkable nature of my father’s deliberate and substantial evocation of a cardinal myth of his own ‘world’, the great voyage of Eärendel to Valinor, in relation to Sir Lancelot of Arthurian legend – to whom, indeed, he was now ascribing a great voyage across the western ocean.25
It will be observed that in these lines of the ‘Eärendel passage’ (see here) the only name that does not derive from the ‘Silmarillion’ narratives is the hills of Avalon. Comparing the description of the voyage of Eärendel and Elwing in the quotation from The Quenta given on see here, where after the passage of the Shadowy Seas and the Magic Isles ‘they looked upon the Lonely Isle and they tarried not there’, it seems at least very probable that ‘Avalon’ here bears the meaning ‘Tol Eressëa’, as in the texts of the 1930s cited on see here. If this is so, then where my father wrote in a ‘Silmarillion’ context that Tol Eressëa was renamed Avallon, he also wrote Avalon for Tol Eressëa in an Arthurian context.
It may be thought that the ‘Eärendel verses’ show no more than a large parallel between two great westward voyages. But the second poem, in the first phase of composition and extraordinarily difficult to read (and with two most unfortunate illegibilities), found among these papers26 and given on see here, introduces much more extraordinary associations.
These verses open with the reflection that while Gawain’s grave lies ‘by the sounding sea, where the sun westers’ there are no burial mounds of Lancelot or Guinevere, and ‘no mound hath Arthur in mortal land’ – and the verses that follow concern Arthur: but they are very closely similar, or nearly identical, to the concluding lines of the ‘Eärendel verses’. It is not immediately obvious which of these two ‘poems’, for convenience here called Eärendel’s Quest and Arthur’s Grave, preceded the other. It might seem that the much more finished form, in typescript, of Eärendel’s Quest suggests that it is the later; but the fact that the names closely associated with the Eärendel legend accompany the figure of Eärendel in that poem, whereas in Arthur’s Grave those names are associated with King Arthur, seems to me a stronger argument that Arthur’s Grave followed Eärendel’s Quest.
It is said at the end of Arthur’s Grave that Arthur ‘bides’ (changed from ‘sleeps’) in Avalon, while the Bay of Faëry becomes the Bay of Avalon. On the face of it, Arthur’s living presence ‘in Avalon’ suggests that the name is here used in the familiar Arthurian sense of the island to which Arthur was taken to be healed by Morgan La Fée; but its appearance in the context of ‘Silmarillion’ names seems also to indicate that it was Tol Eressëa.
Similar is the change of the name of the Bay of Elvenhome (or of Faërie, or of Eldamar) to the Bay of Avalon. The name Avalon, now used of Tol Eressëa, is here extended from the isle to the coasts of the vast bay in which Tol Eressëa was anchored.27
It seems then that the Arthurian Avalon, the Fortunate Isle, Insula Pomorum, dominion of Morgan la Fée, had now been in some mysterious sense identified with Tol Eressëa, the Lonely Isle. But the name Avallon entered, as a name of Tol Eressëa, at the time when the Fall of Númenor and the Change of the World entered also (see here), with the conception of the Straight Path out of the Round World that still led to Tol Eressëa and Valinor, a road that was denied to mortals, and yet found, in a mystery, by Ælfwine of England.
How my father saw this conjunction I am wholly unable to say. It may be that through absence of more precise dating I have been led to combine into a contemporaneous whole ideas that were not coherent, but emerged and fell aside in that time of great creative upheaval. But I will repeat here what I said in The Lost Road and Other Writings, p.98, of my father’s intentions for his ‘time-travel’ book:
With the entry at this time of the cardinal ideas of the Downfall of Númenor, the World Made Round, and the Straight Road, into the conception of ‘Middle-earth’, and the thought of a ‘time-travel’ story in which the very significant figure of the Anglo-Saxon Ælfwine would be both ‘extended’ into the future, into the twentieth century, and ‘extended’ also into a many-layered past, my father was envisaging a massive and explicit linking of his own legends with those of many other places and times: all concerned with the stories and the dreams of peoples who dwelt by the coasts of the great Western Sea.
*
In conclusion, it remains to consider those notes of my father’s for the continuation of the story of Lancelot and Guinevere (see here).
We learn of Lancelot after his return, too late, from France that he rode west from Romeril ‘along the empty roads’, and that he met Guinevere ‘coming down out of Wales’. Already the narrative was set to turn definitively from that found in the stanzaic Morte Arthur, which was closely followed by Malory, of whose account I gave a brief sketch on see here. My father’s notes, exceedingly brief as they are, show beyond question that the later years of this Guinevere will know nothing of a nunnery, or of ‘fastynge, prayers, and alme-dedis’ with a long face, and she will certainly not call upon Lancelot in such words as these:
‘But I beseche the, in alle thynge,
That newyr in thy lyffe after thysse
Ne come to me for no sokerynge,
Nor send me sond, but dwelle in blysse:
I pray to Gode euyr lastynge
To graunt me grace to mend my mysse.’28
Still less will this Lancelot reply in such words as these of Malory’s:
‘Now, my swete madame,’ seyde sir Launcelot, ‘wolde ye that I shuld turne agayne unto my contrey, and there to wedde a lady? Nay, madame, wyte you well that shall I never do, for I shall never be so false unto you of that I have promysed. But the selff [same] destiny that ye have takyn you to, I woll take me to, for the pleasure of Jesu, and ever for you I caste me specially to pray.’
All otherwise was their meeting when she came down from Wales as my father would tell it. It was indeed foreseen in verses of the third canto:
Strange she deemed him,
by a sudden sickness from his self altered. (III.95–6)
Strange he deemed her
from her self altered. By the sea stood he
as a graven stone grey and hopeless.
In pain they parted. (III.106–9)
In the stanzaic Morte Arthur there was great sorrow at the last meeting and the parting in the nunnery:
But none erthely man covde telle
The sorow that there by-gan to bene
and in Malory’s tale ‘there was lamentacyon as they had be stungyn with sperys’ (see here); but there was determination and resignation. In the last meeting between them in the notes to The Fall of Arthur (see here) there was desolation and emptiness. In the first of the notes that bear on this Lancelot asks of Guinevere only: Where is Arthur? Though the mood is of course altogether different, this has something of the pared-down poignancy of Morwen’s question to Húrin concerning Túrin as she died: ‘If you know, tell me! How did she find him?’ Húrin said nothing; and Guinevere had nothing to tell. Lancelot ‘turned from her.’
In another note concerning their last meeting it is said that Lancelot had no love left but for Arthur: Guinevere had lost all her power ove
r him. The words of the third canto are repeated: ‘In pain they parted’, but now is added ‘cold and griefless’. This Lancelot is not going to spend his last years in fasting and penance, and to end his life eating and drinking so little that he ‘dryed and dwyned awaye’ (see here). He went to the sea shore and learned from the hermit who dwelt there that Arthur had departed west over the ocean. He set sail to follow Arthur, and no more was ever heard of him. ‘Whether he found Arthur in Avalon and will return no one knows.’
But what lay before Sir Lancelot, is declared by the poet in the concluding lines of the third canto. Though filled with a lighter mind and new hope in Benwick after the great storm had passed, ‘the hour he knew not’:
The tides of chance had turned backward,
their flood was passed flowing swiftly.
Death was before him and his day setting
beyond the tides of time to return never
among waking men, while the world lasted.
One may imagine that my father saw his story of the departure of Sir Lancelot as re-enacting in some sense the tale of Tuor, father of Eärendel (Tuor was the son of Huor, the brother of Húrin; he wedded Idril Celebrindal, the daughter of Turgon King of Gondolin). In the Quenta of 1930 this is told of him:
In those days Tuor felt old age creep upon him, and he could not forbear the longing that possessed him for the sea; wherefore he built a great ship Eärámë, Eagle’s pinion, and with Idril he set sail into the sunset and the West, and came no more into any tale.
Eärendel afterwards built Wingelot, and set out on a great voyage, with a double purpose: to find Idril and Tuor, who had never come back, and ‘he thought to find perhaps the last shore and bring ere he died a message to the Gods and Elves of the West.’ But Eärendel did not find Tuor and Idril, nor did he on that first western voyage reach the shores of Valinor.
We last see Guinevere watching from far off the sails of Lancelot’s departing ship: ‘she sees his silver banner vanish under the moon.’ There is mention of her flight into Wales to escape from ‘the men of the East.’ From my father’s few pencilled sentences it seems that her life henceforward held nothing but grievous loneliness and self-pity; ‘but though grief was her lot it is not said that she mourned for others more than for herself.’ Two lines of verse that he wrote (see here) have the air of an epitaph.
Guinevere grew grey in the grey shadow
all things losing who at all things grasped.
*
THE EVOLUTION OF THE POEM
THE EVOLUTION OF THE POEM
It was a remarkable feature of my father’s ‘Norse’ poems, The Lay of the Völsungs and The Lay of Gudrún, that of work preceding the finished text there survive only a few pages, and apart from these ‘there is no trace of any earlier drafting whatsoever’ (The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún, p.40). Obviously such material existed, and was lost at some stage. Very different indeed is the case of The Fall of Arthur, where there are some 120 pages of drafting (preserved, not surprisingly, in a state of confusion) preceding the ‘final’ text given in this book. The movement from the earliest workings (often only partly legible) can be largely followed through succeeding manuscripts that underwent abundant emendation. In some parts of the poem confusing elements are the parallel development of different versions, and the movement of blocks of text to stand in different contexts.
The amount of time and thought that my father expended on this work is astounding. It would be possible of course to provide a complete and detailed textual apparatus, including an account of every emendation that arose in the successive manuscripts as he searched unceasingly for a better rhythm, or a better word or phrase within the alliterative constraints. But this would be a huge task, and in my view disproportionate.
On the other hand, to omit all textual commentary would be to conceal remarkable and essential elements of the poem’s creation. This is especially so in the case of Canto III, which was the heart of the poem, the most worked upon, and the most changed in the process, and I have provided a fairly full account (fuller than might generally be thought desirable, and inevitably not at all points easy to follow) of that history as I understand it; but throughout my textual commentary on the poem I have frequently omitted minor alterations made for metrical or stylistic reasons.
In what follows I use the word ‘draft’ to refer to any or all of the pages of verse that precede the latest text of The Fall of Arthur, that is, the manuscript from which the text in this book is taken. This latest text does give the impression of having been written as a whole and set apart, and so might be regarded as ‘final’, but it underwent a good deal of correction and alteration subsequently, chiefly in the first two cantos. As a rule, indeed, no manuscript of my father’s could be regarded as ‘final’ until it had safely left his hands. But in this case by far the greater number of such changes were made quickly in pencil; and of similar changes made to the manuscripts of my father’s ‘Norse’ poems I wrote (The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún, p.40): ‘I have the impression that my father read through the text many years later … and quickly emended points that struck him as he went.’ The same may well be true of The Fall of Arthur, but of course this cannot be determined. The fact that these changes are markedly more numerous in Cantos I and II may suggest renewed interest in the poem at some later date, which petered out.
However this manuscript is to be regarded, it must be constantly referred to, and I name it by the letters LT, for Latest Text.
A most extraordinary aspect of the writing of the poem is revealed in the draft pages: namely, that Canto I, the account of King Arthur’s campaign into the East, so far from being the first to be written, was in fact introduced when work on the poem was well advanced.
There are two draft manuscripts of Canto II (the narrative of the news brought by the captain of the wrecked Frisian ship, and of Mordred’s visit to Guinevere in Camelot), and also a single page carrying the opening of the poem. All three begin with the lines:
Dark wind came driving over deep water,
from the South sweeping surf upon the beaches …
The earliest, which I will call IIa, has this title:
The Fall of Arthur
I
How [Mordred >] Radbod brought news and Mordred gathered his army to stay the king’s landing
The text is in essentials the same as that of Canto II in LT as printed, though with a great many differences, but goes no further than the equivalent of line II.109, in this text ‘cormorants of the coast and the cold marshes’.
The second, following, draft text, called IIb, has the same heading as IIa on the first page, but has the whole text of the canto, with again numerous differences though not of structure.
The single page, IIc, of the canto, referred to above, follows the text IIb, and here the heading is thus:
The Fall of Arthur
II
How the Frisian ship brought news, and Mordred gathered an
army and came to Camelot seeking the queen.
But the figure II in this heading was a later extension from I.
It is notable that when Canto I was added no new narrative elements or references were added to what had become Canto II; but this, I presume, was because my father’s original plan had been to open the poem with Mordred and Guinevere, and he had not then considered any prior narrative necessary. One has only to read Canto II now, therefore, with this knowledge, to appreciate how little had been told of Arthur’s absence from Britain: no more is said of the previous history than the words that Radbod, the captain of the Frisian ship, spoke to Mordred before he died (the equivalence in the draft manuscript IIb of the lines II.70–77 in the latest version):
Cradoc the accurséd hath thy counsel bewrayed, [betrayed]
in Arthur’s ears all is rumoured
of thy deeds and purpose. Dark is his anger.
He hastens home, and his host summons
from the Roman marches, riding like a tempest.
&nb
sp; Mordred’s warning to Guinevere, II.144–7, was present in IIb in this form, with a reference to Benwick:
Never again shall Arthur enter this kingdom,
nor Lancelot du Lake love remembering
from Benwick to Britain over broad waters
return to thy tryst!
Another, and notable, reference to Lancelot appears in IIb (repeated from IIa), where Mordred summons to his side ‘lords and earls … faithful in falseness, foes of Arthur, lovers of Lancelot’: in LT (the latest text) Lancelot was changed to treason (II.105).
*
Canto III
For a number of reasons it is clearest, or at any rate least unclear, to begin this account with Canto III, ‘Of Sir Lancelot, who abode in Benwick’.
The draft manuscripts consist very largely of verses, but among them are three synopses of the story of Lancelot and Guinevere as my father thought to tell it, or rather to assume it, in his poem. They were numbered (subsequently) I, II, and III. All three were written very rapidly but seldom illegibly. I have expanded contractions and made a few very minor emendations.
Synopsis I opens with a passage in praise of Lancelot that was quite closely followed in III.19–28. Then follows:
Gawain alone was almost his equal but of sterner mood, loving the king above men and above women, in courtesy cloaking mistrust of the Queen. But the Queen loved Lancelot, to his praise only would she listen. Thus jealousy awoke in lesser hearts, but most in Mordred’s whom her beauty inflamed. Lancelot rejoiced in the Queen’s beauty and served her ever but was loyal long to his lord, but the net closed about him and the Queen would not release him, but with laughter or with tears bent his purpose till he fell from loyalty.