The Fall of Arthur

by J. R. R. Tolkien

  (II.128–33) to no noise of knighthood. Nights are weary.

  Yet less than beloved or lower than queen

  life here below shalt thou lead never.

  A king courts thee …

  A pencilled change replaced this in IIb:

  to no noise of knighthood. Yet never shalt thou

  live unbeloved, nor less than queen,

  though chances change – if thou choose aright.

  The final text of LT was written in the margin of the manuscript.

  (II.144–7) For the text of IIb here see here.

  (II.157–65) my thirst slaking;

  for life is loathsome by longing haunted;

  I will be king after and crowned with gold.’

  Then Guinever the proud, aghast in mind,

  between fear and loathing, who in former day

  wielding beauty was wont rather

  to be sought than seized, dissembling spake:

  ‘Eagerly my lord do ye urge your suit!

  Delay allow me …

  (II.176–7) These lines are absent in IIb.

  (II.213) and time’s new tide turn to her purpose.

  *

  Cantos IV and V

  In Canto IV the textual history is readily followed. The first manuscript, which would be constantly unintelligible without the later texts as a guide, is less a text of the poem than a record of my father ‘thinking with his pen’. It may be that he was to some extent giving written form to verse that he had already prepared and memorised, but it is clear that he was also composing ab initio, experimenting as he went, often setting down several variants of an alliterative phase.

  This manuscript was already remarkably close to the text of the latest version. Following it is a hastily written but legible text, somewhat emended in the usual fashion, leading to the text (LT) as printed. One passage of the canto in LT was rejected and another, longer version (IV.137–154) written, equally carefully in ink, on a separate sheet: the rejected text reads as follows:

  At Arthur’s side eager hastened

  a mighty ship in the morn gleaming

  high, white-timbered, with hull gilded;

  on its sail was sewn a sun rising,

  on its broidered banner in the breeze floated

  a griffon glowing as with golden fire.

  Thus Gawain came his king guarding

  to the van hasting. Now to view came all:

  a hundred ships with hulls shining,

  and shrouds swelling and shields swinging.

  Ten thousand told targes hung there …

  The few pencilled alterations to the text may be mentioned:

  line 24 ‘like drops of glass dripped and glistened’ replaced ‘like tears of glass gleamed and tinkled’;

  lines 98–9 were a marginal addition;

  lines 209–10 ‘as stalks falling / before reapers ruthless, as roke flying’ replaced ‘as starlings fleeing / from reapers ruthless, as roke melting’.

  Lastly, the title of the canto as I have given it, ‘How Arthur returned at morn and by Sir Gawain’s hand won the passage of the sea’, was a replacement of the original title written in ink ‘Of the setting of the sun at Romeril’ – which became the title of Canto V.

  Of the the fifth canto no draft material in verse survives.

  *

  APPENDIX

  APPENDIX:

  OLD ENGLISH VERSE

  The importance of the use of Old English ‘alliterative verse’ in my father’s sole ‘Arthurian’ poem seems to call for some indication, within the pages of this book, of its essential nature, preferably in his own words. His account of the ancient verse-form is indeed well known, appearing in his ‘Prefatory Remarks’ to the new edition (1940) by C.L. Wrenn of the translation of Beowulf by J.R. Clark Hall; these ‘Prefatory Remarks’ have been reprinted in J.R.R. Tolkien: The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays, 1983. I have also cited a portion of it in The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún, 2009.

  On 14 January 1938 there was broadcast by the BBC a brief recorded talk by my father entitled ‘Anglo-Saxon Verse’. On this he expended much thought and labour, as is attested by a great deal of preliminary drafting, but here all that need be said is that there is also a later and much longer lecture on the subject, addressed to some audience actually present, clearly related to the broadcast talk but very distinct. For the present book I think it may be interesting to print some passages extracted, with minor editing, from this lecture, very different in scope and manner though belonging to the same period as the Prefatory Remarks.

  For exemplification my father took the concluding lines of the Old English poem The Battle of Brunanburh, and gave an alliterative translation. The text of the lecture was subsequently much emended and many passages were marked for omission, perhaps for considerations of time. The date that appears in the first line, ‘1006 this autumn’, i.e. 1943 as the year of composition, was changed first to ‘1008’ and then to ‘1011 last autumn’; this presumably means that it was repeated in other places in those years.

  Ne wearð wæl máre

  on þýs églande ǽfre gýta

  folces gefylled beforan þyssum

  sweordes wecgum, þæs þe ús secgað béc,

  ealde úþwitan, syððan éastan hider

  Engle and Seaxe úp becómon

  ofer brád brimu, Brytene sóhton,

  wlance wígsmiþas Wéalas ofercómon,

  eorlas árhwate eard begéaton.

  No greater host

  of folk hath fallen before this day

  in this island ever by the edge of swords

  in battle slaughtered, as books tell us

  and ancient authors, since from the east hither

  Saxon and English from the sea landed,

  over the broad billows Britain assailing,

  the Welsh smiting on war’s anvil,

  glory seeking great men of old,

  in this land winning a lasting home.

  So sang a court poet 1000 years ago – 1006 this autumn to be precise: commemorating the great Battle of Brunanburh, AD 937. So great was it that it was long remembered as magnum bellum. The victor was Æthelstan, Ælfred’s grandson, one of the greatest monarchs of the day. His enemies were an alliance of Norse, Scots, and Welsh kings and chieftains. These lines are the ending of a short poem (73 lines long) that is embedded in the so-called ‘Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’. So it comes from the tenth century; the century of the great Æthelwulfing kings (descendants, that is, of Æthelwulf and Ælfred his son), when the English revived after the havoc of the ninth century. It is from the tenth century that we derive most of the documents, of prose and of verse, that have survived the later wrecks of time. The older world, before the Norse invasions, had passed away in ruin. All that has come down to us from that earlier time, the first flowering time of English verse, is preserved in tenth-century copies – all but a very few scraps.

  It is in the records of the fifth century that the word ‘Anglo-Saxon’ first appears. Indeed it was King Æthelstan who, among other high titles such as Bretwalda and Caesar, first styled himself Ongulsaxna cyning, that is, ‘King of Angel-Saxons’. But he did not speak ‘Anglo-Saxon’, for there never was such a language. The king’s language was then, as now, Englisc: English. If you have ever heard that Chaucer was the ‘father of English poetry’, forget it. English poetry has no recorded father, even as a written art, and the beginning lies beyond our view, in the mists of northern antiquity.

  To speak of Anglo-Saxon language is thus wrong and misleading. You can speak of an ‘Anglo-Saxon period’ in history, before 1066. But it is not a very useful label. There was no such thing as a single uniform ‘Anglo-Saxon’ period. The fifth century, and the coming of the English to Britain, to which the poet of Brunanburh referred in the tenth century, was as remote from him in time, and as different from his days in kind, as the Wars of the Roses are from us.

  But there it is: ‘the Anglo-Saxon period’ covers six centuries. During that
long age a great vernacular literature (to speak only of that) – I mean a ‘literature’ in the full sense, books written by cultivated and learned men – had arisen, and been ruined, and again to some extent revived. What is left today is only a tattered fragment of a very great wealth. But as far as can be seen from what is preserved, there is one feature common to all the verse of the period, older and later. That is the ancient English metre and technique of verse. It is quite unlike modern metres and methods, both in its rules and in its aims. It is often called ‘alliterative’ verse – and I will say a word on that in a moment. The ‘alliterative’ measures were used throughout the Anglo-Saxon period for poetry in English; and for English poetry only ‘alliterative’ verse was used. It did not, however, stop at 1066! It went on being used for at least four hundred years longer in the North and West. In the kind of verse meant for books (and so for educated people, clerical or lay) this ‘alliterative’ technique was elaborate and highly polished. It was used because it was admired and appreciated by cultivated men, and not simply because the poor ‘Saxons’ knew nothing else, for in point of fact they did. The English of those days were interested in verse and often quite accomplished metrists, and could when writing in Latin use many classical metres or compose in what we call ‘rhyme’.

  Now this ‘alliterative’ metre has great virtues in itself. I mean that it is quite worthy of study by poets today as a technique. But it is also interesting as being a native art independent of classical models (I mean, as a metre: I am not talking about matter: the ancient English poets of those days often used alliterative verse for matter that they had got out of Greek and Latin books). It was already old in Alfred’s day. Indeed it descends from days before the English came to Britain, and is almost identical with the metre used for the oldest Norse (Norwegian and Icelandic) poems. A great body of oral verse dealing with ancient days in the northern lands was known to minstrels in England, though little has survived beyond one long verse catalogue [Widsith] of the subjects of heroic and legendary song: a list of now forgotten or almost forgotten kings and heroes.

  It would take an hour or two to explain properly the Old English metre and show how it works, and what kind of things it can do and what it cannot. In essence it is made by taking the half-dozen commonest and most compact phrase-patterns of the ordinary language that have two main elements or stresses – for example (lines from the translation of the passage from The Battle of Brunanburh):

  A glóry séeking

  B by the édge of swórds

  C from the séa lánded

  E gréat men of óld

  [added later: D bríght árchàngels]

  Two of these, usually different, are balanced against one another to make a full line. They are linked or cemented together by what is usually but wrongly called ‘alliteration’. It is not ‘alliteration’ because it does not depend on letters or spelling, but on sounds: it is in fact a kind of brief rhyme: head-rhyme.

  The chief syllable – loudest (most stressed), highest in tone, and most significant – in each half must begin with the same consonant, or agree in beginning with a vowel (I.e. no consonant).

  So in battle slaughtered as books tell us

  or glory seeking great men of old

  or ancient authors since from the east hither

  In the last example there are two head-rhymes or ‘staves’ in the first half-line. That is often the case, but not compulsory. In the second half two are not allowed. The first important syllable, and that only, must ‘bear the stave’ or rhyme. This has important consequences. It means that you must always so arrange your phrases that the most important word comes first in the second half-line. There is thus always a drop in force, loudness, and significance at the end of an Old English line, and then the spring is wound up again at the beginning.

  Very frequently the beginning of a new line repeats in more vigorous form, or produces some variation on, the end of the preceding line:

  as books tell us // ancient authors

  from the sea landed // over the broad billows

  So all Old English verse is rich in parallelisms and verbal variations.

  But there is of course a good deal more in Old English verse beside the mere sound patterns. There was the vocabulary and diction. It was ‘poetical’. Already in the first written survivals of English verse we find a rich vocabulary of poetry-words – and then as now these words were to a large extent archaisms, old words and forms that had fallen out of daily use in some senses, or altogether, but had been preserved by poetic tradition.

  Kennings. Poetic ‘riddling’ expressions, sometimes called kennings (an Icelandic word meaning ‘descriptions’), are a marked feature of Old English verse diction, especially in more elaborate poems, and are one of its chief poetic weapons. Thus a poet may say bán-hús ‘bone-house’ and mean ‘body’; but mean you also (though with almost lighting swiftness) to think of a house being built with its wooden frame and beams and between them the clay packed and shaped in the old style, and then see the parallelism between that and skeleton and flesh. He may say beado-léoma ‘flame of battle’ and mean ‘sword’ – a bright blade drawn in the sun with a sudden flash; and similarly merehengest ‘sea-stallion’ for ‘ship’; ganotes bæð ‘the gannet’s bathing-place’ for ‘sea’. The Old English poet liked pictures, but valued them the more sudden, hard and compact they were. He did not unroll similes. You had to be attentive and quick-witted to catch all that he meant and saw.

  In the Chronicle poem of the Battle of Brunanburh the poet speaks of wlance wígsmiþas overthrowing the Welsh – literally ‘splendid war-smiths’. You can say if you like that ‘war-smith’ is ‘just a kenning in verse’ for ‘warrior’: so it is in mere logic and syntax. But it was coined and used to mean ‘warrior’ and at the same time to give a sound-picture and an eye-picture of battle. We miss it, because none of us have seen or heard a battle of steel or iron weapons hand-wielded, and few now have seen an old-fashioned smith hammering iron on an anvil. The clang of such a battle could be heard a long way off: like a lot of men hammering on metal bars and hacking at iron-cooped barrels, or – very much like, for those who have heard it (as everyone had in those days), a smith beating out a plough-share, or forging chain-links: not one smith, though, but hundreds all in competition. And seen closer too, the rise and fall of swords and axes would remind men of smiths swinging hammers.

  I have no more time to give to Old English verse methods. But you will see that it has some interest. And the attempt to translate it is not a bad exercise for training in the full appreciation of words – a thing already all people are perilously slack in nowadays: though it is really impossible. Our language now has becone quick-moving (in syllables), and may be very supple and nimble, but is rather thin in sound and in sense too often diffuse and vague. The language of our forefathers, especially in verse, was slow, not very nimble, but very sonorous, and was intensely packed and concentrated – or could be in a good poet.

  Appended to this lecture are four passages from my father’s own ‘alliterative’ works. The first is Winter Comes to Nargothrond in the third version, almost exactly as in The Lays of Beleriand (1985), p.129. The second is a passage from the alliterative Lay of the Children of Húrin, ibid., lines 1554–70, with many minor differences (a much developed version is given in The Lays of Beleriand, pp.129–30).

  Most notably, the third and fourth extracts are taken from The Fall of Arthur. The first of these, as written in ink, consists of III.1–10 (In the south from sleep …) differing only in points of punctuation; later my father pencilled in the next four lines, to Dark slowly fell (which he marked with ‘D’), and wrote against the extract Descriptive Style.

  The second extract from The Fall of Arthur runs from I.183 to 211 and agrees exactly with the text given in this book except that line I.200 and tarnished shields of truant lieges is omitted, and there is a different reading at line 207, upon mortal earth for under moon and sun. A notable feature of this text
is that against each line my father wrote the relevant letters referring to the patterns of strong and weak elements (‘lifts’ and ‘dips’) in each half-line (see here).

  Arthur speaks:

  B C Now for Lancelot I long sorely

  B B and we miss now most the mighty swords

  C A of Ban’s kindred. Best meseemeth

  E A swift word to send, service craving

  B C to their lord of old. To this leagued treason

  B A we must power oppose, proud returning

  B A with matchless might Mordred to humble.

  A A Gawain answered grave and slowly:

  A C Best meseemeth that Ban’s kindred

  +A C abide in Benwick and this black treason

  A B favour nor further. Yet I fear the worse:

  B C thou wilt find thy friends as foes meet thee.

  B C If Lancelot hath loyal purpose

  +A B let him prove repentance, his pride foregoing,

  C C uncalled coming when his king needeth.

  +A A But fainer with fewer faithful-hearted

  C B would I dare danger, than with doubtful swords

  B C our muster swell. Why more need we?

  B B Though thou legions levy through the lands of Earth,

  A C fay or mortal, from the Forest’s margin

  +A A to the Isle of Avalon, armies countless,

  A A never and nowhere knights more puissant,

  A C nobler chivalry of renown fairer,

  A B mightier manhood upon mortal earth

  B C shall be gathered again till graves open.

  +A B Here free, unfaded, is the flower of time

  +A B that men shall remember through the mist of years

  B C as a golden summer in the grey winter.

  It will be seen that there are no D half-lines and only one E in this extract. The sign +A is here used to indicate a prefixed dip or ‘anacrusis’ before the first lift in A half-lines. In lines 202 Though thou legions levy and 211 as a golden summer, both marked B, the words levy and summer constitute ‘broken lifts’, where instead of a long stressed syllable there is a short stressed followed by a weak syllable.