The Fall of Arthur by J. R. R. Tolkien
But from the first lines of The Fall of Arthur it is seen that my father was departing radically from the story of Arthur’s last campaign overseas as told by Geoffrey of Monmouth and his successors. I give here a very condensed account of Geoffrey’s narrative, without any discussion of such literary and traditional sources as he drew upon, since my object here is primarily to observe how The Fall of Arthur stands in relation to the heroic, ‘chronicle’ tradition initiated by him.
In his story, Arthur, on the death of his father Uther Pendragon crowned King of Britain at the age of fifteen, at once embarked on a campaign to subdue the hated and hateful Saxons, and after a number of battles the last was fought in Somerset, at Bath. Arthur bore his shield Prydwen, on which was painted an image of the Virgin Mary, his sword Caliburn which was forged in the isle of Avalon, and on his head was set a golden helmet with a crest carved in the form of a dragon. In this battle Arthur drove into the Saxon ranks, and slew with a single blow every man that he struck with Caliburn, until no less than four hundred and seventy Saxons lay dead from his hand alone.
The Saxons having fled into hiding in forests, caves and mountains, Arthur turned to the crushing of the invading Picts and Scots; and ‘when he had restored the whole of the country of Britain to its ancient dignity’ he married Guinevere, ‘born of a noble Roman family’, most beautiful of all the women of Britain. In the following year he conquered Ireland and Iceland, and the kings of Gotland and the Orkneys accepted his overlordship without a blow struck. After the passage of twelve more years Norway and Denmark were savagely put by the Britons to fire and sword and subdued to the rule of King Arthur; and all the regions of Gaul were subjected to him.
As Geoffrey of Monmouth represented him, he was now a very mighty monarch, unbeaten in battle, a name of awe throughout Europe, his knights and his household the model and pattern of chivalry and courtly life; and returning from Gaul he held in the city of Caerleon-upon-Usk in Glamorgan a high court and festival of extraordinary magnificence, from which no ruler of renown in the western lands and isles was absent. But before it ended there appeared envoys from Rome bearing a letter to Arthur from the Emperor Lucius Hiberius. In this letter Lucius demanded that Arthur should himself come to Rome to submit to judgement and punishment for the wrongs he had committed in the withholding of the tribute owing from Britain, and the seizure of lands that were tributary to the Empire; and if he did not come then Rome would move against him.
To this Arthur replied that he would indeed come to Rome, but in order to exact from the Romans the penalty that they had demanded of him. Then Lucius commanded the kings of the East to prepare their armies and to accompany him to the conquest of Britain; and the number of men in this mighty force of arms was precisely four hundred thousand and one hundred and sixty. Against them King Arthur raised a great host, and he placed the defence of Britain in his absence in the hands of his nephew Mordred and of Guinevere the Queen.
Condensing Geoffrey of Monmouth’s narrative still further, and letting C.S. Lewis’s words stand in place of a précis, the end of the ‘Roman War’ was a great victory for the Britons and the death of the Emperor Lucius; and Arthur was already in the Alps on his way to Rome when word reached him that Mordred had usurped the crown and was living adulterously with Guinevere. Here Geoffrey of Monmouth fell suddenly silent: of this matter he will say nothing, he wrote. He was as good as his word; and after the landing of King Arthur at Richborough on the coast of Kent he moved rapidly through battles with Mordred, in which Mordred and Gawain were slain and Arthur mortally wounded. Of Guinevere he said nothing save that in despair she fled to Caerleon and there became a nun; and of Arthur only that he was borne to the Isle of Avalon for the treating of his wounds. Of Sir Lancelot there is no mention at all in the Historia Regum Britanniae.
This was the story in the ‘chronicle’ or ‘pseudo-historical’ tradition of King Arthur deriving from Geoffrey of Monmouth: in the Roman de Brut of the Norman poet Wace which appeared at the time of Geoffrey’s death (1155), and in the next generation the very long poem named Brut1 composed near the beginning of the thirteenth century by the Englishman Laȝamon, priest of the parish of Ernleye (Arley Regis) on the Severn in Worcestershire, following Wace but independently.
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The alliterative Morte Arthure
It was also the story in a work of some importance, as will be seen later, in the narrative of The Fall of Arthur. This is a remarkable poem of the fourteenth century ‘alliterative revival’ commonly known as the alliterative Morte Arthure. In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl and Sir Orfeo (1975) I cited my father’s words concerning
the ancient English measure which had descended from antiquity, that kind of verse which is now called ‘alliterative’. It aimed at quite different effects from those achieved by the rhymed and syllable-counting metres derived from France and Italy; it seemed harsh and stiff and rugged to those unaccustomed to it. And quite apart from the (from a London point of view) dialectal character of the language, this ‘alliterative’ verse included in its diction a number of special verse words, never used in ordinary talk or prose, that were ‘dark’ to those outside the tradition.
In short, this poet [the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight] adhered to what is now known as the Alliterative Revival of the fourteenth century, the attempt to use the old native metre and style long rusticated for high and serious writing; and he paid the penalty for its failure, for alliterative verse was not in the event revived. The tides of time, of taste, of language, not to mention political power, trade and wealth, were against it.
The alliterative Morte Arthure is a long poem of over 4000 lines, of very uncertain date but commonly ascribed to the latter part of the fourteenth century, and known only from a manuscript, made by Robert Thornton, in the library of Lincoln Cathedral.2 The sources of the unknown poet have been much debated, but for this purpose it is sufficient to say that in its narrative structure it derives from the Historia Regum Britanniae tradition. It begins with the great feast held by King Arthur to which came the envoys sent by ‘Sir Lucius Iberius, the Emperour of Rome’, and for much of its length it is devoted to description of Arthur’s war against the Romans and their allies. It is indeed a ‘heroic’ poem, a chanson de geste, a poem of war (if by no means exclusively), of battlefields and ferocious encounters, the horrors of the sword seen with stark clarity – scenes of the Hundred Years War. A brief passage may illustrate this. Whereas Geoffrey of Monmouth told that Lucius was slain by a knight unknown, in this poem he dies at Arthur’s hand, and the King’s prowess is thus described:
The emperour thane egerly at Arthure he strykez,
Awkwarde on the umbrere, and egerly hym hittez!
The nakyde swerd at the nese noyes hym sare,
The blode of [the] bolde kynge over the breste rynnys,
Beblede al the brode schelde and the bryghte mayles!
Oure bolde kynge bowes the blonke by the bryghte brydylle,
With his burlyche brande a buffette hym reches,
Thourghe the brene and the breste with his bryghte wapyne,
O-slante doune fro the slote he slyttes at ones!
Thus endys the emperour of Arthure hondes …3
After the death of the Emperor in the last great battle of the war against the Romans the alliterative Morte Arthure extends for many hundreds of lines in accounts of further aggressive campaigns led by Arthur, not found in Geoffrey of Monmouth, until we find the King north of Rome in the vale of Viterbo ‘among the vines’, and ‘was never meriere men made on this erthe’.
To Arthur in this very agreeable place there came envoys from Rome to sue for peace, among them the ‘konyngeste cardynalle that to the courte lengede’ [belonged], who brought a proposal that the Pope should crown him in Rome as sovereign and lord. King Arthur now gloried in the splendour of his success, and saying that Rome is now ours, and that he will be crowned there at Christmas, he took himself, being weary from lack of sleep, to be
But be ane aftyre mydnyghte alle his mode changede;
He mett in the morne-while fulle mervaylous dremes!
And when his dredefulle drem was drefene to the ende,
The kynge dares for dowte, dye as he scholde;
Sendes aftyre phylosophers, and his affraye telles.4
I have said that the alliterative Morte Arthure is a heroic poem celebrating Arthur, above all a poem of battles; but when it is far advanced one becomes aware that it was only with Arthur’s dream amid the vineyards of the valley of Viterbo that the author’s large design was to be fulfilled. That dream, as he described it to his ‘philosophers’ when he awoke in fear, was an elaborate and ornate vision of the Wheel of Fortune, on which are set eight of the ‘Nine Worthies’ or ‘Nine Heroes’, the great rulers and conquerors of history: of this I give here a very abbreviated account.
He dreamed that he was alone and lost in a forest full of wolves and wild boars, and lions that lapped up the blood of his faithful knights; but fleeing away he found himself in a mountain meadow, ‘the meryeste of medillerthe that men myghte beholde’, and saw descending out of the clouds a goddess in magnificent garments, the embodiment of Fortune, bearing in her hands a wheel made of gold and silver which she whirled about in her white hands. Arthur saw that there was ‘a chayere of chalke-whytte silver’ at the top of Fortune’s Wheel, from which six kings had fallen and now clung with broken crowns to the outer circle of the wheel, each in turn lamenting that he had fallen from such heights of greatness and power; and two kings were climbing up to claim the high seat at the summit of the wheel. The lady Fortune now raised Arthur to that seat, telling him that it was through her that he had won all his honour in war, that she had chosen him to sit in the high chair, and treating him as ‘soverayne in erthe’. But suddenly ‘at midday’ her manner changed towards him, saying ‘Thow has lyffede in delytte and lordchippes inewe’ [enough], and ‘abowte scho whirles the whele, and whirles me undire’, so that all his body was crushed; and he awoke.
The philosopher who interpreted his dream told him in hard words that he was at the high point of his fortune, and now must fall from it.
Thow has schedde myche blode, and schalkes distroyede,
Sakeles, in cirquytrie, in sere kynges landis;
Schryfe the of thy schame, and schape for thyne ende!
Thow has a schewynge, sir kynge, take kepe yif the lyke,
For thow sall fersely falle within fyve wynters!5
And having expounded at length the meaning of what King Arthur had seen in his sleep, the learned man declared that the wild beasts in the wood were wicked men that had entered his land to harass his people, and warned him that within ten days he would hear tidings that some mischief had befallen in Britain since his departure. He called on the king to repent his unjust deeds, to ‘amend his mood’ (that is, to change his disposition) and meekly ask for mercy ere misfortune befall him.
Then Arthur arose and having dressed (seven lines are devoted to a close description of his magnificent attire) set off to walk alone; and at sunrise he met with a man in the humble clothes (to which as many lines are devoted) that marked him as a pilgrim, on his way to Rome. Accosting him Arthur learned that he was Sir Cradoc, and known to him as ‘a knight of his chamber, the keeper of Caerleon’. In Geoffrey of Monmouth’s story it is not told how Arthur heard of the treachery of Mordred, but in the poem it was the express purpose of Sir Cradoc’s journey (and it was Sir Cradoc who brought the news in The Fall of Arthur, I.145). He told that Mordred had crowned himself King of Britain, taken castles, prepared a great fleet lying off Southampton, brought in Danes and Saxons, Picts and Saracens to rule the realm, and worst of all his deeds had wedded Guinevere and begotten a child.
From this point the narrative of the alliterative Morte Arthur continues for some eight hundred lines. To this, and its relation to The Fall of Arthur, I will return (see here).
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It is a notable feature of English Arthurian history that Sir Thomas Malory’s fifth book (in Caxton’s numbering), The Tale of the Noble King Arthur that was Emperor Himself, was very closely based on the alliterative Morte Arthure (and on no other source): he had the manuscript before him as he made his very judicious prose rendering (but he had access to a manuscript more authentic in detail than that at Lincoln written by Robert Thornton).
Professor Eugène Vinaver, in his great edition (The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, three volumes, 1947), showed that this tale was actually the first that Malory wrote, and he argued that ‘contrary to the generally accepted view, he first became familiar with the Arthurian legend not through “French books” but through an English poem, the alliterative Morte Arthure’ (Vinaver, I, xli).
With well over a thousand lines of the alliterative Morte Arthure still to go, Malory nevertheless abruptly abandoned it, at the point where Arthur, encamped near Viterbo, received the Roman envoys who came seeking peace, with the offer of coronation by the Pope. From here Malory sped rapidly to the end of his tale. Arthur was duly crowned as Emperor, and soon afterwards he returned to Britain. He landed at Sandwich on the coast of Kent, and ‘whan quene Guenyvere herde of his commynge she mette with hym at London’. At the beginning of the tale Malory omitted all reference to Arthur’s appointment of his nephew Mordred as regent in his absence; and now at its end he rejected the entire story of Mordred’s treachery, Guinevere’s adultery, and Arthur’s downfall. With it of course went the dream of the Wheel of Fortune. When he wrote this tale Malory had no interest in the representation of the tale of King Arthur as the tragedy of an overweening hero.
It will be seen that in the first canto of The Fall of Arthur my father was preserving the essential narrative idea of the ‘chronicle’ or ‘pseudo-historical’ tradition, the great expedition of King Arthur eastwards over the sea. But his poem enters at once in medias res, without any introductory setting or immediate motive:
Arthur eastward in arms purposed
his war to wage on the wild marches,
for
So fate fell-woven forward drave him.
The great feast, going back to Geoffrey of Monmouth, held at Caerleon to celebrate Arthur’s victories, is absent, and with it the coming of the Roman envoys with the menacing letter from the Emperor, which provided the motive for the last campaign of the King of the Britons. In The Fall of Arthur there is no trace of this conception. So far from being the zenith of his life’s attainment as the conqueror who beat down the Roman armies and had Rome’s emissaries begging for peace, his purpose was to ‘ward off ruin from the Roman realm’ (I.4).
The aims and extent of the campaign are in fact somewhat obscure. At first it is clear that Arthur’s intent was to assail the Saxon pirates in their own lairs, and it seems reasonable to suppose therefore that ‘the Roman realm’ which he will defend against them must surely be the realm of Roman Britain; but a larger horizon seems to me to be suggested by the references to Mirkwood (I.68, 132). I cannot say whether my father intended a more precise meaning in his use of this ancient legendary name for a dark boundary forest separating peoples, but since Arthur’s host marched ‘from the mouths of the Rhine / o’er many kingdoms’ (I.43), and rode ‘ever east and onward’ (I.62), and since the forest of Mirkwood lay ‘on the houseless hills ever higher mounting / vast, unvanquished’ (I.70–1) it seems that they were now far to the east of the regions of Saxon settlement; and this is strongly borne out by Sir Cradoc’s words (I.153–4): ‘While war ye wage on the wild peoples / in the homeless East …’
It is also remarkable that in the hundred lines of the first Canto of the poem from the beginning of Arthur’s expedition at line 39 to the coming of Sir Cradoc with his evil tidings there is (beside ‘Foes before them, flames behind them’, I.61) only one reference to the destruction of heathen habitations by the invading host (I.41–3):
Halls and temples of the heathen kings
his might assailed marching in conquest
from the mouth
My father seems intent rather on conveying a hostile and wintry world of storms and ice, of ‘ravens croaking among ruinous rocks’, unpeopled save by ‘phantom foes with fell voices’ and wolves howling, a menacing world in which (I.134–6)
Fear clutched their souls,
waiting watchful in a world of shadow
for woe they knew not, no word speaking.
Moreover, this sense of vast impending danger accompanies the assertions of the poet that the declared purpose of Arthur is a matter of the gravest consequence, a great heroic gamble against fate:
Thus the tides of time to turn backward
and the heathen to humble, his hope urged him (I.5–6)
– echoed in lines I.176–9, after receiving the news of Mordred’s treachery:
Now from hope’s summit headlong falling
his heart foreboded that his house was doomed,
the ancient world to its end falling
and the tides of time turned against him.
So also, Gawain leading the host ‘as in last sortie from leaguered city’ is
defence and fortress of a falling world. (I.55)
And later (II.147–9) Mordred knows that