King Arthur's downfall

King Arthur's Fall (Original title: The Fall of Arthur ) is an unfinished, posthumously published poem by the British author and philologist J. RR Tolkien , which was published in 2013 by his son Christopher Tolkien at HarperCollins .

Background and content

The poem uses the elements of metric and alliteration . It consists of around 1000 stanzas and is divided into five sections. It deals with the legend of the legendary King Arthur and describes how the king went to the east to fight in pagan lands. In his absence, the knight Sir Lancelot falls in love with the king's wife Guinevere , which leads to an insurmountable conflict of love, loyalty, doubt and betrayal. In addition, Mordred tries to take the opportunity and seize power over the kingdom. This story is told here by Tolkien in his own interpretation. In addition to the translation by Hans-Ulrich Möhring, the German edition of the book contains the original English text of the poem. Tolkien took inspiration from the texts of Geoffrey von Monmouth (author of the Historia regum Britanniae ) and Thomas Malory (author of Le Morte Darthur ).

The Fall of Arthur is one of several narrative poems, the elaboration of which Tolkien probably interrupted and not completed in favor of the stories The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings . He had started the poem in the early 1930s. It is mentioned, for example, in 1934 in a correspondence with RW Chambers , to whom he had sent the poem for assessment. He encouraged Tolkien to continue this project as soon as possible. The history of its origins is highlighted by Christopher Tolkien in a separate chapter of the book.

The book is structured as follows
The Fall of Arthur	King Arthur's downfall
Foreword	Preface
The fall of Arthur	King Arthur's downfall
Notes on the text of The fall of Arthur	Notes on King Arthur's Fall
The poem in Arthurian tradition	The poem in the Arthurian tradition
The unwritten poem and its relation to The Silmarillion	The unwritten poem and its relationship with the Silmarillion
The evolution of the poem	The evolution of the poem
Appendix: Old English verse.	Appendix: A - Old English poetry; B - On the German text form; bibliography

expenditure

JRR Tolkien: The fall of Arthur . Ed .: Christopher Tolkien. HarperCollins, London 2013, ISBN 978-0-00-748994-7 ( erb.kingdomnow.org - reading sample).
JRR Tolkien: King Arthur's Downfall . Ed .: Christopher Tolkien (= Hobbit Press ). Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 2015, ISBN 978-3-608-96050-1 (translated by Hans-Ulrich Möhring ).

literature

Tilman Spreckelsen: JRR Tolkien: The Fall of Arthur - Mr. Gawain is not frightened by an eagle scream or a wolf howl . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . May 24, 2013, ISSN 0174-4909 ( faz.net ).
Andrew O'Herir: Legend Retold - 'The Fall of Arthur,' by JRR Tolkien. In: The New York Times . dated June 21, 2013. (Review, English, nytimes.com ).
Verlyn Flieger: The Fall of Arthur by JRR Tolkien (Review) . In: Tolkien Studies . tape 11 , no. 11 , 2014, ISSN 1547-3163 , p. 213–225 , doi : 10.1353 / tks.2014.0011 .
Christian Thomas: Tolkien "King Arthur's Fall": Arthur, Arthur ... thur ... ur . In: Frankfurter Rundschau . 2015 ( fr-online.de ).

Web links

Christopher Tolkien on: The Fall of Arthur on tolkienestate.com (English)
John Garth: Tolkien's Unfinished Epic: 'The Fall of Arthur' on thedailybeast.com (Review)
Arthur's Downfall: JRR Tolkien's previously unpublished fragment ( Memento from July 6, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) (Contribution from April 2, 2015 In: WDR 3 Mosaik - das Kulturmagazin )

Individual evidence

↑ ^a ^b ^c Tom Shippey : Tolkien's King Arthur. In: The Times Literary Supplement. June 26, 2013, accessed March 29, 2018 .
↑ The Fall of Arthur - JRR Tolkien. HarperCollins UK, accessed July 6, 2015 (publisher page for the book).
^ Alison Flood: 'New' JRR Tolkien epic due out next year. the Guardian, October 9, 2012, accessed July 6, 2015 .

[Shippey-1] Tom Shippey : Tolkien's King Arthur. In: The Times Literary Supplement. June 26, 2013, accessed March 29, 2018 .

[2] The Fall of Arthur - JRR Tolkien. HarperCollins UK, accessed July 6, 2015 (publisher page for the book).

[3] Alison Flood: 'New' JRR Tolkien epic due out next year. the Guardian, October 9, 2012, accessed July 6, 2015 .


Fiction	Songs for the Philologists (1936) • The Hobbit (1937) • Blatt von Tüftler (1947) • The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun (1945) • Bauer Giles von Ham (1949) • The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm's Son (1953) • The Lord of the Rings (1954/55) • The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Poems from the Red Book (1962) • Tree and Leaf (1964) • The Tolkien Reader (1966) • The Road Goes Ever On (1967) • Smith of Wootton Major (1967)
Posthumously published fiction	Santa's Letters (1976) • The Silmarillion (1977) • News from Middle-earth (1980) • Mr. Bliss (1982) • Bilbo's Farewell Song (1990) • The History of Middle-earth (12 volumes; 1983–1996) • The Lost Road and Other Writings (Volume 5, 1987) • Roverandom (1998) • The Children of Húrin (2007) • The History of The Hobbit (2007) • The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún (2009) • King Arthur's Fall (2013) • The Story of Kullervo (2015) • Beren and Lúthien (2017) • The Fall of Gondolin (2018)
Academic works	A Middle English Vocabulary (1922) • Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Middle English text, 1925) • Some Contributions to Middle-English Lexicography (1925) • The Devil's Coach-Horses (1925) • Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiðhad (1929) • The Name Nodens (1932) • Sigelwara Land Parts I and II, in Medium Aevum (1932–1934) • Chaucer as a Philologist: The Reeve's Tale (1934) • Beowulf: The Monsters and Their Critics (1936) • The Reeve's Tale: version prepared for recitation at the "summer diversions" (1939) • On Fairy-Stories (1939) • Sir Orfeo (1944) • Ofermod and Beorhtnoth's Death (1953) • Middle English "Losenger": Sketch of an etymological and semantic inquiry ( 1953) • Ancrene Wisse : The English Text of the Ancrene Riwle (1962) • English and Welsh (1963) • Introduction to Tree and Leaf (1964) • Contributions to the Jerusalem Bible (as translator and lexicographer) (1966) • Tolkien on Tolkien (autobiographical) (1966)
Posthumous academic publications	Sir Gawain and the Green Knight , Pearl and Sir Orfeo (translations into modern English, 1975) • Finn and Hengest (1982) • The Monsters and the Critics (1983) • Beowulf and the Critics (2002) • Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary (2014)