A Brief Review of Tolkien's THE FALL OF ARTHUR

The Fall of Arthur.  J.R.R. Tolkien.  Ed. Christopher Tolkien.  Houghton Mifflin, Boston and New York.  2013.

This book contains the text of Tolkien’s unfinished The Fall of Arthur in four cantos and part of a fifth, running to about forty pages of Anglo-Saxon meter and mostly in modern English garnished with a few charming archaisms. 

The poem is delightful, and will appeal to Hobbit-istas and to those who enjoy Beowulf, “The Seafarer” and other Anglo-Saxon poems in translations that keep the A/S form with its four-beat line, alliteration, and kennings, and Arthurian tales and topics.

The rest of the book, over 170 pages, consists of detailed essays in what-is-this-about detail by Christopher Tolkien, and a singularly unhelpful appendix not explaining Old English verse.  Tolkien minor never uses one word when he can throw in ten, and the (to me) strained connections between the poem and Middle-Earth are obscure; this material is for the true Hobbit-ista.

The Fall of Arthur, the poem, is really good, and I will re-read it and mark the more of the allusions and obscure words far more than I did in my first, hasty reading.  A clearer and much briefer explanation of Anglo-Saxon verse for those, like me, who did not pay attention in high school senior English would have been useful, and the turbid essays and the Hobbitry could have left out, resulting in a smaller, more pocketable vade mecum (cf. Everyman’s Pocket Poet series).