J.R.R. Tolkien - The Fall of Arthur

CONTENTS

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THE HOBBIT

LEAF BY NIGGLE

ON FAIRY-STORIES

FARMER GILES OF HAM

THE HOMECOMING OF BEORHTNOTH

THE LORD OF THE RINGS

THE ADVENTURES OF TOM BOMBADIL

THE ROAD GOES EVER ON (WITH DONALD SWANN)

SMITH OF WOOTTON MAJOR

SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT, PEARL AND SIR ORFEO

THE FATHER CHRISTMAS LETTERS

THE SILMARILLION

PICTURES BY J.R.R. TOLKIEN

UNFINISHED TALES

THE LETTERS OF J.R.R. TOLKIEN

FINN AND HENGEST

MR BLISS

THE MONSTERS AND THE CRITICS & OTHER ESSAYS

ROVERANDOM

THE CHILDREN OF HRIN

THE LEGEND OF SIGURD AND GUDRN

I THE BOOK OF LOST TALES, PART ONE

II THE BOOK OF LOST TALES, PART TWO

III THE LAYS OF BELERIAND

IV THE SHAPING OF MIDDLE-EARTH

V THE LOST ROAD AND OTHER WRITINGS

VI THE RETURN OF THE SHADOW

VII THE TREASON OF ISENGARD

VIII THE WAR OF THE RING

IX SAURON DEFEATED

X MORGOTHS RING

XI THE WAR OF THE JEWELS

XII THE PEOPLES OF MIDDLE-EARTH

The importance of the use of Old English alliterative verse in my fathers 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 Gudrn, 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 wear wl mre

on s glande fre gta

folces gefylled beforan yssum

sweordes wecgum, s e s secga bc,

ealde witan, syan astan hider

Engle and Seaxe p becmon

ofer brd brimu, Brytene shton,

wlance wgsmias Walas ofercmon,

eorlas rhwate eard begaton.

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 wars 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 thelstan, lfreds 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 thelwulfing kings (descendants, that is, of thelwulf and lfred 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 thelstan 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 kings 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