J.R.R. Tolkien
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892-1973) was an English philologist who specialized in an academic pursuit of Old English, Anglo-Saxon, Germanic, and Scandinavian criss-crossings in language — and who conquered the world of popular culture by his creation of the high-fantasy epics of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. He would be the first to agree that often the language created in his mind needed a people and their history to make the creation live, and he had the genius to become deeply interested in what happened to his language-speakers.
Tolkien was a veteran of trench warfare in WWI (reflected in his picture of Mordor). In less than six months he participated in many assaults and lost most of his close friends to the war. He was invalided out with trench fever, a wasting and potentially crippling consequence of the plague of lice in the works. He began a life in academia, eventually carving a distinguished career both for his teaching and his scholarship. His entire adult life, however, had an ever-present onging project with Middle-Earth and its peoples. He published The Hobbit in 1937 and finally finished tinkering with The Lord of the Rings after the war, publishing the three volumes in the early 1950s. The many volumes of his drafts and notes published posthumously by his son Christopher attest to his devotion to languages creating the world and fashioning its history.
It is easy to get lost with Tolkien, trying to track what he wrote when and how revising it affected his fantastic universe in a hundred different ways. It may be helpful when first reading him or even when going back to savor him once again to remember he wanted to find that pre-War England, to take journeys with friends, even if the journeys may be hazardous in a great and noble cause, and to return safely back to a comfortable shire.
The Fall of Arthur
The Fall of Arthur
The Fall of Arthur, the only venture by J.R.R. Tolkien into the legends of Arthur, king of Britain, may well be regarded as his finest and most skillful achievement in the use of Old English alliterative meter, in which he brought to his transforming perceptions of the old narratives a pervasive sense of the grave and fateful nature of all that is told: of Arthur’s expedition overseas into distant heathen lands, of Guinevere’s flight from Camelot, of the great sea battle on Arthur’s return to Britain, in the portrait of the traitor Mordred, in the tormented doubts of Lancelot in his French castle.
Unhappily, The Fall of Arthur was one of several long narrative poems that Tolkien abandoned. He evidently began it in the 1930s, and it was sufficiently advanced for him to send it to a very perceptive friend who read it with great enthusiasm at the end of 1934 and urgently pressed him, "You simply must finish it!" But in vain: he abandoned it at some unknown date, though there is evidence that it may have been in 1937, the year of publication of The Hobbit and the first stirrings of The Lord of the Rings. Years later, in a letter of 1955, he said that he "hoped to finish a long poem on The Fall of Arthur," but that day never came.
Associated with the text of the poem, however, are many manuscript pages: a great quantity of drafting and experimentation in verse, in which the strange evolution of the poem’s structure is revealed, together with narrative synopses and significant tantalizing notes. In these notes can be discerned clear if mysterious associations of the Arthurian conclusion with The Silmarillion, and the bitter ending of the love of Lancelot and Guinevere, which was never written.