The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Volume 2: Reader’s Guide PART 1. Christina Scull

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СКАЧАТЬ be significant in his academic career. He taught a class on the poem at the University of *Oxford in Trinity Term 1920, even before he held an academic appointment; and together with *E.V. Gordon he produced an edition of the work (published 1925) while employed at the University of *Leeds. Sir Gawain is the story of a knight of King Arthur’s court, described by Tolkien and Gordon as ‘shaped with a sense of narrative unity not often found in Arthurian romance. Most of the Arthurian romances, even the greatest of them, such as the French Perlesvaus, or Malory’s Morte Darthure … are rambling and incoherent. It is a weakness inherited from the older Celtic forms, as we may see in the Welsh Mabinogion, stories told with even greater magic of style and even less coherence than the French and English compilations’ (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. Tolkien and Gordon (1925), p. x). Tolkien also made a verse translation of the poem, possibly begun while working on the edition; the translation was broadcast on BBC radio in 1953 and published posthumously in 1976.

      Apparently in the early 1930s Tolkien began to compose a lengthy poem in alliterative verse, *The Fall of Arthur. He wrote 954 lines before abandoning the work c. 1937, though in 1955 he still hoped to be able to complete it. The volume of the same title, first published in 2013 (see separate Reader’s Guide article), includes the latest text of the poem, together with commentary by *Christopher Tolkien concerning notes and outlines for its continuation, and the context of the Arthurian tradition in which the poem was written.

      In ?late 1951 Tolkien explained in a letter to *Milton Waldman that one of the reasons he wrote *‘The Silmarillion’ was that he

      was from early days grieved by the poverty of my own beloved country: it had no stories of its own (bound up with its tongue and soil), not of the quality that I sought, and found (as an ingredient) in legends of other lands. There was Greek, and Celtic, and Romance, Germanic, Scandinavian and Finnish (which greatly affected me); but nothing English, save impoverished chap-book stuff. Of course there was, and is, all the Arthurian world, but powerful as it is, it is imperfectly naturalized, associated with the soil of Britain but not with English; and it does not replace what I felt to be missing. For one thing its ‘faerie’ is too lavish, and fantastical, incoherent and repetitive. For another and more important thing: it is involved in, and explicitly contains the Christian religion. [Letters, p. 144]

      The Arthurian legends are ‘associated with the soil of Britain’ because they had their origins among the inhabitants of that land, and indeed, that whole body of legend is often referred to as the ‘Matter of Britain’. The Romans, who invaded the island in 43 AD, called it ‘Britannia’, a version of ‘Ynys Prydain’, the name given it by its native Celtic inhabitants. When the last of the Roman troops were withdrawn in AD 410 the Romano-British peoples tried unsuccessfully to defend themselves against invasion by Germanic tribes, mainly Angles and Saxons, the ancestors of the English, and eventually held out only in western areas such as Wales and Cornwall; many fled across the channel into north-west Gaul and called their new settlement ‘Brittany’.

      The little contemporary evidence that exists has been thought to suggest that in the late fifth or early sixth century a dux bellorum or war-leader arose among the British and, in a series of battles, for a time managed to stem the Saxon advance and even to regain some territory. By the tenth century a body of literature about this leader, now given the name Arthur, developed among the remnants of the original British inhabitants in Wales and Brittany, written in the vernacular Welsh or Breton. (Wales and Welsh are English names, derived from Germanic walh, wealh, used to describe speakers of Celtic languages, though as Tolkien points out in *English and Welsh the same word was used to describe speakers of Latin.) The Arthurian legends arose in part to celebrate the successes, even if temporary, of the native British population against the English.

      Those of the legends developed in Brittany were translated or retold in French, and new stories or versions of stories were written, adding characters such as Lancelot, changing Arthur’s early companions (such as Bedivere, or Bedwyr) into chivalric knights of the Round Table, laying increasing emphasis on the Grail Quest, and sometimes reducing Arthur himself to an ineffectual figure. The Norman invaders who conquered England in 1066 introduced some of these new tales into England, and the Norman rulers tended to identify themselves with Arthur, who had also defeated the English. Thus for Tolkien, who strongly identified himself with *England and the English, the Arthurian legends were not only not themselves English (as opposed to British), but to some extent were identified with the Norman invaders who had had a devastating effect on English language, traditions, and literature.

      Tolkien’s objection in his letter to Milton Waldman that the ‘faerie’ of Arthurian legend was ‘too lavish, and fantastical, incoherent and repetitive’ was probably directed mainly at the Welsh tales in the fourteenth- to fifteenth-century collection known as the Mabinogion. Earlier he had told *Stanley Unwin that he felt for Celtic things ‘a certain distaste; largely for their fundamental unreason. They have bright colour, but are like a broken stained glass window reassembled without design. They are in fact “mad”’ (16 December 1937, Letters, p. 26). In his letter to Waldman he said that while he would like his invented legends to have ‘the fair elusive quality that some call Celtic (though it is rarely found in genuine, ancient Celtic things)’, he also desired a ‘tone and quality … somewhat cool and clear’ (Letters, p. 144).

      Tolkien accepted that Christianity was of major significance in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and in his W.P. Ker Lecture on that work in 1953 he discussed at length Gawain’s conduct as a Christian. He may have felt that in some of the tales of Arthur the Christian content was treated superficially; but his main thought may have been regret that the heroic tales of the pre-Christian Anglo-Saxons were lost, only hinted at in such works as survived the Norman Conquest.

      In *Farmer Giles of Ham (1949), set in a time ‘after the days of King Coel maybe, but before Arthur or the Seven Kingdoms of the English’ (p. 8), Tolkien parodied and mocked both Arthurian legend and the critics who tried to reconstruct its true history. The King in this tale is not at all glorious, and his knights are cowards. In notes to the fiftieth anniversary edition of Farmer Giles of Ham (1999) Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond suggest that Tolkien alludes to the Historia Regum Britanniae (History of the Kings of Britain) by Geoffrey of Monmouth, an important twelfth-century source for the Arthur legends, especially for the ‘historical’ Arthur (though the work itself is pseudo-historical). But Farmer Giles of Ham also contains anachronisms for the period in which it is set, if ‘not really worse than all the medieval treatment of Arthurian matter’, as Tolkien wrote to Naomi Mitchison (18 December 1949, Letters, p. 133).

      Characters in *The Notion Club Papers discuss Arthurian legend, possibly expressing Tolkien’s own opinions. One member says:

      Of course the pictures presented by legends may be partly symbolical, they may be arranged in designs that compress, expand, foreshorten, combine, and are not at all realistic or photographic, yet they may tell you something true about the Past. And mind you, there are also real details, what are called facts, accidents of land-shape and sea-shape, of individual men and their actions, that are caught up: the grains on which the stories crystallize like snowflakes. There was a man called Arthur at the centre of the cycle.

      To which another answers: ‘Perhaps! … But that doesn’t make such things as the Arthurian romances real in the same way as true past events are real.’ The first speaker comments that ‘history in the sense of a story made up out of the intelligible surviving evidence (which is not necessarily truer to the facts than legend)’ is not the same as ‘“the true story”, the real Past’ (*Sauron Defeated, pp. 227–8, 230).

      In spite of what Tolkien wrote to Milton Waldman, some critics have discerned influence from or echoes of Arthurian legends in Tolkien’s own stories. The most obvious is the similarity of the wounded Frodo’s departure from Middle-earth to Tol Eressëa in the West, at the end of СКАЧАТЬ