![\"fall](\"http:\/\/www-images.theonering.org\/torwp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/05\/fall-of-arthur-197x300.jpg\")
Yours truly has been ever-so-slowly getting through the newest Tolkien book The Fall of Arthur for the last month-and-a-half with a hope of at some point stringing together a few poor words on the subject.<\/p>\n Yours truly has been ever-so-slowly getting through the newest Tolkien book The Fall of Arthur for the last month-and-a-half with a hope of at some point stringing together a few poor words on the subject.<\/p>\n
I’ve also been reading other what others have had to say in the media. This piece, by Tolkien scholar John Garth, is a good place to start if you’re interested.<\/p>\n
Early in The Fall of Arthur, long awaited by fans of J.R.R. Tolkien and now edited for publication by his son Christopher, an army rides to Mirkwood where they see in a storm above it, Ringwraith-like:<\/p>\n
wan horsemen \u00a0 \u00a0 wild in windy clouds
\ngrey and monstrous \u00a0 \u00a0 grimly riding
\nshadow-helmed to war, \u00a0 \u00a0 shapes disastrous.<\/p><\/blockquote>\nBut this isn\u2019t Middle-earth: it is Europe on the brink of the Dark Ages, and the army is led by Arthur and Gawain. Mirkwood is simply the old name for Germany\u2019s eastern forests, which Tolkien borrowed for the children\u2019s story he was writing in the same period in the early 1930s, The Hobbit.<\/p>\n
Tolkien was a writer of endless stories. And as with most of them, The Fall of Arthur is literally endless: unfinished. It\u2019s been lying among his vast legacy of papers, almost unknown but for a paragraph in Humphrey Carpenter\u2019s 1976 biography and a single reference in Tolkien\u2019s published letters. Publication follows that of the more difficult The Legend of Sigurd and Gudr\u00fan in 2009, which Christopher Tolkien probably elected to publish first because it was complete. Like Sigurd and Gudr\u00fan, The Fall of Arthur is in alliterative verse, a mode last fashionable in the 14th century.<\/p>\n