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bloodygranuaileIt’s been a big winter for me wanting to read medieval British nonsense, partly due to the cold wet dark New England weather this time of year and partly due to not being allowed to leave the house. Having enjoyed reading some of his Anglo-Saxon poetry translations around Thanksgiving I therefore decided that I would dig into J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Fall of Arthur, an original poem done in the style of Anglo-Saxon alliterative poetry and yet somehow still the least intimidating bit of Arthuriana left on my TBR shelves. (The other two are Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Mort D’Arthur and Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon, which is 800 pages long.)
The poem itself is unfinished and consists of only five cantos, leaving off right as Arthur sets out for his final battle against his treacherous nephew Mordred. Like all good Anglo-Saxon poetry, it is meant to be read aloud, so much so that it’s almost difficult to sit and read it with your mouth shut; the temptation to declaim it or at least to mouth the words along is too strong. The style is purposefully archaic but quite comprehensible, similar to many of Tolkien’s other original works. It is also fairly short–maybe fifty pages of the 230-page book is given to the actual text of the poem. The rest is commentary by Tolkien’s son Christopher Tolkien, walking us both through the evolution of the legend of Arthur and the evolution of this particular poem through its early drafts and bits of scratch paper. Personally, I found the historical tour of the Arthur cycle to be the most engrossing part of the book; Tolkien quotes liberally from a variety of older sources in both their original language and, for the Latin and Old English ones, translated into modern English; for Middle and Early Modern English, however, we get raw, un-spelling-corrected transcriptions with footnotes where necessary (there are a lot of footnotes). I am the sort of dork who thinks lines like “Betwixte me and Launcelote du Lake/Nys man in erthe, for sothe to sayne,/Shall trews sette and pees make/Er outher of vs haue other slayne” are hilarious to read, and I really enjoyed both the prose and poetry versions of Arthur’s last voyage to Avylyon to hele his grete woundes. (It’s possible that an adolescence spent reading Discworld has rotted my brain.)
Anyway, this book took me one evening to read, and I feel very edified, and like I can go back to wasting my time hunting dire chinchillas in The Sims Medieval with a clear conscience.
The poem itself is unfinished and consists of only five cantos, leaving off right as Arthur sets out for his final battle against his treacherous nephew Mordred. Like all good Anglo-Saxon poetry, it is meant to be read aloud, so much so that it’s almost difficult to sit and read it with your mouth shut; the temptation to declaim it or at least to mouth the words along is too strong. The style is purposefully archaic but quite comprehensible, similar to many of Tolkien’s other original works. It is also fairly short–maybe fifty pages of the 230-page book is given to the actual text of the poem. The rest is commentary by Tolkien’s son Christopher Tolkien, walking us both through the evolution of the legend of Arthur and the evolution of this particular poem through its early drafts and bits of scratch paper. Personally, I found the historical tour of the Arthur cycle to be the most engrossing part of the book; Tolkien quotes liberally from a variety of older sources in both their original language and, for the Latin and Old English ones, translated into modern English; for Middle and Early Modern English, however, we get raw, un-spelling-corrected transcriptions with footnotes where necessary (there are a lot of footnotes). I am the sort of dork who thinks lines like “Betwixte me and Launcelote du Lake/Nys man in erthe, for sothe to sayne,/Shall trews sette and pees make/Er outher of vs haue other slayne” are hilarious to read, and I really enjoyed both the prose and poetry versions of Arthur’s last voyage to Avylyon to hele his grete woundes. (It’s possible that an adolescence spent reading Discworld has rotted my brain.)
Anyway, this book took me one evening to read, and I feel very edified, and like I can go back to wasting my time hunting dire chinchillas in The Sims Medieval with a clear conscience.