Monday, October 08, 2012

The Fall of Arthur - to be published 40 years after Tolkien's death ?


The Australian reports that " JRR TOLKIEN'S classic, The Hobbit, has sold about 100 million copies. Now, nearly 40 years after his death, a work by the author previously seen only by a handful of family members and a close friend is to be published for the first time.
The Fall of Arthur, a 1,000-line poem telling the story of the legendary king and his Knights of the Round Table, dates from the 1930s".


The following is fromTolkien Gateway



Le Morte d'Arthur by James Archer.

The Fall of Arthur the title of an unpublished poem by J.R.R. Tolkien, concerned with the legend of King Arthur.
According to Humphrey Carpenter, who published a few brief extracts from the poem in his biography about Tolkien, the poem "has alliteration but no rhyme [and] did not touch on the Grail but began an individual rendering of the Morte d'Arthur, in which the king and Gawain go to war in 'Saxon lands' but are summoned home by news of Mordred's treachery". "The Fall of Arthur" was read by E.V. Gordon and R.W. Chambers, who both approved of the poem.[1][2]
The writing of the poem was abandoned in the mid 1930s,[1] but in a 1955 letter to Houghton Mifflin, his American publishers, Tolkien mentioned that he hoped to finish the "long poem".[3] Although the state of the manuscript(s) is unknown, there is a rumour that the poem has 954 lines.[4]
Carl F. Hostetter mentions the transcription of a manuscript by Tolkien which seems to be a fragment of his The Fall of Arthur.[5]
An edition of the poem appears to be scheduled for publication in May 2013 by HarperCollins.[6]

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