The Tolkien scholarly community is afire with curiosity and rumours after it emerged that a new Tolkien book is on the horizon. The book, which we understand will be called The Fall of Arthur appears to be set for a May 2013 release going from pre-order information that inadvertently popped up on the website of retailing giant Amazon. It’s possible that it has been edited by Christopher Tolkien, but this is unconfirmed.
The Fall of Arthur is a long, alliterative poem based on Arthurian legends. Some excerpts from it were published in Humphrey Carpenter’s biography of JRR Tolkien. It seems it was written in the 1930s. In Letters of JRR Tolkien there is a bare mention of The Fall of Arthur.
I write alliterative verse with pleasure, though I have published little beyond fragments in The Lord of the Rings, except ‘The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth’… a dramatic dialogue on the nature of the ‘heroic’ and the ‘chivalrous’. I still hope to finish a long poem on The Fall of Arthur in the same measure. Letter 165, Letters of JRR Tolkien.
