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Molly Bayberry
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re: 'The Fall of Arthur' review

This sounds interesting...

Legend Retold. ‘The Fall of Arthur,’ by J. R. R. Tolkien
By ANDREW O’HEHIR


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Cennwyn
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re: 'The Fall of Arthur' review

Is it weird that I wish they wouldn't compare it so much to the Lord of the Rings, and would try and discuss it more as an independent piece of literature?


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re: 'The Fall of Arthur' review

Interesting article. I'd heard of this coming out, but I haven't heard much about the actual book yet. I like the idea that Arthurian legend is a "borrowed" tradition in England.

Cennwyn, I agree with you to a certain extent. It does deserve to be treated on its own, and it does annoy me sometimes when anything Tolkien has to be linked to LotR to get people to buy it. But actually I see very little direct comparison to the Lord of the Rings in that review. It's hard to treat it as its own piece of literature when it was unpublished and unfinished, and it might be that Tolkien abandoned it for good reason. It makes more sense to look at it in its place in Tolkien's development as a writer, and the development of his thinking, including his thoughts on the world that would eventually become Middle-earth.

I'm taking a class this summer with the Mythgard Institute called "Beyond Middle-earth", looking at Tolkien's writings outside of the stories we talk about most. (See the class's promo video and a sample lecture posted on YouTube if you're interested.) It has been fascinating, but a lot of the time we do end up relating his poems and short stories back to the Silmarillion or the Hobbit or Lord of the Rings, because those things were so important to Tolkien and they reveal a lot about what he was thinking, and how his ideas changed over the course of his life. Next week we start Tom Shippey's portion of the class talking about his scholarly work, and I'm really excited. I'll be interested to see if The Fall of Arthur ever comes up in discussion.


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