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| You'll probably want to read this. |
We feel their powerful call, and many have sought to capture their magic in diverse adaptations. These include authors separated by long gulfs of time—Malory and T.H. White, for example—and artists working in very different mediums.
J.R.R. Tolkien and Iron Maiden.
I just got finished reading Tolkien’s The Fall of Arthur. It’s a curious little volume, 233 pages, of which the actual centerpiece poem is incomplete and only comprises 40 pages. The rest is critical apparatus by Tolkien’s son Christopher.
But what a poem it is.
40 pages of 14th century alliterative verse rendered into modern English metre, telling the story of Arthur’s journey into far heathen lands before he is summoned back to Britain to quell an uprising by the traitor Mordred. Of Guinevere’s flight from Camelot and a great sea battle.
This is no tale of formal courtly love or restrained codes of chivalry, but resembles something out the pages of The Iliad, the Goddess singing of the rage of Achilles:
Thus the tides of time to turn backward
and the heathen to humble, his hope urged him,
that with harrying ships they should hunt no more
on the shining shores and shallow waters
of South Britain, booty seeking.
As when the earth dwindles in autumn days
and soon to its setting the sun is waning
under mournful mist, then a man will lust
for work and wandering, while yet warm floweth
blood sun-kindled, so burned his soul
after long glory for a last assay
of pride and prowess, to the proof setting
will unyielding in war with fate.
There is no magic, no romance, just vengeance, hard combat, lust, and doom.
… then a man will lust for work and wandering… so burned his soul after long glory. Not exactly words Bilbo comfortably enjoying cakes and tobacco Bag End. Yet Tolkien wrote The Fall of Arthur contemporaneous with his much more famous work.
Tolkien began the poem in the early 1930s and there is evidence to suggest he may have continued working on it as late as 1937, when The Hobbit was published. He spent a lot of time getting the words right, and his effort was not wasted—its words ring with power. Christopher says his father drafted some 120 pages before settling on the final text presented in the book. “The amount of time and thought that my father expended on this work is astounding,” he says.
Given the effort expended it remains a mystery why Tolkien abandoned the poem, though Christopher offers up a possible explanation: He was turning his whole thought to Middle-Earth.
After the publication of The Lord of the Rings Tolkien expressed a desire to return to the poem, but the effort failed. It’s a shame the poem remained unfinished but Tolkien’s unbounded genius outstripped his available hours.
But the extant work is remarkable, and as Christopher demonstrates in the additional material served as likely inspiration for the great Middle-Earth legendarium, including the voyage of Earendil and the fall of Numenor.
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| Arthurian Eddie. |
Arthur was taken to Avalon to be healed after his great wound suffered at the hands of Mordred at Camlann. The story from there varies; in some versions he does not make the voyage but dies and is interred in an abbey graveyard at Glastonbury. But in others he seems to reach the fabled isle, where one day he will return, healed, to unite a divided land.
Maiden refers to the legendary properties of the isle in “Isle of Avalon” off of 2010’s The Final Frontier.
The gateway to Avalon
The island where the souls
Of dead are reborn
Brought here to die and be
Transferred into the earth
And then for rebirth
This same Isle of Avalon prefigures Tolkien’s Tol Eressea, the Lonely Isle, accessible only by a Straight Path out of the Round World denied to mortals, that led on to Valinor.
Arthur, gravely wounded, bides in Avalon/Tol Eressea. His return is promised in the old rituals and the enigmatic enduring standing stones of Britain, as depicted in “Return of the King,” a track appearing on the expanded edition of Bruce Dickinson’s 1998 solo album The Chemical Wedding.
What is the meaning of these stones?
why do they stand alone?
I know the king will come again
From the shadow to the sun
Burning hillsides with the beltane fires
I know the king will come again
When all that glitters turn to rust
The song is a powerful cry for Arthur’s return, one that I feel.
We’re all engaged in the eternal struggle. As human beings we're possessed of own individual desires and wants and enjoy our freedoms, but must balance that as members of a civilization that provides purpose and joint safety, but in exchange saddles us with restrictions and obligations. The Arthurian myths speak directly to this great tension.
Arthur is a man with earthly desires, including his great love for Guinevere, but must subsume them to greater obligations owed to his kingdom. Launcelot is a heroic figure whose martial prowess and love for Guinevere can be viewed as the Chivalric ideal, but his base desires and human weaknesses undo a kingdom.
All the same struggles play out today. There is no clean resolution, just a balance that must be struck with compromise.
I think we’ve have tipped too much into individualism. We create and curate our own virtual realities in our smartphones. We distrust institutions. Civic engagement has sharply declined. Some of this institutional skepticism is warranted. But if everyone reverts to selfish individual interests the center cannot hold, and civilization falls apart.
We need the return of a king to unite this fragmented land.
In “The Darkest Hour” when Bruce/Winston Churchill exhorts the besieged people of England to turn their ploughshares into swords and take up arms against tyranny (“You Sons of Albion awake, defend this sacred land”). Perhaps we one day we may unite under a common cause and create a new shining kingdom from the wasteland, a “Jerusalem” on earth:
I will not cease from mental fight,
nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant Land.
