The abandonment of The Fall of Arthur is qualified by the existence of manuscript notes of various value that indicate my father’s thoughts and intentions for the continuation and conclusion of the poem, and of some of these it must be said that their content is both extremely interesting and extremely tantalizing. There are also scraps of further verse, though almost all are written so rapidly as to be in places beyond certain interpretation. Among these papers is a sketch of the narrative to follow the last part of the finished text, where Arthur, pondering the nature and outcome of an assault on the cliffs, opens his thought to Gawain that they would best postpone further conflict, and ‘trusting to the wind and the ebb-tide’ sail west along the coast ‘to other landing’ (V.61–3).
I give here this sketch: clearly contemporary with the concluding passage of the poem, it takes up no more than a single page, written in a manner somewhat but not greatly above my father’s most impenetrable. I have expanded contractions and introduced trivial corrections for clarity.
Counsel. Arthur does not wish to risk his knights. He calls Gawain and proposes to turn west and run with wind and ebb down the channel west to other landing – ere Mordred could follow in power, to Cornwall of unkindly coast by kind people or to fair Lyonesse.15
But Gawain says we planned to attack Mordred right away. There he is. Sooner or later we must attack him. Every day adds to his strength and leaves the East open to the [? heathen].16
They gaze till the sun sinks. Gawain gazed in fretted wrath. [Written in the margin: Arthur insists on leaving.] As the suns westers the tide turns again. Gawain leaps into a light boat with his dearest friends, and bidding all that dare follow him they drive their craft with oars and ground it on the white beaches. Gawain leaps overboard and under a hail of arrows wades ashore and up the river course, seeking to win a passage to the cliff tops. Mordred eggs on his men. That day Gawain missed Gaheris and Gareth and dour-handed Agravain his brethren.17
But he slew many men, …. level with those that stood on higher ground. He reaches the top but few are with him, though many are following. There he clears a way to Mordred. They fight and Gawain [?? falters]. The sun is sinking on his left hand [written above: lights his shield]. A red ray strikes on his shield and lights up the griffon [on the shield]. Galuth [Gawain’s sword] breaks Mordred’s helm and he falls back among his men, but snatches [a bow] from Ivor and turning shoots Gawain through the breast. Gawain falls, calling upon Arthur. Geryn, Gawain’s esquire, slays Ivor, and Gawain’s household fall on so fiercely that they win the cliff-top and stand about his body until Arthur’s host comes [?? pressing] up. Arthur comes as Gawain dies, and the sun sinks beyond Lyonesse.
Here this outline ends. Another, evidently somewhat earlier, projects the narrative for the whole of the rest of the poem from the beginning of the fourth canto; but from Arthur’s lament for Gawain it is reduced (if written at the same time as the outline, which is not certain) to hasty notes on two sides of a single page, and there are no other clues to my father’s thoughts for the remainder of the poem.
Bright sun shines over Britain. Mordred’s men are beating the woods for Guinevere, and they cannot find her. In the meanwhile sending men to the land of Leodogrance (Camiliard in Wales) he goes east and assembles his host joining with the Saxons and Frisians. Wind blew fair from the south and the sea lay green beneath the white cliffs. Mordred had beacons built on cliff tops and hills, so that his host might assemble to whatever point Arthur came.
The ships of Arthur are seen approaching. A white lady with a child in her arms is Arthur’s ensign. Before Arthur’s ship sails a great white ship with a banner of a golden griffin. The sun is embroidered on its sails. That is Gawain. Still Mordred hesitates and will not have fire set in the beacon. For he thought in his heart, if Lancelot and Ban’s kindred were in the navy he would draw off and make peace. For if he hated Lancelot the more he was of him now afraid. But the white lily on the black field of Lancelot was not seen, for Lancelot awaited the Queen’s summons. Then at last the beacon flamed and Mordred’s host held the shore. Thus Arthur came to Romeril.
The Saxon ships before Romeril were driven away or sunk and set on fire, but Arthur could not land and was held back. So Gawain thrust forth his ship Wingelot (?)18 and others of his vassals, and they ground upon the white beach, which is soon stained red. The battle is fierce. Gawain leaps overboard and wades ashore. His yellow hair is seen towering above his dark foes. He slays the King of Gothland, and hews his way to Mordred’s standard. Duel of Gawain and Mordred. Mordred driven back, but he catches a bow from a henchman and turns and shoots Gawain. [Written in margin: Mordred saved by Ivor.]
Gawain falls and dies by the rim of Ocean, calling for Arthur. In the meanwhile the fury of Gawain’s men clears the shore and Arthur comes and kisses Gawain farewell.
Arthur’s lament.
I give here, for a reason that will quickly be apparent, both King Arthur’s lament from the alliterative Morte Arthure and its form in The Fall of Arthur.
Than gliftis the gud kynge, and glopyns in herte,
Gronys ful grisely with gretande teris;
Knelis downe to the cors, and kaught it in armes,
Kastys upe his umbrere, and kyssis hym sone,
Lookes one his eye-liddis, that lowkkide ware faire,
His lipis like to the lede, and his lire falowede.
Than the corownde kyng cryes fulle lowde:
‘Dere kosyn o kynde, in kare am I levede,
For nowe my wirchipe es wente and my were endide.
Here es the hope of my hele, my happynge of armes,
My herte and my hardynes hale on hym lengede,
My concelle, my comforthe, that kepide myne herte!
Of alle knyghtes the kynge that undir Criste lifede,
Thou was worthy to be kynge, thofe I the corown bare.
My wele and my wirchipe of all this werlde riche
Was wonnen thourghe sir Gawayne, and thourghe his witt
one!
Allas!’ saide sir Arthure, ‘nowe ekys my sorowe!
I am uttirly undon in my awen landes!
A! dowttouse derfe dede, thou duellis to longe!
Why drawes thou so one dreghe? thow drownnes myn
herte!’19
The lamentation of King Arthur for Sir Gawain in The Fall of Arthur papers is at once in the very earliest stage of composition and unhappily in my father’s most inscrutable hand. After much study this is the best rendering that I have been able to produce.
Then gloom fell grey on the good king’s heart
and he groans amid gliding tears
looking upon his eyes now closed for ever
and his lips like lead and [? lily faded].
Then his [? crown] he cast down crying aloud
‘Dear kinsman in care am I left
now my glory is gone and my grace [written above: good]
ended.
Here lies my hope and my help and my helm and my sword
my heart and my hardihood and my ..... of strength
my counsel and comfort
of all knights the [?? noblest].
of all [?kings] the ............. Christ lived
To be king .............. I the crown bore.
I am ...... [?utterly ruined] in mine own lands.
Ah, dread death thou dwellest too long,
thou drownest my heart ere I die.
In the Alliterative Morte Arthure the king is reproved by his knights for his indecorous display of grief:
‘Blyne’, sais thies bolde men, ‘thow blondirs thi selfen;
This es botles bale, for bettir bees it never.
It es no wirchipe iwysse to wryng thyn hondes;
To wepe als a woman, it es no witt holden.
Be knyghtly of contenaunce, als a kyng scholde,
And leve siche clamoure for Cristes lufe of heven!’20
My father dashed down a few words here, with a heading ‘Sir Iwain comforts him with Beowulf’s words’:
to weep as a woman is not wit holden
better vengeance than lament
The passage from Beowulf in my father’s mind is I think certainly Beowulf’s words to Hrothgar, King of the Danes, in lines 1384–9 of the poem:
Ne sorge, snotor guma! Selre bið æghwæm,
þæt his freond wrece, þonne he fela murne.
Ure æghwylc sceal ende gebidan
worold lifes, wyrce se þe mote
domes ær deaþe; þæt bið drihtguman
unlifgendum æfter selest.
Grieve not, wise one! Better is it for every man
that he should avenge his friend than he should much
lament.
To each one of us shall come the end of life in the world;
let him who may earn glory ere his death. No better thing
can brave knight leave behind when he lies dead.
In the Alliterative Morte Arthure there follows a vow made by King Arthur:
‘Here I make myn avowe,’ quod the kynge than,
‘To Messie and to Marie, the mylde qwenne of heven,
I sall never ryvaye ne racches uncowpyll
At roo ne rayne-dere, that rynnes appone erthe;
Never grewhownde late glyde, ne gossehawke latt flye,
Ne never fowle see fellide, that flieghes with wenge;
Fawkon ne formaylle appon fiste handill,
Ne yitt with gerefawcon rejoyse me in erthe;
Ne regnne in my royaltez, ne halde my Rownde Table,
Till thi dede, my dere, be dewly revengede;
Bot eveer droupe and dare, qwylls my lyfe lastez,
Till Drighten and derfe dede hafe don qwate them likes!’21
My father’s initial thought for a rendering of the king’s vow to deny himself all forms of his principal pleasure reads thus:
Arthur’s vow
I will never hunt with hounds nor with hawk
Nor feast nor hear harp nor bear crown
[? nor sit at] the Round Table till I have avenged Gawain.
It needs no discussion to see that if my father did not have the Alliterative Morte Arthure open in front of him, at the very least he had read this passage very recently, when he sketched out an initial version of Arthur’s lament for Gawain and his vow of self-denial.
I have already observed (see here) that the conception of a great sea-battle off Romeril in The Fall of Arthur was derived from the alliterative poem. From the outlines given above other features of this nature can be added. From the Morte Arthure come the ebbing of the tide, hindering Arthur from landing (see here, here), and Gawain’s taking a boat with a few companions and then wading ashore (see here, here). Gawain’s slaying of the King of Gothland in the fighting on land is from the same source (see here, here) – but in the finished poem this is placed earlier, in the course of the sea-battle (IV.202–3). Among other details are the name of Gawain’s sword, Galuth (IV.197–200), and the golden griffon on his ship’s banner (IV.144) and his shield (see here, here).
It remains now to return to the second of the two outlines and the tantalizing notes that follow Arthur’s lament for Gawain, which are all that exist to give any idea of how my father saw the conclusion of The Fall of Arthur at about the time when he abandoned it.
Beneath the drafting for Arthur’s lament and vow is written:
Mordred is driven off and retires east. Arthur goes west. Lancelot … [?? the body of Gawain]. In the margin is written, presumably referring to Mordred: for lack of support all the east is held by him. At the foot of the page is jotted in pencil: Begin Canto V with Gawain’s body being borne to Camelot.
On another page are the following notes, written very rapidly indeed: in my transcript several words are scarcely more than guesses.
Strong sun. Arms of Arthur move first. Rumour of Mordred’s attack. A little cloud in the East. Mordred comes unexpectedly out of a forest upon the Plain of Camlan. Iwain and Errak. Marrac and Meneduc. Idris and Ailmer.
Mordred has Saxons Frisians Irish Picts and Paynims [i.e. Pagans] with perilous weapons (see here). Arthur borne back. Mordred issues last. Arthur and Mordred slay one other. The cloud [?gathers] to darkness. All grows dark.
Arthur retires into the west. Rumour of Mordred’s advance.
Mordred issues from forest.
Battle of Camlan. Arthur and Mordred slay one another.
Cloud [?gathers]. Arthur dying in the gloom. Robbers search the field.
[Excalibur >] Caliburn and the lake. The dark ship comes up the river. Arthur placed upon it.
Lancelot has no news. On a grey day of [?? rain] he sets sail with Lionel and comes to Romeril where the crows are still over Romeril. As he rides along the empty roads the Queen comes down out of Wales and meets him. But he only asks where is Arthur. She does not know.
He turns from her and rides ever west. The hermit by the sea shore tells him of Arthur’s departure. Lancelot gets a boat and sails west and never returns. – Eärendel passage.
Guinevere watching afar sees his silver banner vanish under the moon. Thus she came utterly to grief. She fled to Wales from the men of the east, but though grief was her lot it is not said that she mourned more for others than for herself. But so ended the glory of Arthur and the prowess of the ancient world, and there was a long darkness over the land of Britain.
Other hastily pencilled notes tell a little more of Lancelot and Guinevere.
Lancelot came too late hearing of Camlan, and meets Guinevere, but his lord loving all his love went to him. His love for Guinevere had no more power. In [?? pain] they parted cold and griefless. [?? She is alone.]
Lancelot parts from Guinevere and sets sail for Benwick but turns west and follows after Arthur. And never returns from the sea. Whether he found him in Avalon and will return no one knows.
Guinevere grew grey in the grey shadow
all things losing who at all things grasped.
..... gold .... and was laid in dust
as profitless to men as it proved of old.
With these papers are found on a separate sheet seventeen lines of alliterative verse in typescript, and from this fact and from the mention of Avalon in line 15 it is obvious that this is the ‘Eärendel passage’ referred to in the second outline above.
The moon mounted the mists of the sea,
and quivering in the cold the keen starlight
that wavered wan in the waiting East
failed and faded; the foam upon the shore
was glimmering ghostly on the grey shingle,
and the roaring of the sea rose in darkness
to the watchers on the wall.
O! wondrous night
when shining like the moon, with shrouds of pearl,
with sails of samite, and the silver stars
on her blue banner embroidered white
in glittering gems, that galleon was thrust
on the shadowy seas under shades of night!
Eärendel goeth on eager quest
to magic islands beyond the miles of the sea,
past the hills of Avalon and the halls of the moon,
the dragon’s portals and the dark mountains
of the Bay of Faery on the borders of the world.
The first seven lines were later hastily altered by my father thus, largely for metrical improvement.
The moon was fallen into misty caves,
and quivering cold the keen starlight
wavered wanly in the waiting East
failed and faded; the foam upon the shore
was glimmering ghostly upon grey shingle,
and the roaring sea rising and falling
under walls of stone.
On another page is a pencilled text of verses in the primary stage of composition, with deletions and substitutions, of exceptional difficulty, but of the utmost interest in relation to the ‘Eärendel pasage’ just given.
The grave of Gawain under grass lieth
by the sounding sea, where the sun westers.
What grave hath Guinever The grey shadow
her gold in [?ground] [(struck out:) gleams like]
her gold in silence unseen gleameth.
Britain nor Benwick did barrow keep
of Lancelot and his lady.
No [(struck out:) grave hath Arthur]
No mound hath Arthur in mortal land
under moon or sun who in ...........
beyond the miles of the sea and the magic islands
beyond the halls of night upon Heaven’s borders
[(struck out:) the] dragon’s portals and the dark mountains
of the Bay of Avalon on the borders of the world.
up[on] Earth’s border in Avalon [sleeping >] biding.
While the world w....eth
till the world [??awaketh]
In the penultimate line the verb is not waiteth and seems not to be watcheth. Beneath the verses is written: The tomb
*
Among the scanty and enigmatic notes that I have given on see here there is so little that refers to the departure of Arthur after his mortal wounding in the battle of Camlan that must one look to other writings in the attempt to interpret them.
Of the departure of Arthur we have only these sentences (see here): Arthur dying in the gloom. Robbers search the field. Caliburn and the lake. The dark ship comes up the river. Arthur placed upon it. And subsequently we read that Lancelot sailed into the west following Arthur, but never returns, and Whether he found him in Avalon and will return no one knows.
I have given on see here Malory’s account of Arthur’s departure. In this he was following the stanzaic Morte Arthur fairly closely, rather than the French Mort Artu (see here). The most curious point, in relation to my father’s notes, concerns the place and nature of Arthur’s departure. In Le Morte Arthur it is said of the king and the knights Bedivere and Lucan that ‘all night they in the chapel lay by the sea side’, and Malory has ‘not far from the sea’. In Le Morte Arthur Arthur orders Bedivere to cast Excalibur ‘in the salt flood’, and when Bedivere finally obeys the command ‘into the sea he cast it’: here Malory used the word ‘water’ (see here), but Bedivere reports to the king that he saw wawes (waves). In the Mort Artu, however, the water is specifically a lake, as in my father’s note: Caliburn and the lake. In Malory the vessel in which Arthur departed was ‘a lytyll barge’, in Le Morte Arthur it was ‘a riche shyppe with maste and ore’.
Thus, in his intention, never fulfilled, my father had abandoned the conclusion of the alliterative Morte Arthure, where it is told of Arthur’s death (see here) that after the battle of Camlan he was carried, as he desired, to Glastonbury and entered ‘the Ile of Aveloyne’, where he died. He was now following the story derived in essentials from the Mort Artu. But it is difficult to interpret the ‘lake’ in his notes; as is also the ship that ‘comes up the river’.
It doesn’t seem that the ancient evidences concerning the battle of Camlan shed any light on my father’s conception here. The earliest record is found in a chronicle of the tenth century known as the Annales Cambriae, the Annals of Wales, which has an entry under the year 537 Gueith Camlann (the Battle of Camlan) ‘in which Arthur and Medraut fell.’ Geoffrey of Monmouth said that the battle took place in Cornwall, on the river Cambula, but gave no other indication. In fact, it is not known where Camlan of the Annales Cambriae was, not even whether it was in Cornwall; but it came to be identified with the Cornish river Camel.22
The river that bore Arthur away in my father’s note must derive ultimately from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Cambula. But the apparent incongruities in these notes are best explained, I think, on the supposition that they represent his ideas in an unformed state: glimpses of scenes which were not as yet coherent and unified: the chapel by the sea, Excalibur cast into the sea – or lake, the river which brings the mysterious ship on which Arthur departs.
It is in any case abundantly clear that he would have nothing to do with the ending of the story of Arthur himself in the Mort Artu, in the stanzaic Morte Arthur, and in Malory (see here): the burial of his body at the hermitage to which it had been brought on the night following his departure in the ship – in the words of the hermit to Bedivere in Le Morte Arthur,
Abowte mydnyght were ladyes here,
In world ne wyste I what they were,
This body they brought uppon a bere
And beryed it wyth woundys sore.
But Malory’s actual words about the burial of Arthur at the hermitage chapel near Glastonbury are curious.
‘Sir,’ seyde sir Bedyvere, ‘what man ys there here entyred that ye pray so faste fore?’
‘Fayre sunne,’ seyde the ermyte, ‘I wote nat veryly but by demynge [guessing]. But thys same nyght, at mydnyght, here cam a numbir of ladyes and brought here a dede corse and prayde me to entyre [bury] him. And here they offird an hondred tapers, and they gaff me a thousande besauntes.’
‘Alas!’ seyde sir Bedyvere, ‘that was my lorde kynge Arthur, which lyethe here gravyn [buried] in thys chapell.’
Thus of Arthur I fynde no more wrytten in bokis that bene auctorysed, nothir more of this verray sertaynté of hys deth harde I never rede, but thus was he lad away in a shyp wherein were three quenys .....
Now more of the deth of kynge Arthur coude I never fynde, but that thes ladyes brought hym to hys grave ..... But yet the ermyte knew nat in sertayne that he was veryly the body of kynge Arthur; for thys tale sir Bedwere, a knyght of the Table Rounde, made hit to be wrytten.
It seems plain that Malory was very sceptical of the strange story that he found in his sources.
But in respect of Arthur’s destination in the barge, or ship, his last words to Bedivere in Malory’s tale, already cited on see here, must be recalled: ‘For I muste into the vale of Avylyon to hele me of my grevous wounde. And if thou here nevermore of me, pray for my soule!’ Malory was echoing Arthur’s words in Le Morte Arthur, here in response to the cry of Bedivere ‘lord, whedyr are ye bowne?’ [Whither are you bound?]:
I wylle wende a lytelle stownde [while]
In to the vale of Aveloune,
This reference to the vale of Avalon is absent from the Mort Artu. In The Fall of Arthur it was of course to Avalon that the king was going. But where was Avalon?
In my father’s poem it was emphatically not Glastonbury in Somerset. In the notes given on see here Sir Lancelot, returned to Britain from Benwick, rides westward; and ‘the hermit by the sea shore tells him of Arthur’s departure.’ Then ‘Lancelot gets a boat and sails west and never returns.’ It seems to me all but certain that this hermit was the keeper of the chapel ‘not far from the sea’ or ‘by the sea side’ (see here) to which Sir Lucan and Sir Bedivere brought the wounded king, though he is not mentioned in Le Morte Arthur or Malory. On this view, he saw, and told what he saw to Sir Lancelot, the ship bearing Arthur away from the coast, out to sea, and certainly not in the direction of a hermitage near Glastonbury for burial.
The association of Arthur’s grave with Glastonbury can therefore be described briefly. The earliest written record is found in a work of the Welsh antiquary Giraldus Cambrensis, or Gerald of Wales, written near the end of the twelfth century. After observing that fantastical tales were told of Arthur’s body, as that it had been borne to a region far away by spirits and was not subject to death, he said that ‘in our days’ Arthur’s body had in fact been found, by the monks of the abbey of Glastonbury, buried deep in the ground in a hollowed oak in the graveyard. A leaden cross was fixed to the underside of a stone beneath the coffin, in such a way that an inscription on the cross was concealed. The inscription, which Giraldus had himself seen, declared that buried there was the renowned King Arthur together with Wennevaria in insula Avallonia [in the island Avallonia]. (He records also the curious detail that beside the bones of Arthur (which were of huge size) and of Guinevere was a perfectly preserved tress of her golden hair, but that when it was touched by one of the monks it fell instantly to dust.) The date of this event is recorded as 1191.
In the same passage Giraldus said that what was now called Glastonia was anciently called Insula Avallonia. This name, he explained, arose because the place was virtually an island, entirely surrounded by marshes, whence it was called Britannice (in the British [i.e. Celtic] language) Inis Avallon, meaning, he said, insula pomifera ‘island of apples’, aval being the British word for ‘apple’, for apple-trees were once abundant there. He adds also that Morganis, who was a noble lady, akin to King Arthur, and ruler of that region, took him after the battle of Kemelen (Camlan) to the island which is now called Glastonia for the healing of his wounds.
*
There is no need to pursue further the ‘Glastonbury connection’ into the complex questions of what lay behind this very curious ‘discovery’ of King Arthur’s grave, and whether there were associations between Glastonbury and the legends of Arthur before 1191. It will however be clear how it came about that the author of the alliterative Morte Arthure could say (see here) that Arthur was taken to Glasschenberye, and yet entered the Ile of Aveloyne, and how the king could say to Bedivere, in the stanzaic Morte Arthur and in Malory, as he lay in the ship, that he will go to the vale of Avalon for the healing of his wound (see here).
But in The Fall of Arthur my father had no concern with Glastonbury in his reshaping of the legend. For him, beyond question, Avalon was an island in the remote West; but concerning its nature, in the notes that are appended to the poem, we learn nothing. There is a single, and mystifying, reference to Avalon in the poem itself (I.204). This is in a speech by Gawain in which he reminds King Arthur of his uncounted might in chivalric arms, ‘from the Forest’s margin to the Isle of Avalon’: which must mean that Avalon had become a part of Arthur’s dominion in the western seas, unless it is no more than a sweeping rhetorical suggestion of the extent of his power in East and West.
Of Arthur’s departure Geoffrey of Monmouth in his Historia Regum, as already noted (see here), said no more than that for the healing of his wounds he was borne to the Isle of Avalon (in insulam Avallonis). But in another, later work of his, the Vita Merlini, a poem in Latin hexameters, he gave an account of Avalon and the coming there of King Arthur, as if in the words of the Welsh bard Taliesin. In this poem the isle is named (using the same etymology, aval ‘apple’, as did Giraldus) Insula pomorum que fortuna vocatur, ‘the Island of Apples, which is called the Fortunate Isle’: for in this blessed land all things are brought forth of themselves: there is no need of farmers to plough the fields, where corn and grapes appear without tending. ‘Thither after the battle of Camlan (post bellum Camblani) we took the wounded Arthur, and there we were received with honour by Morgen, who laid the king on a golden bed in her own chamber and looked long at the wound, saying at last that he could be restored to health if he were to stay with her for a long time and submit to her cure. Rejoicing therefore we committed the king to her and returning gave our sails to the following winds.’
The earliest account in literature of Arthur’s departure in the ship is found in the Brut of Laȝamon, on which see here. According to Laȝamon the place of the great battle was Camelford, and the armies came together ‘upon the Tambre’, the river Tamar, which is a long way from Camelford. I cite here Laȝamon’s lines on King Arthur’s words as he lay mortally wounded on the ground and the coming of the boat that carried him away.23 It will be seen that the metre is the heir to the ancestral form seen in Beowulf (and indeed in The Fall of Arthur) but with longer lines, the half-lines linked now by rhyme or assonance rather than alliteration; while the vocabulary is almost wholly Old English.
‘And ich wulle varen to Avalun to vairest alre maidene,
to Argante þere quene, alven swiðe sceone,
and heo scal mine wunden makien alle isunde,
al hal me makien mid haleweiȝe drenchen.
And seoðe ich cumen wulle to mine kinerichen
and wunien mid Brutten mid muchelere wunne.’
Æfne þan worden þer com of se wenden
þat wes an sceort bat liðen sceoven mid uðen,
and twa wimmen þer inne wunderliche idihte,
and heo nommen Arður anan, and aneouste hine vereden,
and softe hine adun leiden and forð gunnen hine liðen.
. . . .
Bruttes ileveð ȝete þat he bon on live,
and wunnien in Avalun mid fairest alre alven,
and lokieð evere Bruttes ȝete whan Arður cumen liðe.
‘And I will go to Avalon, to the fairest of all maidens,
to Argante the queen24, an elf most fair,
and she shall make whole my wounds
make me all whole with healing draughts.
And afterwards I will come again to my kingdom
and dwell among the Britons with great joy.’
Even with the words there came from the sea
a short boat journeying, driven by the waves,
and therein two women marvellously arrayed,
and forthwith they took up Arthur, and bore him swiftly,
and laid him gently down, and departed.
. . . .
The Britons believe yet that he lives
and dwells in Avalon with the fairest of all elves,
and the Britons ever yet await when Arthur will return.
This passage is peculiar to Laȝamon: there is nothing corresponding to it in Wace’s Brut.
*
In the case of The Fall of Arthur there is a further aspect of ‘Avalon’ to be considered: the perplexing question of the relationship between the ‘island of apples’ or ‘Fortunate Isle’, the Avalon to which King Arthur was taken, that was briefly described by Geoffrey of Monmouth in the Vita Merlini (see here), and the Avalon of my father’s own imagined world.
It was a long time before that name emerged for the island called Tol Eressëa, the Lonely Isle, in the furthest waters of Belegaer, the Great Sea of the West; and there is no occasion here to enter into an account of my father’s strangely changing vision of the Lonely Isle in the earlier years of ‘The Silmarillion’. On the other hand, it is relevant to try to discern his thinking on the matter during the time when he was working on The Fall of Arthur.
The only precise date to assist in this is 9 December 1934, when R.W. Chambers wrote to congratulate him on ‘Arthur’, then in progress (see here); but this of course gives no indication of how near he was at that time to abandoning the poem.
Long afterwards, in a letter of 16 July 1964, he told how he and C.S. Lewis had agreed, at some time now unknown, each to write a story: Lewis’s to be a tale of space-travel and my father’s a tale of time-travel. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet was finished by the autumn of 1937, and my father’s The Lost Road, very far indeed from finished, was sent with other works in a fateful parcel to Allen and Unwin in November of that year. In September The Hobbit had been published; on 19 December 1937 he said in a letter ‘I have written the first chapter of a new story about Hobbits’.
Many years later he described, in that letter of 1964, his intentions for The Lost Road.
I began an abortive book of time-travel of which the end was to be the presence of my hero in the drowning of Atlantis. This was to be called Númenor, the Land in the West. The thread was to be the occurrence time and again in human families (like Durin among the Dwarves) of a father and son called by names that could be interpreted as Bliss-friend and Elf-friend. ..... It started with a father-son affinity between Edwin and Elwin of the present, and was supposed to go back into legendary time by way of an Eädwine and Ælfwine of circa A.D.918, and Audoin and Alboin of Lombardic legend, and so to the traditions of the North Sea concerning the coming of corn and culture heroes, ancestors of kingly lines, in boats (and their departure in funeral ships). ..... In my tale we were to come at last to Amandil and Elendil leaders of the loyal party in Númenor, when it fell under the domination of Sauron.
There survives (printed in The Lost Road and Other Writings, 1987, p.12) the original sketch of his ‘idea’ for the concluding legend that my father dashed down at great speed. ‘This remarkable text,’ I wrote of it in that book, ‘documents the beginning of the legend of Númenor, and the extension of “The Silmarillion” into a Second Age of the world. Here the idea of the World Made Round and the Straight Path was first set down …’ There exist also two versions (ibid. pp.13 ff.), close in time, the second a revision of the first, of a brief narrative that was the forerunner of the Akallabêth (published with The Silmarillion). On the second text (only) my father later pencilled on the manuscript a title: The Last Tale: The Fall of Númenor.
My study of these texts showed that The Fall of Númenor and passages in The Lost Road ‘were intimately connected; they arose at the same time and from the same impulse, and my father worked on them together’ (ibid. p.9). I came therefore to the conclusion that ‘“Númenór” (as a distinct and formalized conception, whatever “Atlantis-haunting”, as my father called it, lay behind) arose in the actual context of his discussions with C.S. Lewis in (as seems probable) 1936.’
In the first of the two texts of The Fall of Númenor there occurs this passage:
[when] … Morgoth was thrust again into the Outer Darkness, the Gods took counsel. The Elves were summoned to Valinor … and many obeyed, but not all.
But in the second version this was changed to read:
But when Morgoth was thrust forth, the Gods held council. The Elves were summoned to return into the West, and such as obeyed dwelt again in Eressëa, the Lonely Island, which was renamed Avallon: for it is hard by Valinor.
This is one of the first occurrences of the name Avallon for Eressëa. In the fragmentary narrative of the Númenórean story for The Lost Road that was all that my father ever wrote of it Elendil tells his son Herendil:
And they [the Valar] recalled the Exiles of the Firstborn and pardoned them; and such as returned dwell since in bliss in Eressëa, the Lonely Isle, which is Avallon, for it is within sight of Valinor and the light of the Blessed Realm.
To this time, it may be supposed, belongs an entry in The Etymologies (an extremely difficult working text from this period published in The Lost Road and Other Writings) under the stem LONO- (p.370):
lóna: island, remote land difficult to reach. Cf. Avalóna = Tol Eressëa = the outer isle. [Probably added subsequently: A-val-lon.]
Another entry that bears on this name, under the stem AWA-, reads (in part):
away, forth; out. Q[uenya] ava outside, beyond. Avakúma Exterior Void beyond the World. [To this was added: Avalóna, cf. lóna.]
These etymologies do not accord with the explanation of the name (‘hard by Valinor’) in the second version of The Fall of Númenor.
At this time, when my father was pondering the successive tales that were to constitute The Lost Road, but of which only fragments would ever be told, he wrote down at great speed a note on the possibility of a story of ‘the man who got onto the Straight Road’. That man would be Ælfwine, the Englishman of the tenth century of whom my father had written much in earlier years: the mariner who came to the Lonely Isle and there learned from the Elves the histories that are set out in The Book of Lost Tales. I give here my father’s note:
But this would do best of all for introduction to the Lost Tales: How Ælfwine sailed the Straight Road. They sailed on, on, on over the sea; and it became very bright and very calm – no clouds, no wind. The water seemed thin and white below. Looking down Ælfwine suddenly saw lands and mountains [or a mountain] down in the water shining in the sun. Their breathing difficulties. His companions dive overboard one by one. Ælfwine falls insensible when he smells a marvellous fragrance as of land and flowers. He awakes to find the ship being drawn by people walking in the water. He is told very few men there in a thousand years can breathe air of Eressëa (which is Avallon), but none beyond. So he comes to Eressëa and is told the Lost Tales.
It is interesting to compare this with the conclusion of The Silmarillion in the version entitled Quenta Silmarillion, the form of the work before my father laid it aside during The Lord of the Rings years (The Lost Road and Other Writings, pp.333–5). Here the name Avallon for Tol Eressëa had entered, but not yet the conception of the Straight Road.
Here endeth The Silmarillion: which is drawn out in brief from those songs and histories which are yet sung and told by the fading Elves, and (more clearly and fully) by the vanished Elves that dwell now upon the Lonely Isle, Tol Eressëa, whither few mariners of Men have ever come, save once or twice in a long age when some man of Eärendel’s race hath passed beyond the lands of mortal sight and seen the glimmer of the lamps upon the quays of Avallon, and smelt afar the undying flowers in the meads of Dorwinion. Of whom was Eriol one, that men named Ælfwine, and he alone returned and brought tidings of Cortirion [city of the Elves in Eressëa] to the Hither Lands.
There is no need to pursue the subject of Avallon into the complexities of later development, which are fully recounted in Sauron Defeated (1992). I have attempted in this summary only to suggest what that name meant to my father in the context of ‘The Silmarillion’ at the time when he was working on The Fall of Arthur, and probably nearing its abandonment.
It seems to me that one should assume a considerable passage of time for the emergence of so huge a perturbation of the existing myth, brought about by the irruption of Númenor and its drowning, the elemental refashioning of the earth, and the mystery of the ‘Straight Path’ leading to a vanished ‘past’ denied to mortals. I think therefore that it is at least quite probable that this evolution in ‘The Silmarillion’, together with the new enterprise of The Lost Road and the severe doubts and difficulties that my father encountered, were in themselves sufficient to account for his turning away from The Fall of Arthur.
This would indeed argue a surprisingly late date for its abandonment, but there is in fact a very curious and puzzling piece of evidence which seems to support this supposition. This is a single page of very rough notes, a list of successive ‘elements’ in the narrative, all of which are found elsewhere. The latter part of the list reads thus:
At some time after this list was made my father entered the bracket that separates ‘Carried to Avalon’ from what precedes, and against the bracket (I.e. on the same line as ‘Carried to Avalon’) wrote ‘Aug 1937’.
The most natural way, perhaps, to interpret this is that my father had reached (in verse, if not in polished form) ‘Arthur slays Mordred and is wounded’, but no further, at that time. The problem with that, of course, is that he had not even reached the Battle of Camlan: the poem ceases with the end of the fighting at Romeril, and the manuscript evidence gives no indication that verse-form ever extended any further. I cannot explain this. But at least there seems to be evidence here that my father was still actively concerned with The Fall of Arthur in August 1937, surprisingly late as that seems.
But if this were the case, is any light cast thereby on the question, why did he at about this time write that Tol Eressëa, a name then going back some twenty years, was changed to Avallon – for no very evident reason? That there was no connection at all with the Arthurian Avallon seems impossible to accept; but it must be said that similarity to the departure of Arthur became still less evident.
In a letter of September 1954, after the publication of The Fellowship of the Ring, my father wrote a beautifully brief and lucid statement concerning Eressëa:
… Before the Downfall there lay beyond the sea and the west-shores of Middle-earth an earthly Elvish paradise Eressëa, and Valinor the land of the Valar (the Powers, the Lords of the West), places that could be reached physically by ordinary sailing-ships, though the Seas were perilous. But after the rebellion of the Númenóreans, the Kings of Men, who dwelt in a land most westerly of all mortal lands, and eventually in the height of their pride attempted to occupy Eressëa and Valinor by force, Númenor was destroyed, and Eressëa and Valinor removed from the physically attainable Earth: the way west was open, but led nowhere but back again – for mortals.
It seems to me that the most that can be said is that the Fortunate Isle, the Avalon of Morgan la Fée, and the Avallon that was Tol Eressëa, are associated only in that they both have the character of an ‘earthly paradise’ far over the western ocean.
Nonetheless, there is good reason, indeed, compelling evidence, to believe that my father did expressly make this connection, although the underlying motive may be difficult to interpret.
Among my father’s notes for the continuation of The Fall of Arthur the one that tells Lancelot took a boat and sailed into the west, but never returned, is of particular interest in the present context on account of the words that follow and conclude the note: ‘Eärendel passage’ (see here). These lines of alliterative verse, found together with the notes for the continuation of The Fall of Arthur, have been given on see here.
In this brief poem ‘the galleon was thrust on the shadowy seas‘, and Eärendel ‘goeth to magic islands … past the hills of Avalon … the dragon’s portals and the dark mountains / of the Bay of Faery beyond the borders of the world.’ In these lines my father was expressly introducing elements of the mythical geography of the First Age of the World as originally described in The Book of Lost Tales, but which largely survived into much later texts of ‘The Silmarillion’.
In the tale of ‘The Hiding of Valinor’ in The Book of Lost Tales Part I it is told that in the time of the fortification of Valinor the Magic Isles were set in a great ring in the ocean as a defence of the Bay of Faëry. By the time of the version of ‘The Silmarillion’ entitled The Quenta, written or largely written in 1930, this was said (The Shaping of Middle-earth, 1986, p.98):
In that day, which songs call The Hiding of Valinor, the Magic Isles were set, filled with enchantment, and strung across the confines of the Shadowy Seas, before the Lonely Isle is reached sailing West, there to entrap mariners and wind them in everlasting sleep.
It is notable that the expression ‘the Bay of Faery on the borders of the world’ in the last line of the ‘Eärendel passage’ is found frequently in early writings. It constitutes the fourth line in the second version of the alliterative poem The Children of Húrin, in or before 1925 (The Lays of Beleriand, 1985, p.95):
Ye Gods who girt your guarded realms
with moveless pinnacles, mountains pathless,
o’er shrouded shores sheer uprising
of the Bay of Faëry on the borders of the World!
In The Quenta all these names appear together in the story of Eärendel (The Shaping of Middle-earth, p.150). On their voyage to Valinor bearing the Silmaril Eärendel and Elwing in the ship Wingelot
came unto the Magic Isles, and escaped their magic; and they came into the Shadowy Seas and passed their shadows; and they looked upon the Lonely Isle and they tarried not there; and they cast anchor in the Bay of Faërie upon the borders of the world.
Particularly striking are the words ‘the dragon’s portals’ in the penultimate verse of the ‘Earendel passage’. In the tale of ‘The Hiding of Valinor’ it is told (The Book of Lost Tales Part I, pp.215–16) that the Gods ‘dared a very great deed, the most mighty of all their works’:
‘They drew to the Wall of Things, and there they made the Door of Night.... There it still stands, utterly black and huge against the deep-blue walls. Its pillars are of the mightiest basalt and its lintel likewise, but great dragons of black stone are carved thereon, and shadowy smoke pours slowly from their jaws. Gates it has unbreakable, and none know how they were made or set, for the Eldar were not suffered to be in that dread building, and it is the last secret of the Gods.’
(The expressions ‘dragonheaded door’ and ‘Night’s dragonheaded doors’ are found in early poems: The Book of Lost Tales Part II, pp.272, 274.)
In this earliest form of the astronomical myth ‘the galleon of the Sun’ passes through the Door of Night, ‘goes out into the limitless dark, and coming behind the world finds the East again’, returning through the Gates of Morn. But this conception was early overtaken by a new form of the myth, in which the Sun does not enter the Outer Dark by the Door of Night but passes beneath the Earth. The Door of Night remained, but changed in purpose and the time of its making. In the brief work named Ambarkanta, The Shape of the World, of 1930 or a little later, the new significance of the Door of Night is expressed in these passages (The Shaping of Middle-earth, pp.235, 237):
About all the World are the Ilurambar, or Walls of the World. They are as ice and glass and steel, being above all imagination of the Children of Earth cold, transparent, and hard. They cannot be seen, nor can they be passed, save by the Door of Night.
Within these Walls the Earth is globed: above, below, and upon all sides is Vaiya, the Enfolding Ocean.
In the midst of Valinor is Ando Lómen, the Door of Timeless Night that pierceth the Walls and opens upon the Void. For the World is set amid Kúma, the Void, the Night without form or time. But none can pass the chasm and the belt of Vaiya and come to that Door, save the great Valar only. And they made that Door when Melko [Morgoth] was overcome and put forth into the Outer Dark; and it is guarded by Eärendel.
I have of course set out here all these passages, chosen from an immense body of writing, not for their own intrinsic significance, but to reinforce the remarkable nature of my father’s deliberate and substantial evocation of a cardinal myth of his own ‘world’, the great voyage of Eärendel to Valinor, in relation to Sir Lancelot of Arthurian legend – to whom, indeed, he was now ascribing a great voyage across the western ocean.25
It will be observed that in these lines of the ‘Eärendel passage’ (see here) the only name that does not derive from the ‘Silmarillion’ narratives is the hills of Avalon. Comparing the description of the voyage of Eärendel and Elwing in the quotation from The Quenta given on see here, where after the passage of the Shadowy Seas and the Magic Isles ‘they looked upon the Lonely Isle and they tarried not there’, it seems at least very probable that ‘Avalon’ here bears the meaning ‘Tol Eressëa’, as in the texts of the 1930s cited on see here. If this is so, then where my father wrote in a ‘Silmarillion’ context that Tol Eressëa was renamed Avallon, he also wrote Avalon for Tol Eressëa in an Arthurian context.
It may be thought that the ‘Eärendel verses’ show no more than a large parallel between two great westward voyages. But the second poem, in the first phase of composition and extraordinarily difficult to read (and with two most unfortunate illegibilities), found among these papers26 and given on see here, introduces much more extraordinary associations.
These verses open with the reflection that while Gawain’s grave lies ‘by the sounding sea, where the sun westers’ there are no burial mounds of Lancelot or Guinevere, and ‘no mound hath Arthur in mortal land’ – and the verses that follow concern Arthur: but they are very closely similar, or nearly identical, to the concluding lines of the ‘Eärendel verses’. It is not immediately obvious which of these two ‘poems’, for convenience here called Eärendel’s Quest and Arthur’s Grave, preceded the other. It might seem that the much more finished form, in typescript, of Eärendel’s Quest suggests that it is the later; but the fact that the names closely associated with the Eärendel legend accompany the figure of Eärendel in that poem, whereas in Arthur’s Grave those names are associated with King Arthur, seems to me a stronger argument that Arthur’s Grave followed Eärendel’s Quest.
It is said at the end of Arthur’s Grave that Arthur ‘bides’ (changed from ‘sleeps’) in Avalon, while the Bay of Faëry becomes the Bay of Avalon. On the face of it, Arthur’s living presence ‘in Avalon’ suggests that the name is here used in the familiar Arthurian sense of the island to which Arthur was taken to be healed by Morgan La Fée; but its appearance in the context of ‘Silmarillion’ names seems also to indicate that it was Tol Eressëa.
Similar is the change of the name of the Bay of Elvenhome (or of Faërie, or of Eldamar) to the Bay of Avalon. The name Avalon, now used of Tol Eressëa, is here extended from the isle to the coasts of the vast bay in which Tol Eressëa was anchored.27
It seems then that the Arthurian Avalon, the Fortunate Isle, Insula Pomorum, dominion of Morgan la Fée, had now been in some mysterious sense identified with Tol Eressëa, the Lonely Isle. But the name Avallon entered, as a name of Tol Eressëa, at the time when the Fall of Númenor and the Change of the World entered also (see here), with the conception of the Straight Path out of the Round World that still led to Tol Eressëa and Valinor, a road that was denied to mortals, and yet found, in a mystery, by Ælfwine of England.
How my father saw this conjunction I am wholly unable to say. It may be that through absence of more precise dating I have been led to combine into a contemporaneous whole ideas that were not coherent, but emerged and fell aside in that time of great creative upheaval. But I will repeat here what I said in The Lost Road and Other Writings, p.98, of my father’s intentions for his ‘time-travel’ book:
With the entry at this time of the cardinal ideas of the Downfall of Númenor, the World Made Round, and the Straight Road, into the conception of ‘Middle-earth’, and the thought of a ‘time-travel’ story in which the very significant figure of the Anglo-Saxon Ælfwine would be both ‘extended’ into the future, into the twentieth century, and ‘extended’ also into a many-layered past, my father was envisaging a massive and explicit linking of his own legends with those of many other places and times: all concerned with the stories and the dreams of peoples who dwelt by the coasts of the great Western Sea.
*
In conclusion, it remains to consider those notes of my father’s for the continuation of the story of Lancelot and Guinevere (see here).
We learn of Lancelot after his return, too late, from France that he rode west from Romeril ‘along the empty roads’, and that he met Guinevere ‘coming down out of Wales’. Already the narrative was set to turn definitively from that found in the stanzaic Morte Arthur, which was closely followed by Malory, of whose account I gave a brief sketch on see here. My father’s notes, exceedingly brief as they are, show beyond question that the later years of this Guinevere will know nothing of a nunnery, or of ‘fastynge, prayers, and alme-dedis’ with a long face, and she will certainly not call upon Lancelot in such words as these:
‘But I beseche the, in alle thynge,
That newyr in thy lyffe after thysse
Ne come to me for no sokerynge,
Nor send me sond, but dwelle in blysse:
I pray to Gode euyr lastynge
To graunt me grace to mend my mysse.’28
Still less will this Lancelot reply in such words as these of Malory’s:
‘Now, my swete madame,’ seyde sir Launcelot, ‘wolde ye that I shuld turne agayne unto my contrey, and there to wedde a lady? Nay, madame, wyte you well that shall I never do, for I shall never be so false unto you of that I have promysed. But the selff [same] destiny that ye have takyn you to, I woll take me to, for the pleasure of Jesu, and ever for you I caste me specially to pray.’
All otherwise was their meeting when she came down from Wales as my father would tell it. It was indeed foreseen in verses of the third canto:
Strange she deemed him,
by a sudden sickness from his self altered. (III.95–6)
Strange he deemed her
from her self altered. By the sea stood he
as a graven stone grey and hopeless.
In pain they parted. (III.106–9)
In the stanzaic Morte Arthur there was great sorrow at the last meeting and the parting in the nunnery:
But none erthely man covde telle
The sorow that there by-gan to bene
and in Malory’s tale ‘there was lamentacyon as they had be stungyn with sperys’ (see here); but there was determination and resignation. In the last meeting between them in the notes to The Fall of Arthur (see here) there was desolation and emptiness. In the first of the notes that bear on this Lancelot asks of Guinevere only: Where is Arthur? Though the mood is of course altogether different, this has something of the pared-down poignancy of Morwen’s question to Húrin concerning Túrin as she died: ‘If you know, tell me! How did she find him?’ Húrin said nothing; and Guinevere had nothing to tell. Lancelot ‘turned from her.’
In another note concerning their last meeting it is said that Lancelot had no love left but for Arthur: Guinevere had lost all her power over him. The words of the third canto are repeated: ‘In pain they parted’, but now is added ‘cold and griefless’. This Lancelot is not going to spend his last years in fasting and penance, and to end his life eating and drinking so little that he ‘dryed and dwyned awaye’ (see here). He went to the sea shore and learned from the hermit who dwelt there that Arthur had departed west over the ocean. He set sail to follow Arthur, and no more was ever heard of him. ‘Whether he found Arthur in Avalon and will return no one knows.’
But what lay before Sir Lancelot, is declared by the poet in the concluding lines of the third canto. Though filled with a lighter mind and new hope in Benwick after the great storm had passed, ‘the hour he knew not’:
The tides of chance had turned backward,
their flood was passed flowing swiftly.
Death was before him and his day setting
beyond the tides of time to return never
among waking men, while the world lasted.
One may imagine that my father saw his story of the departure of Sir Lancelot as re-enacting in some sense the tale of Tuor, father of Eärendel (Tuor was the son of Huor, the brother of Húrin; he wedded Idril Celebrindal, the daughter of Turgon King of Gondolin). In the Quenta of 1930 this is told of him:
In those days Tuor felt old age creep upon him, and he could not forbear the longing that possessed him for the sea; wherefore he built a great ship Eärámë, Eagle’s pinion, and with Idril he set sail into the sunset and the West, and came no more into any tale.
Eärendel afterwards built Wingelot, and set out on a great voyage, with a double purpose: to find Idril and Tuor, who had never come back, and ‘he thought to find perhaps the last shore and bring ere he died a message to the Gods and Elves of the West.’ But Eärendel did not find Tuor and Idril, nor did he on that first western voyage reach the shores of Valinor.
We last see Guinevere watching from far off the sails of Lancelot’s departing ship: ‘she sees his silver banner vanish under the moon.’ There is mention of her flight into Wales to escape from ‘the men of the East.’ From my father’s few pencilled sentences it seems that her life henceforward held nothing but grievous loneliness and self-pity; ‘but though grief was her lot it is not said that she mourned for others more than for herself.’ Two lines of verse that he wrote (see here) have the air of an epitaph.
Guinevere grew grey in the grey shadow
all things losing who at all things grasped.
*