La caída de Arturo

The Fall of Arthur, the only foray of J. R .R. Tolkien's legends of King Arthur of Britain may be considered his greatest achievement in the use of alliterative meter in Old English. A work in which he managed to convey the sense of inevitability and gravity of events: from Arthur's expedition to distant pagan lands, from Queen Guinevere's flight from Camelot, from the great naval battle to Arthur's return to Britain. . Unfortunately, The Fall of Arthur was one of the long narrative poems that Tolkien abandoned during this period, probably in 1937, the year of the publication of The Hobbit and the first dawn of The Lord of the Rings. Along with the text of the poem, many handwritten pages, a large number of drafts and various experiments in verse were found in which the strange evolution of the structure of the poem is revealed, together with prose synopses, as well as very interesting notes. In the latter, one can clearly discern the associations of Arthur's conclusion with The Silmarillion, and the bitter end of Lancelot and Guinevere's love, which he never wrote.