The Fall of Arthur the only venture by J.R.R. Tolkien into the legends of Arthur King of Britain may well be regarded as his finest and most skilful achievement in the use of the Old English alliterative metre in which he brought to his transforming perceptions of the old narratives a pervasive sense of the grave and fateful nature of all that is told: of Arthur's expedition overseas into distant heathen lands of Guinevere's flight from Camelot of the great sea-battle on Arthur's return to Britain in the portrait of the traitor Mordred in the tormented doubts of Lancelot in his French castle.

Unhappily The Fall of Arthur was one of several long narrative poems that he abandoned in that period. In this case he evidently began it in the earlier nineteen-thirties and it was sufficiently advanced for him to send it to a very perceptive friend who read it with great enthusiasm at the end of 1934 and urgently pressed him 'You simply must finish it!' But in vain: he abandoned it at some date unknown though there is some evidence that it may have been in 1937 the year of the publication of The Hobbit and the first stirrings of The Lord of the Rings. Years later in a letter of 1955 he said that 'he hoped to finish a long poem on The Fall of Arthur'; but that day never came.

Associated with the text of the poem however are many manuscript pages: a great quantity of drafting and experimentation in verse in which the strange evolution of the poem's structure is revealed together with narrative synopses and very significant if tantalising notes. In these latter can be discerned clear if mysterious associations of the Arthurian conclusion with The Silmarillion and the bitter ending of the love of Lancelot and Guinevere which was never written.