A Lord of More Renown than Arthur: Tolkien’s Corrective and Compensatory Approach to the Arthurian Tradition in his Legendarium

“A Lord of More Renown than Arthur”:

Tolkien’s Corrective and Compensatory Approach to the Arthurian Tradition in his Legendarium

by Kate Jensen

J. R. R. Tolkien is one of the most influential mythmakers of the twentieth century. He is widely praised for the originality of his grand creative work, known as the Legendarium, of which The Lord of the Rings is only a part, yet he also has a reputation for taking pre-existing legends and fairytales and incorporating them into his own created world. One such well of inspiration from which he draws is the Arthurian tradition, also known as the Matter of Britain. While Arthurian influences are apparent in many of the Legendarium’s narratives, characters, and locations, Tolkien’s relationship with these pre-existing legends is far from simple. He speaks highly critically of the Arthurian canon for its lack of grounding in the English language, its supposed incoherence, and its overt Christianity. Therefore, while he takes from this tradition, he transforms and “corrects” what he sees as the flaws of previous mythmakers and creates something uniquely tailored to his own tastes, yet with detectable Arthurian flavours. Tolkien’s revisionary approach to the Arthurian tradition is apparent throughout many of the stories of the Legendarium, but I have found a surprisingly enlightening microcosm of Tolkien’s wider approach in the story of Eärendil, one of the legendary heroes of The Silmarillion, whom Tolkien establishes as a mythical figure of grandeur (within the Legendarium) to rival even King Arthur himself.

1. Tolkien and the “incoherent and repetitive” Arthurian Canon

To provide context on Tolkien’s attitudes toward Arthurian literature that manifest within the Legendarium, it is important to consult the author’s letters. In Letter 130, Tolkien relates his motivations for the creation of his Legendarium. He states that he has always had an interest in mythology and fairy stories, finding pleasure in stories from many nations and cultures, but he claims that England is lacking in stories that are specifically tied to the English language, prompting him to create his own (Letters 144). He acknowledges the obvious presence of the “Arthurian world,” and concedes that it is “powerful,” but marks it as insufficient for his tastes and standards (144). He provides three crucial criticisms of this canon; he denigrates (1) its lack of connection to the English language, (2) its portrayal of “faerie” (a term Tolkien uses to refer to the magical elements of fairy-stories [Tree 10]), and (3) its treatment of Christianity (Letters 144). These three points are paramount for building an understanding of Tolkien’s engagement with Arthurian matters in his own writings, and they each bear elaboration.

His first point, on the Matter of Britain’s lack of Englishness, evidently alludes to the legends’ Celtic (especially Welsh) origins and continental (particularly French) influences. This is not to say that Tolkien means to disparage Welsh and French legends; in his list of other cultures’ legends he enjoys, he cites “Celtic, and Romance” stories as examples. The issue, as Tolkien sees it, is that whereas Welsh and French speakers have Welsh and French legends to call their own, English speakers largely only have retellings and appropriations of Welsh and French legends in the form of the Matter of Britain. The critique ties directly back to his wider point on his motivation to write his own legends; he attempts to provide something that he believes Arthurian literature, and therefore England as a whole, is lacking: a firm cultural grounding in the English language.

Tolkien’s own contributions to the Arthurian canon bear out his desire for the foregrounding of the English language. Tolkien translated the alliterative poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight into modern English, and his “main object” in doing so, as he states in his introduction, “is to preserve the metres” (Sir Gawain 3). He highlights the importance of the characteristically English nature of alliterative verse “descended from antiquity” as opposed to the rhymed French and Italian-inspired metres that gained traction in the Middle English period.¹ He speaks of the poem in the context of “the Alliterative Revival of the fourteenth century,” and laments the literary movement’s failure (Sir Gawain 3). It would not be a stretch to consider Tolkien to be, in intention, the spearhead of an attempted twentieth-century Alliterative Revival, and not only because of his translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; he wrote many alliterative poems throughout his career, both within and outside of his legendarium. Most notable of these works for present purposes is his unfinished narrative poem The Fall of Arthur. Tolkien mentions this work in a letter specifically as an example of the alliterative metre in which he loves to compose (Letters 219). His son Christopher Tolkien attributes the incompletion of the poem largely to his father’s unsustainably perfectionist approach to the metre (Fall, Foreword 11-12), implying that, for the author, the importance of this English metre supersedes that of the Arthurian legends that are the content of the work. Taken together, we can view the translation and the original poem as attempted reclamations of any scraps of Englishness in the largely Celtic and French canon of the Matter of Britain.

After his discussion of language, Tolkien’s second point in Letter 130 is on the religiosity of the Matter of Britain. Although a devout Catholic himself, he laments that the Arthurian canon “explicitly contains the Christian religion,” arguing that “fairy-story” should “contain in solution elements of religious and moral truth (or error), but not explicit” (144). This prescription on the proper place of religion within the fairy-tale genre aligns with Tolkien’s description of The Lord of the Rings in another letter. He describes his book as “fundamentally . . . catholic,” but states that he avoids explicit inclusion of any religious practices because the work’s religious content “is absorbed into the story and the symbolism” (Letters 172). Verlyn Flieger argues that this approach protects the “inner consistency” of his stories, by refusing to use his created world merely “as a pointer to something outside itself” (37). For Tolkien, eschewing all overt references to the Bible, the Church, and Christian iconography need not mean abandoning all expression of theological ideas; rather, in his view, the fairy-tale genre holds potential for a unique form of religious expression, one which Arthurian Literature lacks the subtlety to achieve.

Tolkien’s third and final criticism of the Arthurian canon in Letter 130 concerns the logic of its fairy-tale elements, which he calls “incoherent and repetitive” (Letters 144). We can compare this statement to a point he makes in his essay “On Fairy-Stories.” Here, he claims that Arthur was likely an insignificant historical figure who was “boiled for a long time” in the soup of storytelling alongside other myths and histories “until he emerged as a King of Faërie” (Tree 28). Taken together, the letter and the essay present the notion that this age-long boiling process has resulted in a severely overcooked and therefore “incoherent” soup of Faërie. He does not, however, paint all Arthurian stories with one brush; in the same essay, He cites Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as one fairy-story that treats its magic “seriously” (Tree 11). Despite Tolkien’s generally critical attitude toward Arthuriana, Jane Beal highlights his interest in and “special love” for Sir Gawain and its anonymous poet (14, 17). Tolkien’s comment on the poem’s treatment of magic demonstrates that his interest in the work is not strictly metrical; he is as complimentary of its contents as its form. Still, this work seems to be the exception rather than the rule and does not contradict Tolkien’s wider assessment of the flaws of Arthurian Faërie.

2. Arthurian Elements in the Legendarium

Having covered, in broad strokes, Tolkien’s views on the Matter of Britain, I now wish to discuss how he draws on these pre-existing legends for his own created world while compensating for their perceived flaws. Let us begin with an examination of Tolkien’s use of languages and their connected literatures and cultures in the Legendarium, in light of his critique of the Arthurian canon’s lack of Englishness. The desire Tolkien expresses in Letter 130 to ground his myths in the English language is apparent in his choice, in early drafts, to frame his legends through the character of Ælfwine, an Anglo-Saxon sailor who meets various elves who tell him of their ancient history.² This character gradually fades into obscurity over years of successive drafts as Tolkien develops the Legendarium (Christopher Tolkien, Book Part I Foreword 5-6) and deemphasizes specific real-world connections. Still, Tolkien always finds a place for Anglo-Saxon in his tales. He even places an entire kingdom of Anglo-Saxon speakers into The Lord of the Rings through the Rohirrim (although Anglo-Saxon is technically a placeholder for the hypothetical Rohirric language which Tolkien never, in reality, constructed).³ He also incorporates elements of Anglo-Saxon legends; Bilbo’s theft of a cup from the dragon Smaug’s horde in The Hobbit (201) is lifted more-or-less directly from Beowulf (Rateliff 533). None of these creative decisions are particularly surprising coming from an Anglo-Saxon specialist and prominent Beowulf scholar, but they take on extra significance when we view them as a counterbalance to the overwhelmingly Celtic Matter of Britain.

Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to view the Legendarium as a rejection of Celtic influence in favour of Germanic culture and language; in fact, some readers have come to the opposite conclusion. In 1937 Edward Crankshaw read and evaluated drafts of The Silmarillion on behalf of the publisher Allen & Unwin; he writes that Tolkien’s work has “that mad, bright-eyed beauty that perplexes all Anglo-Saxons in the face of Celtic art” (qtd. in Letters 25). Tolkien’s response to these comments is somewhat defensive, claiming that neither his stories nor his names are Celtic, and expressing his “distaste” for the “fundamental unreason” of Celtic stories (Letters 26). In a later letter, however, he admits that he has constructed his elven language Sindarin to resemble Welsh (a Celtic language he greatly admires) and that this choice is appropriate for “the rather Celtic type of legends” of the Sindarin elves (Letters 176). Furthermore, Flieger notes the general Celtic flavour of much of Tolkien’s world, full of mysterious forests and wondrous elven kingdoms (39). Both she and Jane Beal highlight in particular Tolkien’s adoption of the Celtic name Broceliande⁴ (a forest in Arthurian legend) in early drafts as the name of the land in which most of The Silmarillion takes place, although he would later change the name to Beleriand (Flieger 39) (Beal 15). While we may speculate that this Celtic “unreason” is partially the source of what Tolkien finds “incoherent and repetitive” about Arthurian Faërie, it is clear that he himself is more than willing to borrow heavily from Celtic languages and folklore, including the Celtic elements of Arthuriana.

When Tolkien draws on such disparate and, for him, “incoherent” Arthurian and broader Celtic sources, he attempts to unify them and bring them into his ostensibly more cohesive world. Tolkien has a wide-reaching reputation as an expert world-builder with a keen eye for consistency and detail. The Legendarium includes multiple interrelated constructed languages with roots from a common proto-language, detailed family trees spanning millennia, and copious historical annals and chronologies with the dates of important events. Nevertheless, Tolkien, as a perfectionist, constantly revised his tales throughout the years, and left many works unfinished, or in states that contradict other materials. Flieger even argues that Tolkien’s Legendarium mirrors Arthurian literature most strongly in the multiplicity of its stories and variants (37-41). Both the Arthurian and Tolkienian canons are rife with works of poetry and prose, full, well-developed tales, mere sketches or summaries, finished works, and fragments (Flieger 37-41). Nevertheless, Tolkien’s works contain one type of cohesion that the Matter of Britain cannot; the Legendarium is greatly unified by the sensibilities its singular creator, leading to a wide-ranging body of legends all conforming to the particular tastes of a writer who constantly seeks coherence and cohesion, even if this goal is never fully achieved.

The influences of Arthuriana are not, however, limited to the level of broad linguistic, cultural, and structural inspirations; Tolkien gives certain individual characters an Arthurian air. Flieger connects the powerful and mysterious Lady Galadriel to Morgan le Fay (35), while Clare Moore locates two separate Morgan figures in The Silmarillion; she compares the shapeshifting elven Princess Lúthien to Monmouth’s Morgen (Moore 200-208), and the willful sister of King Turgon, Aredhel, to the French portrayals of Morgan le Fay (208-216). Richard J. Finn finds echoes of Merlin in Middle-earth’s famous wizard Gandalf, who aids Aragorn in his journey to claim the Kingship of Gondor (23). Aragorn and his legendary sword Andúril, in turn, parallel King Arthur and Excalibur (Finn 24). Beal contrasts Arthur’s disastrous fall with Aragorn’s Christ-like ascension as King, connecting Tolkien’s happy ending with his concept of eucatastrophe (26). “Eucatastrophe” is Tolkien’s coinage to describe a sudden positive turn of events, particularly in fairy-tales (Tree 68-69), which ties into his views on the incarnation of Christ, which he calls “the eucatastrophe of Man’s history” (Tree 72). Thus, Tolkien is able to rework the unsatisfactory aspects of Arthur’s story through his own tales, all the while weaving implicit religious themes into his narratives without resorting to the explicit Christian references for which he denigrates the Arthurian tales.

Tolkien’s reworking of the perceived flaws of Arthur’s story is not limited to Aragorn; the ending of Frodo’s story takes this revisionary approach one step further. In the final chapter of The Lord of the Rings, the physically and mentally wounded Frodo sails on a ship to the legendary elven lands of Tol Eressëa and the kingdom of Valinor (Return 1346-1349). This event quite obviously parallels the mortally wounded Arthur’s journey to the mystical isle of Avalon, as Tolkien readily admits, referring in a letter to Frodo’s journey as “an Arthurian ending” (Sauron 130). This parallel is further heightened by Tolkien’s mention of a haven on the island of Tol Eressëa named Avallónë (Silmarillion 268), clearly evoking Avalon. Still, the similarities to Arthur’s story only go so far; Tolkien clarifies in another letter that the wounded Frodo journeys to the Undying Lands not to prepare for a return, but simply to rest and live out his mortal life, stating that in his Legendarium “the return of Arthur would be quite impossible” (Letters 198). This statement does much to elucidate Tolkien’s revisionary and transformative approach to Arthurian influence; he draws on elements of Arthurian tales where they fit into his world and alters them according to his tastes where he finds contradictions between his own creative ethos and those of the sources from which he draws.

3. Eärendil the Mariner and the Problem of Analogues: A Case Study

In order to further demonstrate Tolkien’s peculiar corrective approach to Arthurian literature, I would like to take a close look at the character of Eärendil the Mariner. He is one of Tolkien’s first, most formative, and generative creations, being featured in some of the earliest poems and stories of the Legendarium, from which the rest of his tales later sprung (Letters 385-6). I wish to illustrate the wider points that I have highlighted in my general research on Tolkien’s Arthurian influences with Eärendil as a case study, as I believe his story serves in many ways as a microcosm for Tolkien’s attitude towards Arthuriana. My goal is not only to present my findings but also to demonstrate how my views have radically shifted throughout my research and, accordingly, I have structured this section to mirror the development of my thought process. I entered into my research on Eärendil with a specific direction in mind, seeking to find simple analogies between Tolkien’s mariner and specific Arthurian characters, but what I have found is far more interesting, complex, and ambiguous, and it has given insight into how Tolkien both builds upon and writes against the Arthurian canon.

Although Eärendil is far from the most obviously Arthurian character in the Legendarium, there are palpable Arthurian qualities in Eärendil’s story. Living about six thousand years before the events of The Lord of the Rings, Eärendil is a half-elven, half-human refugee embroiled in the hopelessly failing war against the Dark Lord Morgoth. He sets sail on his ship Vingilot across the sea to Valinor, which is ruled by the Valar (the pantheon of angelic beings who rule the Earth), to plead for help in the desperate war. He is ultimately successful in this endeavour, and the Valar raise him and his ship into the heavens to become the morning-star as a herald of the armies of Valinor, who vanquish the Dark Lord (Silmarillion 254-263). Though he is not specifically referred to as a “knight,” through his voyage he becomes the quintessential figure of a knight-errant and would not feel out of place in the Matter of Britain. The Lord of the Rings features a poem recounting his “errantry”⁵ as he is repeatedly lost on his episodic quest for Valinor (Fellowship 304-308); the poem even contains a catalogue of his weapons, armour, and gear (304-305) that would not be out of place in a chivalric romance such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. While Tolkien’s presentation of the character arguably gives him a general Arthurian flavour, there is little in these observations to point towards specific Arthurian parallels.

However, I became interested in pursuing Eärendil’s Arthurian connections further when I recalled coming across an obscure note years ago in which Tolkien compares the character to Sir Lancelot. This note comes from one of Tolkien’s outlines for a planned section of his poem The Fall of Arthur, in which he plans to write of Sir Lancelot, after Arthur’s passing, sailing away to seek his late King in Avalon, with Tolkien explicitly comparing this wandering knight to Eärendil (Fall 136). My case would be far simpler had Tolkien used the note to show Eärendil as a Lancelot figure, but in essence he does the opposite, conforming the pre-existing Lancelot to fit the shape of a character from his own mythology. In The Fall of Arthur, Tolkien abides by Lancelot’s long-established narrative of an adulterous entanglement with Queen Guinevere and consequent civil strife with Arthur, but he then gives Lancelot an Eärendil-inspired mariner’s ending. Eärendil’s tale has absolutely no equivalents to Lancelot’s traditional narrative centring around his love triangle,⁶ and Tolkien’s comparison between the two characters only seems to function in the context of his rewriting of Lancelot as an Eärendil figure.

This strange Lancelot-Eärendil link only becomes more muddled when read alongside a related outline for The Fall of Arthur in which Tolkien refers to Sir Gawain having a ship named Wingelot (Fall 129). Though it is impossible to prove, I believe this detail to be a nod to the theory of scholar Israel Gollancz, who posits that the traditional name of Gawain’s horse Gringolet derives from a boat named Guingelot in germanic folklore, belonging to the giant, Wade (Gollancz 104-107). In one marginal rewrite of a line from an early alliterative poem about the mariner, Tolkien considers changing the name of Eärendil’s father Tuor to Wade (Christopher Tolkien, Lays 143), and elsewhere states that the Name of Eärendil’s ship Vingilot is directly inspired by Wade’s Guingelot (J. R. R. Tolkien, Peoples 371).⁷ Taken altogether, it is clear that Tolkien intentionally links both his own creation Eärendil and the Arthurian Gawain with the non-Arthurian legend of Wade. The connection evidently runs deeper still, linking Eärendil and Gawain directly; the spelling of “Wingelot” for Gawain’s ship in The Fall of Arthur is highly significant, as this is the spelling that Tolkien uses in earlier drafts for Eärendil’s Vingilot (Christopher Tolkien, Book Part II 272). As intriguing as this connection is, this Gawain-Eärendil parallel drastically complicates or even undermines Tolkien’s Lancelot-Eärendil link. Tolkien even seems to express hesitance over the parallel he draws between the characters, placing a question mark in the outline after the line about Gawain’s ship Wingelot (Fall 129), perhaps perceiving a tension between the Lancelot-Eärendil and Gawain-Eärendil Analogies.

Making sense of these obscure and muddled parallels requires a comparative analysis of the narratives of Gawain and Eärendil. Considering Tolkien’s interest in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, it is reasonable to posit that this poem is a particularly suitable Arthurian well of inspiration from which Tolkien can draw. With this thought in mind, we can see that both Gawain and Eärendil set out on perilous journeys and get lost for extended periods along the way. For both characters, their journeys’ ends seem certain to end in death; Gawain believes that he heads toward his imminent beheading, while Eärendil seeks the immortal land of Valinor which is forbidden to him on pain of death as a descendent of mortal men and exiled elves. Both characters are ultimately spared execution, but whereas Gawain is able to return home to Arthur’s court, albeit changed by his experience, Eärendil becomes a star and is forbidden to set foot on the mortal lands of Middle-earth ever again (Silmarillion 257-258). When we take these narrative similarities into consideration, it is easy to view Gawain as a far more appropriate Arthurian analogue than Lancelot.

It is where Eärendil’s story diverges from that of Gawain (with the former’s ascension into the sky) that it aligns with the story of another Arthurian knight: Sir Galahad. Through his wife Elwing, Eärendil is the inheritor of one of the three Silmarils, magical elven jewels lit with the holy light of the Two Trees of the Valinor. Flieger notes the similarities between the Holy Grail and the Silmarils (35), and with this analogy in mind, it is not difficult to construct a reading of Eärendil as a sort of Galahad figure. Galahad seeks the Fisher King’s castle in order to find the Grail whereas Eärendil already possesses the Silmaril and carries it back to Valinor (its point of origin). Despite this difference, these holy objects play similarly central roles in the characters’ quests to mythical locations. Both relics even serve the function of measuring the worth of would-be possessors; Galahad reaches the grail through the purity and worth of his heart, while the Silmarils burn the hands of any unworthy of holding them; Elwing’s Silmaril notably leaves Eärendil unscathed.⁸ Through the power of the Holy Grail, Galahad is able to ascend to Heaven, and similarly, Elwing’s Silmaril becomes the source of light for the Star of Eärendil when the Valar raise the mariner and his ship into the heavens (Silmarillion 257-258). While Eärendil, fitting with Tolkien’s aversion to overt religiosity, does not literally ascend to “Heaven” as an afterlife, but instead is an immortal being who sails through the sky, the parallels to Galahad are nevertheless striking and appear to go beyond the realm of coincidence.

Having established Eärendil’s Arthurian connections, it is useful to step beyond them to illustrate how Tolkien compensates for what he perceives to be lacking in Arthurian literature by drawing from other traditions. The name Eärendil is inspired by the Old English name Éarendel, which refers to the morning-star (the planet Venus) (Letters 385), which is, of course, the star that Eärendil becomes. Therefore, Tolkien’s tale of the mariner sailing the sky with the holy light of his Silmaril functions as an aetiological myth of the morning-star, giving Tolkien’s mythos a grander and more cosmological scope than that of the Arthurian legends. The Éarendel connection also accords with Tolkien’s linguistic aims for the Legendarium; though he gives Eärendil a fictional etymology in his constructed elven language Quenya (Letters 385-6), the name is a major example of the grounding of his writings in the history of the English language (the same indeed can be said for the Germanic Vingilot-Guingelot connection). Tolkien, here as elsewhere, provides a linguistically English flavour to his mythology, compensating for the perceived lack of Englishness in Arthurian literature that he laments.

Eärendil also addresses another major complaint of Tolkien about Arthurian literature: its explicit inclusion of Christianity. Tolkien was specifically inspired by the name Éarendel as it is used in the anonymous Anglo-Saxon allitertive poem Crist I, sometimes attributed to Cynewulf, (Hostetter 5), and it is generally accepted that in this poem Éarendel is a reference to John the Baptist, who heralds Christ as the morning-star heralds the sunrise (Hostetter 7-8). Tolkien explicitly states in a letter that the Old English representation of Éarendel as Christ’s herald is “alien to [his] use” (Letters 387).⁹ He then elaborates, stating that Eärendil lives during a time in between the “Fall” and the “Redemption of Man,” in which knowledge of Eru (the name of God in the Legendarium) is not widespread (Letters 387). In the Legendarium, the Fall is a vague, distant legend (J. R. R. Tolkien Morgoth’s 345-349), and the eventual incarnation of Eru a scarcely whispered “hope” of which I have located only one mention in Tolkien’s entire body of work (Morgoth’s 321-323). On the other hand, the Arthurian tales are set in an era in Britain wherein Christianity is so ubiquitous that it is entirely taken for granted. Tolkien intentionally writes against this aspect of Arthuriana, side-stepping what he sees as the problematic inclusion of Christianity within the world of myth and fairy tales by placing his legends in an imaginary era long before the incarnation.

Though he is far removed from the Christian knights of the Round Table, and further still from John the Baptist, Eärendil is still undoubtedly a herald of salvation. He does not presage capital-S Salvation in a Christian sense, which, in Tolkien’s view, can come only through Christ, but rather a major victory in war. His story serves as a prime example of the narrative trajectory of eucatastrophe, the ultimate realisation of which, for Tolkien, is Christ’s incarnation (Tree 72). Therefore, Eärendil’s tale (like all of the Legendarium’s stories of eucatastrophe, to a certain extent) structurally echoes the foundational story of Christianity while avoiding allegory (which Tolkien famously rejects [Fellowship xxvi]) and explicit mentions of Christianity. Thus, Tolkien can express his Christian faith through his writings while avoiding what he views as the deeply detrimental overt Christianity that permeates the Arthurian legends. We can view Eärendil’s story as a model for what Tolkien views to be the appropriate treatment of religious themes and imagery within the world of fairy tales. Tolkien’s subtle and often implicit treatment of religious matters in his fiction, of which Eärendil’s story is emblematic, is one of the clearest cases of Tolkien writing directly against the norms of the Arthurian tradition.

Eärendil, as the herald of eucatastrophe, is also a figure who brings cohesion to the Legendarium. While Tolkien speaks of Arthur and his world as an overly boiled jumble of influences with “incoherent” results, the same could scarcely be said for Eärendil. As the descendent of many of the most important characters in The Silmarillion, both elven and human, the inheritor of one of the legendary Silmarils, and one of the last survivors of the war that has consumed the land of Beleriand, he becomes the emissary of the hopes and sufferings of all those who came before him. Therefore, although he is only born in the second-to-last chapter of the Quenta Silmarillion¹⁰ (Silmarillion 249), he becomes a central unifying figure of the story cycle, and the eucatastrophic victory against Morgoth that he helps achieve brings the legends of the First Age to a close. His importance extends into the later ages of legend, as the father of Elrond, the distant ancestor of Aragorn, and the source of the starlight that Frodo carries with him to protect him from evil on his perilous quest. Samwise even speaks explicitly to Frodo about Eärendil’s role as a connecting thread between the legends of old and their present quest, reminding him that they “are in the same tale still!” (Two 931). Eärendil occupies a place in the folklore of Middle-earth comparable to Arthur in our modern world; In fact, Tolkien refers to Eärendil’s son Elrond as “a lord of more renown than Arthur would be, were he still king at Winchester today” (Return 1491). The same, and far more, could easily be said of Elrond’s father, destined to sail the skies as a bright symbol of hope until the world’s end.

Although it can be tempting to look for a one-to-one Arthurian analogue, Eärendil embodies a much broader point on Tolkien’s attitude toward Arthurian literature. Ultimately, any one connection is in itself a small component of his character; Eärendil is not Lancelot, Gawain, Galahad, Wade, Éarendel, or John the Baptist, but is rather a new and unique figure in Tolkien’s mythology. Ironically, it is the multiplicity of the diverse sources that have contributed to Eärendil’s creation and characterization that puts him in league with the characters of Arthurian legends, whose influences span Celtic folklore, French romances, Biblical sources, etc. Eärendil’s story also demonstrates Flieger’s point about Tolkien’s textual development mirroring the Arthurian canon in its complexity and layering (Flieger 37-41); Tolkien wrote many unique, often contradictory, versions of Eärendil’s story in both poetry and prose throughout his life, many of which are left intriguingly incomplete. What remains consistent throughout these many versions, however, is Tolkien’s grounding of the legend in the history and folk traditions of English and the Germanic languages more broadly (through the references to Éarendel and Guingelot), as well as Tolkien’s characteristic religious subtlety and aversion to explicit Christian allusions. Thus, we can see, through the microcosm of one character, Tolkien’s inspiration from specific Arthurian figures and tales, his rivalling of the scope, breadth, and complexity of the Arthurian canon, and his corrective and reactive habit of seeking to compensate for the perceived flaws of Arthuriana.

As his letters and essays demonstrate, Tolkien views the Matter of Britain as a highly flawed body of literature that nonetheless contains some works of high literary merit; therefore, he draws on those elements which accord with his tastes to incorporate into his own canon and alters or discards those that do not. For instance, he gives readers a new Avalon in the form of Avallónë, yet no new returning Arthur figure. He also leaves behind the overt Christianity of characters like Galahad, and yet retains more implicit Christian imagery in the character of Eärendil, as a herald of salvation. Eärendil also ties together the many tales of the Legendarium into a cohesive whole while hearkening back to Celtic Arthurian legends and the Anglo-Saxon language and folklore that Tolkien so dearly loved. Tolkien’s attempt to correct the perceived shortcomings of the mythmakers of the past through his selective reuse and reshaping of Arthurian motifs and elements leaves readers with a new and unique body of myth, one that is fit to stand alongside the monumentally renowned Matter of Britain.

Footnotes

¹ Sir Gawain and the Green Knight exists at a fascinating liminal point between the ancient traditions of Anglo- Saxon poetry, and the growing French influence of post-Norman-conquest Middle-English. The poem alternates between alliteration and rhyme with its distinctive bob-and-wheel style. Tolkien obliquely refers to this mixture of forms with his use of the plural “metres,” but it is telling that he only speaks specifically about the poem’s use of alliteration, and not its use of rhyme, showing the former to be far more significant in his estimation.

² See Christopher Tolkien’s discussion of the character (Book Part II 278-334).

³ Tolkien’s logic behind this decision is that Rohirric is related to the Common Speech of Middle-earth, which is rendered as Modern English, and therefore using Old English as a stand-in for Rohirric preserves the sense of familiarity between related languages (Return 1493).

⁴ See Christopher Tolkien (Lays 160).

⁵ Not only does this poem refer to Eärendil’s adventuring as “errantry” (Fellowship 306), but the work itself is developed out of one of Tolkien’s earlier poems entitled “Errantry” (see Christopher Tolkien Treason 84-109).

⁶ Flieger notes the absence of adultery in the Legendarium and links this to Tolkien’s comment that his works are intended to be “purged of the Gross” (Letters 144), arguing that he is reacting against the adulterous elements of Arthuriana that he may find distasteful (Flieger 38).

⁷ Vingilot, which sails the sky as a star, is sometimes described with wings (Fellowship 307), further paralleling Wade’s Guingelot, the first element of whose name has the same root as the English word “wing” (Gollancz 107). Gollancz notes Wade and Guingelot’s folkloric association with swans and swan wings in particular (107), and even this detail is mirrored in Tolkien’s works; Vingilot has a swan-shaped prow (Fellowship 304).

⁸ The silmarils’ power to test the worth of their bearers not only mirrors that of the grail but can additionally be seen as an instance of the worth-measuring “sword in the stone” motif.

⁹ While I am willing to take Tolkien at his word that he is not attempting to evoke the specific Christian associations under which the author of Crist I operates, there is, nevertheless, an undeniable general air of saintliness around the character as he is referenced in The Lord of the Rings that parallels Crist I. Not only does Frodo carry the light of Eärendil’s star to protect him from evil on his quest, he even invokes Eärendil’s name as he shines his light, as one might call on a saint: “Aiya Eärendil elenion ancalima!” (Two 942). This is a Quenya (elven) phrase which Tolkien translates as “Hail Eärendil brightest of stars,” and is, as he admits, a paraphrasing of “Éala Éarendel engla beorhtast” (Letters 385). This Old English line comes directly from Crist I and translates to “Hail Éarendel, brightest of angels” (Hostetter 5).

¹⁰ The Quenta Silmarillion is the part of The Silmarillion that covers the events of the First Age of Middle-earth and constitutes the vast majority of the text.

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