Tolkien accepted that Christianity was of major significance in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and in his W.P. Ker Lecture on that work in 1953 he discussed at length Gawain’s conduct as a Christian. He may have felt that in some of the tales of Arthur the Christian content was treated superficially; but his main thought may have been regret that the heroic tales of the pre-Christian Anglo-Saxons were lost, only hinted at in such works as survived the Norman Conquest.
In *Farmer Giles of Ham (1949), set in a time ‘after the days of King Coel maybe, but before Arthur or the Seven Kingdoms of the English’ (p. 8), Tolkien parodied and mocked both Arthurian legend and the critics who tried to reconstruct its true history. The King in this tale is not at all glorious, and his knights are cowards. In notes to the fiftieth anniversary edition of Farmer Giles of Ham (1999) Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond suggest that Tolkien alludes to the Historia Regum Britanniae (History of the Kings of Britain) by Geoffrey of Monmouth, an important twelfth-century source for the Arthur legends, especially for the ‘historical’ Arthur (though the work itself is pseudo-historical). But Farmer Giles of Ham also contains anachronisms for the period in which it is set, if ‘not really worse than all the medieval treatment of Arthurian matter’, as Tolkien wrote to Naomi Mitchison (18 December 1949, Letters, p. 133).
Characters in *The Notion Club Papers discuss Arthurian legend, possibly expressing Tolkien’s own opinions. One member says:
Of course the pictures presented by legends may be partly symbolical, they may be arranged in designs that compress, expand, foreshorten, combine, and are not at all realistic or photographic, yet they may tell you something true about the Past. And mind you, there are also real details, what are called facts, accidents of land-shape and sea-shape, of individual men and their actions, that are caught up: the grains on which the stories crystallize like snowflakes. There was a man called Arthur at the centre of the cycle.
To which another answers: ‘Perhaps! … But that doesn’t make such things as the Arthurian romances real in the same way as true past events are real.’ The first speaker comments that ‘history in the sense of a story made up out of the intelligible surviving evidence (which is not necessarily truer to the facts than legend)’ is not the same as ‘“the true story”, the real Past’ (*Sauron Defeated, pp. 227–8, 230).
In spite of what Tolkien wrote to Milton Waldman, some critics have discerned influence from or echoes of Arthurian legends in Tolkien’s own stories. The most obvious is the similarity of the wounded Frodo’s departure from Middle-earth to Tol Eressëa in the West, at the end of *The Lord of the Rings, to the departure of Arthur to the Isle of Avalon after the battle of Camlann, to be healed of his wounds. Tolkien himself recognized this in the summary of The Lord of the Rings that he sent to Waldman: ‘To Bilbo and Frodo the special grace is granted to go with the Elves they loved – an Arthurian ending, in which it is, of course, not made explicit whether this is an “allegory” of death, or a mode of healing and restoration leading to a return’ (*Morgoth’s Ring, pp. 365–6). A few years later, in a letter to *Naomi Mitchison, Tolkien was sure that there was no return for Frodo to Middle-earth as a mortal, ‘since their “kind” cannot be changed for ever, this is strictly only a temporary reward: a healing and redress of suffering. They cannot abide for ever, and though they cannot return to mortal earth, they can and will “die” – of free will, and leave the world. (In this setting the return of Arthur would be quite impossible, a vain imagining)’ (25 September 1954, Letters, pp. 198–9).
Various other parallels to or influences of Arthurian legend have been suggested, but many of these, such as the Quest motif, are not unique to the Matter of Britain. In a series of articles in Beyond Bree Todd Jensen considered both similarities and differences between Tolkien’s writings and Arthurian legend, noting that many of them may have been unintentional or are derived from a common source: see ‘Hobbits at the Round Table: A Comparison of Frodo Baggins to King Arthur’ (Beyond Bree, September 1988); ‘Tolkien and Arthurian Legend’ (November 1988); ‘The Sons of Fëanor and the Sons of Lot’ (July 1992); ‘Mordred and Maeglin’ (September 1992); ‘Merlin and Gandalf’ (November 1992); ‘Aragorn and Arthur’ (January 1993); ‘The Historical Arthur’ (March 1993); and ‘Arthurian Britain and Middle-earth’ (April 1993). See also Verlyn Flieger, ‘J.R.R. Tolkien and the Matter of Britain’, Mythlore 23, no. 1, whole no. 87 (Summer/Fall 2000).
Other writers have commented on parallels between the Arthurian wizard Merlin and Tolkien’s Gandalf, and have come to different conclusions. Nikolai Tolstoy has said that
there can be no doubt that the wizard Gandalf of The Hobbit (1937) and the trilogy [The Lord of the Rings] which follows, is drawn from the Merlin of early legend.
Like Merlin, Gandalf is a magician of infinite wisdom and power; like Merlin, he has a sense of humour by turns impish and sarcastic; and, like Merlin, he reappears at intervals, seemingly from nowhere, intervening to rescue an imperilled cosmos. Even minor aptitudes are openly appropriated, such as Merlin’s propensity for appearing in the incongruous guise of a beggar, and his capacity for launching splendid displays of pyrotechnics. [The Quest for Merlin (1985; 1986 edn. cited), p. 40]
Miriam Youngerman Miller, however, concludes ‘that Tolkien did not so much employ the model of any one wizard, be it Merlin or Odin, in his invention of Gandalf, but rather patterned his mage according to the characteristics which underlie the archetype of the magician as it developed in ancient Persia (and no doubt before) and as it persists to this day’ (‘J.R.R. Tolkien’s Merlin: An Old Man with a Staff: Gandalf and the Magus Tradition’, The Figure of Merlin in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (1989), p. 138). See further, comments by Carl Phelpstead in Tolkien and Wales: Language, Literature and Identity (2011), especially ch. 5. For a lengthy discussion of Gandalf in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings relative to Merlin in Arthurian tales, see Frank P. Riga, ‘Gandalf and Merlin: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Adoption and Transformation of a Literary Tradition’, Mythlore 27, nos. 1/2, whole nos. 103/104 (Fall/Winter 2008).
In ‘An Ethnically Cleansed Faery? Tolkien and the Matter of Britain’, Mallorn 32 (September 1995), David Doughan notes that although Tolkien may have tried to avoid introducing an Arthurian element in his poetry and fiction, nevertheless it ‘keeps breaking through’, particularly in the influence of Welsh on names, though not necessarily on their meaning. Doughan cites (pp. 23–4) the use in the *Lay of Leithian of ‘Broseliande’ (later ‘Beleriand’), ‘originally “Bro Celiddon” – the land of Caledonia, and the supposed place of one of Arthur’s battles’; and, in *The Fall of Númenor, ‘Avallon’ as a name for Tol Eressëa (in later versions ‘Avallónë’, a haven in that island), similar to Arthurian ‘Avalon’, though Avallon is so called because ‘it is hard by Valinor’ (*The Lost Road and Other Writings, p. 24), and Arthurian Avalon is related to Welsh afal ‘apple’.
Alex Lewis and Elizabeth Currie explore Arthurian sources for Tolkien’s story of ‘Beren and Lúthien’ in The Epic Realm of Tolkien, Part One (2009). As Carl Phelpstead has remarked, however, although ‘Lewis and Currie demonstrate a wide knowledge’ of relevant texts, ‘some – not all – of the many connections they make with medieval Arthurian texts are less convincing [than the ‘incontrovertible’ argument that Tolkien made use of ‘Culhwch and Olwen’ in The Mabinogion] and there is too ready an assumption that if a particular medieval text is in some way (more or less) similar to Tolkien’s and could have been known by him it must be a source: as a consequence they leave little to Tolkien’s own imagination’ (Tolkien and Wales, p. 73). Tom Shippey says much the same in ‘A Question of Source’, Mallorn 49 (Spring 2010), but finds plausible ‘the early Welsh demon