A list of Tolkien’s published art is included in the second volume of the Reader’s Guide. See also Nancy-Lou Patterson, ‘Tree and Leaf: J.R.R. Tolkien and the Visual Image’, English Quarterly 7, no. 1 (Spring 1974); Priscilla Tolkien, ‘My Father the Artist’, Amon Hen 23 (December 1976); John Ellison, ‘Tolkien’s Art’, Mallorn 30 (September 1993); Michael Organ, ‘Tolkien’s Japonisme: Prints, Dragons, and a Great Wave’, Tolkien Studies 10 (2013); and Descriptive Bibliography, section E. On art inspired by Tolkien’s works, see *Illustration.
The Art of The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien. Edited by Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull with an introduction and brief explanatory texts, first published in Great Britain by HarperCollins, London, in October 2011, and in the United States by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston, in September 2012. The volume contains every painting, drawing, and sketch known to the authors to have been produced by Tolkien to illustrate *The Hobbit, or for its maps, binding, and dust-jacket, or made by Tolkien for other purposes but which served as models or inspiration for his Hobbit art.
A list of Tolkien’s published *art is included in the second volume of the Reader’s Guide.
The Art of The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien. Edited by Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull with an introduction and brief explanatory texts, first published in Great Britain by HarperCollins, London, and in the United States by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston, both in October 2015. The volume contains every piece of art, including calligraphy and maps, known to the authors at the time of writing to have been produced by Tolkien in relation to *The Lord of the Rings.
A list of Tolkien’s published *art is included in the second volume of the Reader’s Guide.
Arthur and the Matter of Britain. Tolkien enjoyed stories of King Arthur in his childhood reading, and remembered ‘a very deep desire to see and speak to a Knight of Arthur’s Court. If I had, I should have regarded him much as Peredur did. But that is a special case: the desire was in large part a desire to visit or see Past Time. Owing to the accidents of its mediaeval development Arthurian legends had taken on an historical guise. They did not occur “once upon a time”’ (*On Fairy-Stories (expanded edn. 2008), p. 286). Peredur is the protagonist of a Welsh romance dating at least to the thirteenth century. Tolkien also argued in On Fairy-Stories that it seemed ‘fairly plain that Arthur, once historical (but perhaps as such not of great importance), was also put into the Pot’ – that is, the ‘Cauldron of Story’. ‘There he was boiled for a long time, together with many other older figures and devices, of mythology and Faërie, and even some other stray bones of history (such as Alfred’s defence against the Danes), until he emerged as a King of Faërie’ (*Tree and Leaf, p. 30).
While attending *King Edward’s School, Birmingham Tolkien read one of the major works of Arthurian literature, the late fourteenth-century Middle English poem *Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which was to be significant in his academic career. He taught a class on the poem at the University of *Oxford in Trinity Term 1920, even before he held an academic appointment; and together with *E.V. Gordon he produced an edition of the work (published 1925) while employed at the University of *Leeds. Sir Gawain is the story of a knight of King Arthur’s court, described by Tolkien and Gordon as ‘shaped with a sense of narrative unity not often found in Arthurian romance. Most of the Arthurian romances, even the greatest of them, such as the French Perlesvaus, or Malory’s Morte Darthure … are rambling and incoherent. It is a weakness inherited from the older Celtic forms, as we may see in the Welsh Mabinogion, stories told with even greater magic of style and even less coherence than the French and English compilations’ (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. Tolkien and Gordon (1925), p. x). Tolkien also made a verse translation of the poem, possibly begun while working on the edition; the translation was broadcast on BBC radio in 1953 and published posthumously in 1976.
Apparently in the early 1930s Tolkien began to compose a lengthy poem in alliterative verse, *The Fall of Arthur. He wrote 954 lines before abandoning the work c. 1937, though in 1955 he still hoped to be able to complete it. The volume of the same title, first published in 2013 (see separate Reader’s Guide article), includes the latest text of the poem, together with commentary by *Christopher Tolkien concerning notes and outlines for its continuation, and the context of the Arthurian tradition in which the poem was written.
In ?late 1951 Tolkien explained in a letter to *Milton Waldman that one of the reasons he wrote *‘The Silmarillion’ was that he
was from early days grieved by the poverty of my own beloved country: it had no stories of its own (bound up with its tongue and soil), not of the quality that I sought, and found (as an ingredient) in legends of other lands. There was Greek, and Celtic, and Romance, Germanic, Scandinavian and Finnish (which greatly affected me); but nothing English, save impoverished chap-book stuff. Of course there was, and is, all the Arthurian world, but powerful as it is, it is imperfectly naturalized, associated with the soil of Britain but not with English; and it does not replace what I felt to be missing. For one thing its ‘faerie’ is too lavish, and fantastical, incoherent and repetitive. For another and more important thing: it is involved in, and explicitly contains the Christian religion. [Letters, p. 144]
The Arthurian legends are ‘associated with the soil of Britain’ because they had their origins among the inhabitants of that land, and indeed, that whole body of legend is often referred to as the ‘Matter of Britain’. The Romans, who invaded the island in 43 AD, called it ‘Britannia’, a version of ‘Ynys Prydain’, the name given it by its native Celtic inhabitants. When the last of the Roman troops were withdrawn in AD 410 the Romano-British peoples tried unsuccessfully to defend themselves against invasion by Germanic tribes, mainly Angles and Saxons, the ancestors of the English, and eventually held out only in western areas such as Wales and Cornwall; many fled across the channel into north-west Gaul and called their new settlement ‘Brittany’.
The little contemporary evidence that exists has been thought to suggest that in the late fifth or early sixth century a dux bellorum or war-leader arose among the British and, in a series of battles, for a time managed to stem the Saxon advance and even to regain some territory. By the tenth century a body of literature about this leader, now given the name Arthur, developed among the remnants of the original British inhabitants in Wales and Brittany, written in the vernacular Welsh or Breton. (Wales and Welsh are English names, derived from Germanic walh, wealh, used to describe speakers of Celtic languages, though as Tolkien points out in *English and Welsh the same word was used to describe speakers of Latin.) The Arthurian legends arose in part to celebrate the successes, even if temporary, of the native British population against the English.
Those of the legends developed in Brittany were translated or retold in French, and new stories or versions of stories were written, adding characters such as Lancelot, changing Arthur’s early companions (such as Bedivere, or Bedwyr) into chivalric knights of the Round Table, laying increasing emphasis on the Grail Quest, and sometimes reducing Arthur himself to an ineffectual figure. The Norman invaders who conquered England in 1066 introduced some of these new tales into England, and the Norman rulers tended to identify themselves with Arthur, who had also defeated the English. Thus for Tolkien, who strongly identified himself with *England and the English, the Arthurian legends were not only not themselves English (as opposed to British), but to some extent were identified with the Norman invaders who had had a devastating effect on English language, traditions, and literature.
Tolkien’s objection in his letter to Milton Waldman that the ‘faerie’ of Arthurian legend was ‘too lavish, and fantastical, incoherent and repetitive’ was probably directed mainly at the