![]() It was from these same fragments that Tolkien, committed to restoring to his country the legends he felt had been lost as a result of the Norman conquest, had fashioned The Lord of the Rings. Only odd fragments of poetry had survived to hint at how natives and immigrants in post-Roman Britain might actually have made sense of the world. Arthur, the probably fictional war leader who was supposed to have stemmed the Saxon advance, could be located in the period, and enshrined as a great king, precisely because almost nothing was known about it. He praised it for the deep roots it had in the past β a quality he saw it as sharing with both Beowulf and King Lear: βIt is made of tales often told before and elsewhere, and of elements that derive from remote times, beyond the vision or awareness of the poet.β The ultimate origins of the poem, as of the entire corpus of Arthurian myth, lay back in the murkiest depths of the dark ages a time when native Britons and invading Saxons had been fighting over the abandoned Roman province of Britannia. ![]() ![]() ![]() In 1953, JRR Tolkien wrote an essay on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a late medieval poem that features the eponymous nephew of King Arthur undertaking a mysterious quest. ![]()
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