Tolkien and Laʒamon

In this essay I argue that the Arthurian poem that had the greatest influence on The Lord of the Rings was Laʒamon’s Brut. In a Letter to editor Milton Waldman from 1951 Tolkien expressed his regret that England lacked a mythology and stories of its own that were “bound up with its tongue and soil, ” explaining that the Arthurian world was “associated with the soil of Britain but not with English,” and that “its ‘faerie’ is too lavish, and fantastical, incoherent and repetitive.” Perhaps to rectify these deficiencies in the Matter of Britain, Tolkien began writing his own version of the Arthurian legend in Old English alliterative meter, The Fall of Arthur, but never completed it. He did complete The Lord of the Rings, however, in which key events of Aragorn’s narrative recall similar episodes in the Arthurian section of Laʒamon’s Brut. Tolkien, a self- described West-midlander, was drawn for linguistic reasons to the Brut, which was composed in a West-midland dialect of Middle English laced with deliberate archaisms; Tolkien also used archaistic language in several passages in The Lord of the Rings. Finally, the Brut’s ‘faerie’ is fully integrated into the main narrative, thus meeting Tolkien’s standards for a coherent secondary world. I conclude that both Tolkien and Laʒamon created mythologies “bound up with the tongue and soil” of Britain, evoking a lost past in which their readers or listeners could become fully immersed.