The earliest account in literature of Arthur’s departure in the ship is found in the Brut of Laȝamon, on which see here. According to Laȝamon the place of the great battle was Camelford, and the armies came together ‘upon the Tambre’, the river Tamar, which is a long way from Camelford. I cite here Laȝamon’s lines on King Arthur’s words as he lay mortally wounded on the ground and the coming of the boat that carried him away.23 It will be seen that the metre is the heir to the ancestral form seen in Beowulf (and indeed in The Fall of Arthur) but with longer lines, the half-lines linked now by rhyme or assonance rather than alliteration; while the vocabulary is almost wholly Old English.
‘And ich wulle varen to Avalun to vairest alre maidene,
to Argante þere quene, alven swiðe sceone,
and heo scal mine wunden makien alle isunde,
al hal me makien mid haleweiȝe drenchen.
And seoðe ich cumen wulle to mine kinerichen
and wunien mid Brutten mid muchelere wunne.’
Æfne þan worden þer com of se wenden
þat wes an sceort bat liðen sceoven mid uðen,
and twa wimmen þer inne wunderliche idihte,
and heo nommen Arður anan, and aneouste hine vereden,
and softe hine adun leiden and forð gunnen hine liðen.
. . . .
Bruttes ileveð ȝete þat he bon on live,
and wunnien in Avalun mid fairest alre alven,
and lokieð evere Bruttes ȝete whan Arður cumen liðe.
‘And I will go to Avalon, to the fairest of all maidens,
to Argante the queen24, an elf most fair,
and she shall make whole my wounds
make me all whole with healing draughts.
And afterwards I will come again to my kingdom
and dwell among the Britons with great joy.’
Even with the words there came from the sea
a short boat journeying, driven by the waves,
and therein two women marvellously arrayed,
and forthwith they took up Arthur, and bore him swiftly,
and laid him gently down, and departed.
. . . .
The Britons believe yet that he lives
and dwells in Avalon with the fairest of all elves,
and the Britons ever yet await when Arthur will return.
This passage is peculiar to Laȝamon: there is nothing corresponding to it in Wace’s Brut.
*
In the case of The Fall of Arthur there is a further aspect of ‘Avalon’ to be considered: the perplexing question of the relationship between the ‘island of apples’ or ‘Fortunate Isle’, the Avalon to which King Arthur was taken, that was briefly described by Geoffrey of Monmouth in the Vita Merlini (see here), and the Avalon of my father’s own imagined world.
It was a long time before that name emerged for the island called Tol Eressëa, the Lonely Isle, in the furthest waters of Belegaer, the Great Sea of the West; and there is no occasion here to enter into an account of my father’s strangely changing vision of the Lonely Isle in the earlier years of ‘The Silmarillion’. On the other hand, it is relevant to try to discern his thinking on the matter during the time when he was working on The Fall of Arthur.
The only precise date to assist in this is 9 December 1934, when R.W. Chambers wrote to congratulate him on ‘Arthur’, then in progress (see here); but this of course gives no indication of how near he was at that time to abandoning the poem.
Long afterwards, in a letter of 16 July 1964, he told how he and C.S. Lewis had agreed, at some time now unknown, each to write a story: Lewis’s to be a tale of space-travel and my father’s a tale of time-travel. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet was finished by the autumn of 1937, and my father’s The Lost Road, very far indeed from finished, was sent with other works in a fateful parcel to Allen and Unwin in November of that year. In September The Hobbit had been published; on 19 December 1937 he said in a letter ‘I have written the first chapter of a new story about Hobbits’.
Many years later he described, in that letter of 1964, his intentions for The Lost Road.
I began an abortive book of time-travel of which the end was to be the presence of my hero in the drowning of Atlantis. This was to be called Númenor, the Land in the West. The thread was to be the occurrence time and again in human families (like Durin among the Dwarves) of a father and son called by names that could be interpreted as Bliss-friend and Elf-friend. ..... It started with a father-son affinity between Edwin and Elwin of the present, and was supposed to go back into legendary time by way of an Eädwine and Ælfwine of circa A.D.918, and Audoin and Alboin of Lombardic legend, and so to the traditions of the North Sea concerning the coming of corn and culture heroes, ancestors of kingly lines, in boats (and their departure in funeral ships). ..... In my tale we were to come at last to Amandil and Elendil leaders of the loyal party in Númenor, when it fell under the domination of Sauron.
There survives (printed in The Lost Road and Other Writings, 1987, p.12) the original sketch of his ‘idea’ for the concluding legend that my father dashed down at great speed. ‘This remarkable text,’ I wrote of it in that book, ‘documents the beginning of the legend of Númenor, and the extension of “The Silmarillion” into a Second Age of the world. Here the idea of the World Made Round and the Straight Path was first set down …’ There exist also two versions (ibid. pp.13 ff.), close in time, the second a revision of the first, of a brief narrative that was the forerunner of the Akallabêth (published with The Silmarillion). On the second text (only) my father later pencilled on the manuscript a title: The Last Tale: The Fall of Númenor.
My study of these texts showed that The Fall of Númenor and passages in The Lost Road ‘were intimately connected; they arose at the same time and from the same impulse, and my father worked on them together’ (ibid. p.9). I came therefore to the conclusion that ‘“Númenór” (as a distinct and formalized conception, whatever “Atlantis-haunting”, as my father called it, lay behind) arose in the actual context of his discussions with C.S. Lewis in (as seems probable) 1936.’
In the first of the two texts of The Fall of Númenor there occurs this passage:
[when] … Morgoth was thrust again into the Outer Darkness, the Gods took counsel. The Elves were summoned to Valinor … and many obeyed, but not all.
But in the second version this was changed to read:
But when Morgoth was thrust forth, the Gods held council. The Elves were summoned to return into the West, and such as obeyed dwelt again in Eressëa, the Lonely Island, which was renamed Avallon: for it is hard by Valinor.
This is one of the first occurrences of the name Avallon for Eressëa. In the fragmentary narrative of the Númenórean story for The Lost Road that was all that my father ever wrote of it Elendil tells his son Herendil:
And they [the Valar] recalled the Exiles of the Firstborn and pardoned them; and such as returned dwell since in bliss in Eressëa, the Lonely Isle, which is Avallon, for it is within sight of Valinor and the light of the Blessed Realm.
To this time, it may be supposed, belongs an entry in The Etymologies (an extremely difficult working text from this period published in The Lost Road and Other Writings) under the stem LONO- (p.370):
lóna: island, remote land difficult to reach. Cf. Avalóna = Tol Eressëa = the outer isle. [Probably added subsequently: A-val-lon.]
Another entry that bears on this name, under the stem AWA-, reads (in part):
away, forth; out. Q[uenya] ava outside, beyond. Avakúma Exterior Void beyond the World. [To this was added: Avalóna, cf. lóna.]
These etymologies do not accord with the explanation of the name (‘hard by Valinor’) in the second version of The Fall of Númenor.
At this time, when my father was pondering the successive tales that were to constitute The Lost Road, but of which only fragments would ever be told, he wrote down at great speed a note on the possibility of a story of ‘the man who got onto the Straight Ro
ad’. That man would be Ælfwine, the Englishman of the tenth century of whom my father had written much in earlier years: the mariner who came to the Lonely Isle and there learned from the Elves the histories that are set out in The Book of Lost Tales. I give here my father’s note:
But this would do best of all for introduction to the Lost Tales: How Ælfwine sailed the Straight Road. They sailed on, on, on over the sea; and it became very bright and very calm – no clouds, no wind. The water seemed thin and white below. Looking down Ælfwine suddenly saw lands and mountains [or a mountain] down in the water shining in the sun. Their breathing difficulties. His companions dive overboard one by one. Ælfwine falls insensible when he smells a marvellous fragrance as of land and flowers. He awakes to find the ship being drawn by people walking in the water. He is told very few men there in a thousand years can breathe air of Eressëa (which is Avallon), but none beyond. So he comes to Eressëa and is told the Lost Tales.
It is interesting to compare this with the conclusion of The Silmarillion in the version entitled Quenta Silmarillion, the form of the work before my father laid it aside during The Lord of the Rings years (The Lost Road and Other Writings, pp.333–5). Here the name Avallon for Tol Eressëa had entered, but not yet the conception of the Straight Road.
Here endeth The Silmarillion: which is drawn out in brief from those songs and histories which are yet sung and told by the fading Elves, and (more clearly and fully) by the vanished Elves that dwell now upon the Lonely Isle, Tol Eressëa, whither few mariners of Men have ever come, save once or twice in a long age when some man of Eärendel’s race hath passed beyond the lands of mortal sight and seen the glimmer of the lamps upon the quays of Avallon, and smelt afar the undying flowers in the meads of Dorwinion. Of whom was Eriol one, that men named Ælfwine, and he alone returned and brought tidings of Cortirion [city of the Elves in Eressëa] to the Hither Lands.
There is no need to pursue the subject of Avallon into the complexities of later development, which are fully recounted in Sauron Defeated (1992). I have attempted in this summary only to suggest what that name meant to my father in the context of ‘The Silmarillion’ at the time when he was working on The Fall of Arthur, and probably nearing its abandonment.
It seems to me that one should assume a considerable passage of time for the emergence of so huge a perturbation of the existing myth, brought about by the irruption of Númenor and its drowning, the elemental refashioning of the earth, and the mystery of the ‘Straight Path’ leading to a vanished ‘past’ denied to mortals. I think therefore that it is at least quite probable that this evolution in ‘The Silmarillion’, together with the new enterprise of The Lost Road and the severe doubts and difficulties that my father encountered, were in themselves sufficient to account for his turning away from The Fall of Arthur.
This would indeed argue a surprisingly late date for its abandonment, but there is in fact a very curious and puzzling piece of evidence which seems to support this supposition. This is a single page of very rough notes, a list of successive ‘elements’ in the narrative, all of which are found elsewhere. The latter part of the list reads thus:
At some time after this list was made my father entered the bracket that separates ‘Carried to Avalon’ from what precedes, and against the bracket (I.e. on the same line as ‘Carried to Avalon’) wrote ‘Aug 1937’.
The most natural way, perhaps, to interpret this is that my father had reached (in verse, if not in polished form) ‘Arthur slays Mordred and is wounded’, but no further, at that time. The problem with that, of course, is that he had not even reached the Battle of Camlan: the poem ceases with the end of the fighting at Romeril, and the manuscript evidence gives no indication that verse-form ever extended any further. I cannot explain this. But at least there seems to be evidence here that my father was still actively concerned with The Fall of Arthur in August 1937, surprisingly late as that seems.
But if this were the case, is any light cast thereby on the question, why did he at about this time write that Tol Eressëa, a name then going back some twenty years, was changed to Avallon – for no very evident reason? That there was no connection at all with the Arthurian Avallon seems impossible to accept; but it must be said that similarity to the departure of Arthur became still less evident.
In a letter of September 1954, after the publication of The Fellowship of the Ring, my father wrote a beautifully brief and lucid statement concerning Eressëa:
… Before the Downfall there lay beyond the sea and the west-shores of Middle-earth an earthly Elvish paradise Eressëa, and Valinor the land of the Valar (the Powers, the Lords of the West), places that could be reached physically by ordinary sailing-ships, though the Seas were perilous. But after the rebellion of the Númenóreans, the Kings of Men, who dwelt in a land most westerly of all mortal lands, and eventually in the height of their pride attempted to occupy Eressëa and Valinor by force, Númenor was destroyed, and Eressëa and Valinor removed from the physically attainable Earth: the way west was open, but led nowhere but back again – for mortals.
It seems to me that the most that can be said is that the Fortunate Isle, the Avalon of Morgan la Fée, and the Avallon that was Tol Eressëa, are associated only in that they both have the character of an ‘earthly paradise’ far over the western ocean.
Nonetheless, there is good reason, indeed, compelling evidence, to believe that my father did expressly make this connection, although the underlying motive may be difficult to interpret.
Among my father’s notes for the continuation of The Fall of Arthur the one that tells Lancelot took a boat and sailed into the west, but never returned, is of particular interest in the present context on account of the words that follow and conclude the note: ‘Eärendel passage’ (see here). These lines of alliterative verse, found together with the notes for the continuation of The Fall of Arthur, have been given on see here.
In this brief poem ‘the galleon was thrust on the shadowy seas‘, and Eärendel ‘goeth to magic islands … past the hills of Avalon … the dragon’s portals and the dark mountains / of the Bay of Faery beyond the borders of the world.’ In these lines my father was expressly introducing elements of the mythical geography of the First Age of the World as originally described in The Book of Lost Tales, but which largely survived into much later texts of ‘The Silmarillion’.
In the tale of ‘The Hiding of Valinor’ in The Book of Lost Tales Part I it is told that in the time of the fortification of Valinor the Magic Isles were set in a great ring in the ocean as a defence of the Bay of Faëry. By the time of the version of ‘The Silmarillion’ entitled The Quenta, written or largely written in 1930, this was said (The Shaping of Middle-earth, 1986, p.98):
In that day, which songs call The Hiding of Valinor, the Magic Isles were set, filled with enchantment, and strung across the confines of the Shadowy Seas, before the Lonely Isle is reached sailing West, there to entrap mariners and wind them in everlasting sleep.
It is notable that the expression ‘the Bay of Faery on the borders of the world’ in the last line of the ‘Eärendel passage’ is found frequently in early writings. It constitutes the fourth line in the second version of the alliterative poem The Children of Húrin, in or before 1925 (The Lays of Beleriand, 1985, p.95):
Ye Gods who girt your guarded realms
with moveless pinnacles, mountains pathless,
o’er shrouded shores sheer uprising
of the Bay of Faëry on the borders of the World!
In The Quenta all these names appear together in the story of Eärendel (The Shaping of Middle-earth, p.150). On their voyage to Valinor bearing the Silmaril Eärendel and Elwing in the ship Wingelot
came unto the Magic Isles, and escaped their magic; and they came into the Shadowy Seas and passed their shadows; and they looked upon the Lonely Isle and they tarried not there; and they cast anchor in the Bay of Faërie upon the borders of the world.
Particularly striking are the words ‘the dragon’s por
tals’ in the penultimate verse of the ‘Earendel passage’. In the tale of ‘The Hiding of Valinor’ it is told (The Book of Lost Tales Part I, pp.215–16) that the Gods ‘dared a very great deed, the most mighty of all their works’:
‘They drew to the Wall of Things, and there they made the Door of Night.... There it still stands, utterly black and huge against the deep-blue walls. Its pillars are of the mightiest basalt and its lintel likewise, but great dragons of black stone are carved thereon, and shadowy smoke pours slowly from their jaws. Gates it has unbreakable, and none know how they were made or set, for the Eldar were not suffered to be in that dread building, and it is the last secret of the Gods.’
(The expressions ‘dragonheaded door’ and ‘Night’s dragonheaded doors’ are found in early poems: The Book of Lost Tales Part II, pp.272, 274.)
In this earliest form of the astronomical myth ‘the galleon of the Sun’ passes through the Door of Night, ‘goes out into the limitless dark, and coming behind the world finds the East again’, returning through the Gates of Morn. But this conception was early overtaken by a new form of the myth, in which the Sun does not enter the Outer Dark by the Door of Night but passes beneath the Earth. The Door of Night remained, but changed in purpose and the time of its making. In the brief work named Ambarkanta, The Shape of the World, of 1930 or a little later, the new significance of the Door of Night is expressed in these passages (The Shaping of Middle-earth, pp.235, 237):