"Lá e de volta outra vez": o Imaginário Arthuriano em "A Queda de Arthur" de J. R. R. Tolkien

Abstract

The Fall of Arthur is a work by JRR Tolkien, which contains a poem in alliterative verse written approximately in 1930, edited and published by Christopher Tolkien, son of the author, in 2013. The poem narrates Arthur's raids into the territory of Britain and the struggle to defend his kingdom. The aim of this article is to analyze how Arthur's imaginary is constructed in Tolkien's poem, based on the observation of the king's characteristics and how he is related to the context in which he is represented in the poem, in which we problematize Arthur's classification as a “Briton”. In order to understand the work, always in relation to medieval historiography, we used discourse analysis (DA) as methodology. In conclusion, we believe the imagery of King Arthur in Tolkien's poem was largely inspired by the works of the Arthurian cycle produced after the XII century, in which Arthur is a Christian par excellence, imbued with characteristics and elements expressed in medieval chivalry romances and, as such, he distances himself from the oral tales propagated by in Celtic languages in the 6th century.