THE FALL OF ARTHUR

By J.R.R. Tolkien. Edited by Christopher Tolkien.

Harper Collins. 233pp. $29.99.

Christopher Tolkien, now in his late 80s, has been mining his father's manuscript archive with great diligence and scholarship for the past three decades. One would have thought there were no essays by Christopher Tolkien.

Work on The Hobbit slayed any chance of J. R. R. Tolkien finishing The Fall of Arthur.

He says his father's 40-page Arthurian poem, divided into five cantos, was written between 1931 and the end of 1934. J.R.R. Tolkien, pictured, clearly intended to finish it, but work on The Hobbit, published in 1937, and later The Lord of the Rings, prevented its completion.

Christopher Tolkein clearly regrets this fact, unusually chastising his father for ''one of the most grievous of his many abandonments''.