Idylls of the King
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The Idylls of the King (1885) is a cycle of poems by Alfred, Lord Tennyson that expresses the legend of King Arthur in terms of the psychology and concerns of nineteenth-century England.
In twelve poems, the legend recounts how Arthur was born through the trickery of Merlin and how he meets his future wife Guinevere and becomes king. He creates Camelot, an ideal kingdom where he is loyally served by 150 knights of the Round Table. His best knight is Sir Lancelot, but the morality of the poem is shattered by Lancelot's affair with the Queen. She is accused and sentenced to burning at the stake but is rescued by Lancelot; the lovers later escape to France. Arthur wages war on his former knight and leads an army overseas, but Sir Mordred takes the throne and ruins the kingdom. Arthur returns, fights Modred, killing him while in turn receiving a mortal wound. Sir Bedivere carries the King to a lake on the borders of Avalon from where Arthur first received his sword Excalibur, from the Lady of the Lake. Arthur orders Bedivere to throw the sword back in the lake in order to fulfill a prophecy written on the blade of the sword. The wounded Arthur is finally carried away on a magical ship with three queens and sails away to Avalon, where one day he will return to free England from tyranny again.
Based on Chrétien de Troyes' Yvain, the Knight of the Lion and Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, previous accounts of the Arthurian legend, Idylls of the King rewrites them for its own purposes. The Idylls are titled:
- Gareth and Lynette
- The Marriage of Geraint
- Geraint and Enid
- Balin and Balan
- Merlin and Vivien
- Lancelot and Elaine
- The Holy Grail
- Pelleas and Ettarre
- The Last Tournament
- Guinevere
- The Passing of Arthur
The dramatic narratives are not an epic either in structure or tone, but derive elegaic sadness from the idylls of Theocritus. When the poems were published as a set Tennyson's dedication was to a person not immediately identified:
- "And indeed He seems to me
- Scarce other than my king's ideal knight"
In the course of its development the reader finds that the dedication is the late Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. Idylls of the King is often read as an allegory of the social conflicts and malaises of mid-Victorian era in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.
The work was in part written in the Hanbury Arms in Caerleon; a plaque commemorates the event.
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