Analysis of Anglo-Saxon mythology in the poem Idylls of the King by A.Tennyson

Tristram gives the rubies to Queen Isolt, Mark's wife, who is furious that he has married Isolt of Brittany. They taunt each other, but at the last he puts the necklace about her neck and bends to kiss her. At that moment Mark rises up behind him and splits his skull.

Guinevere has fled to the convent at Almesbury. On the night that she and Lancelot had determined to part forever, Mordred, tipped off by Vivien, watched and listened with witnesses to their farewells. Guinevere rejects Lancelot's offer of sanctuary in his castle overseas, choosing instead to take anonymous shelter in the convent. She is befriended by a little novice. But when rumours of war between Arthur and Lancelot and Mordred's usurpation reach the convent, the novice's careless chatter pricks the Queen's conscience. She describes to Guinevere the glorious kingdom in her father's day, "before the coming of the sinful Queen."

The King comes. She hears his steps and falls on her face. He stands over her and grieves over her, himself, and his kingdom, reproaches her, and forgives her. She watches him leave and repents, hoping they will be reunited in heaven. She serves in the abbey, is later chosen Abbess, and dies three years later.

This section of the Idylls is a much expanded and altered version of Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur.

In the disastrous last battle, Arthur kills Mordred, and, in turn, receives a mortal wound. The entire Round Table has been killed with the exception of Sir Bedivere, who carries the King to a church (Avalon), where Arthur first received Excalibur from the Lady of the Lake. Arthur orders Bedivere to throw the sword into the lake to fulfill a prophecy written on the blade. Sir Bedivere resists twice, but on the third time obeys and is rewarded by the sight of an arm "clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful" rising from the water to catch the sword. This was the Lady of the Lake. Sir Bedivere returns to Arthur in the church and tells him what he saw. Arthur believes him and passes with Sir Bedivere watching, as the new sun rises on a new year.

In the very brief final section, poet laureate Tennyson praises Queen Victoria and the recently deceased Albert, Prince Consort, whom Arthur was supposedly modelled after, and prays that she, like Arthur, is remembered as a great ruler long after her reign is over.

Tennyson sought to encapsulate the past and the present in the Idylls. Arthur in the story is often seen as an embodiment of Victorian ideals; he is said to be "ideal manhood closed in real man" and the "stainless gentleman." Arthur often has unrealistic expectations for the Knights of the Round Table and for Camelot itself, and despite his best efforts he is unable to uphold the Victorian ideal in his Camelot. Idylls also contains explicit references to Gothic interiors, Romantic appreciations of nature, and anxiety over gender role reversals--all pointing to the work as a specifically Victorian one.^[4]

In the Victorian age there was a renewed interest in the idea of courtly love, or the finding of spiritual fulfilment in the purest form of romantic love. This idea is embodied in the relationship between Guinevere and Arthur in the poem especially; the health of the state is blamed on Guinevere when she does not live up to the purity expected of her by Arthur as she does not sufficiently serve him spiritually. Tennyson's position as poet laureate during this time and the popularity of the Idylls served to further propagate this view of women in the Victorian age.^[5]

CONCLUSION

Despite the growing prestige and proliferation of fiction, this age of the novel was in fact also an age of great poetry. Alfred Tennyson made his mark very early with Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830) and Poems (1832; dated 1833), publications that led some critics to hail him as the natural successor to Keats and Shelley. A decade later, in Poems (1842), Tennyson combined in two volumes the best of his early work with a second volume of more-recent writing. The collection established him as the outstanding poet of the era.

In his early work Tennyson brought an exquisite lyric gift to late Romantic subject matter. The result is a poetry that, for all its debt to Keats, anticipates the French Symbolists of the 1880s. The death of his friend and supporter Arthur Hallam in 1833, however, left him vulnerable to accusations from less-sympathetic critics that this highly subjective verse was insufficiently engaged with the public issues of the day. The second volume of the Poems of 1842 contains two remarkable responses to this challenge. One is the dramatic monologue, a form of poetry in which the speaker is a figure other than the poet. Used occasionally by writers since the time of the Greek poet Theocritus, the technique was developed independently by both Tennyson and his great contemporary Robert Browning in the 1830s, and it became the mode by which many of the greatest achievements of Victorian poetry were expressed. The other is the form that Tennyson called the “English Idyl,” in which he combined brilliant vignettes of contemporary landscape with relaxed debate.

In the major poems of his middle period, Tennyson combined the larger scale required by his new ambitions with his original gift for the brief lyric by building long poems out of short ones. In Memoriam (1850) is an elegy for Hallam, formed by 133 individual lyrics. Eloquent, vivid, and ample, it is at the same time an acute pathological study of individual grief and the central Victorian statement of the problems posed by the decline of Christian faith. Maud (1855) assembles 27 lyric poems into a single dramatic monologue that disturbingly explores the psychology of violence.

Tennyson became poet laureate in 1850 and wrote some apt and memorable poems on patriotic themes. The chief work of his later period, however, was Idylls of the King (1859-85). An Arthurian epic constructed as a series of idylls, or “little pictures,” it offers a sombre vision of an idealistic community in decay, implicitly articulating Tennyson's anxieties about contemporary society.

G.K. Chesterton described Tennyson as “a suburban Virgil.” The elegant Virgilian note was the last thing aimed at by Robert Browning. Browning's work was Germanic rather than Italianate, grotesque rather than idyllic, and colloquial rather than refined. The differences between Browning and Tennyson underline the creative diversity of the period.

LITERATURE TO BE USED

1. Элиот Т.С. Назначение поэзии. М., 1997. C. 282.

2. Ивашева В.В. "Век нынешний и век минувший…" Английский роман XIX в. в его современном звучании. М., 1990. С. 266.

3. Цит. покниге: Baum P. Tennyson sixty years after. Richmond, 1948. Р. 86.

4. Baum P. Ibid. Р. 89.

5. Walters S. Tennyson: Poet, Philosopher, Idealist. L., 1893. Р. 117.

6. Карлейль Т.Избранные труды. СПб., 1898. С. 131.

7. Карлейль Т. Там же. С. 140

8. Цит. покниге: Culler A.D. The Poetry of Tennyson. N.Y.; L., 1977. Р. 67.

9. Culler A.D. Ibid, Р. 88.

10. Ricks C. Tennyson. L.; N.Y., 1972. P. 120.

11. Culler A.D. Ibid, P. 98.

12. Цит. покниге: Tennyson by A.Benson. Fourth edition. L., 1913. Р. 67

13. Там же, Р. 69.

14. Lounsbury T.R. The life and times of Tennyson. New Haven, 1915. Р. 182-183.

15. Mustard W.P. Classical Echoes in Tennyson. N.Y., 1904. P. 87.

16. Baum P. Ibid, Р. 173.

17. Bloom H. Shelley's mythmaking. New Haven, 1959. P. 25.

18. Richard North - Heathen Gods in Old English Literature (Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon England) 2006

19. William Wallace Robson

20. Masson Professor of English Literature, University of Edinburgh, 1972-90. Author of Critical Essays: Modern English Literature.

21. Alfred Tennyson as a Poet for Our Time

22. By Edgar F. Shannon

23. Idylls of the King work by Tennyson

24. CliffsNotes.com Iddyls of the King

25. Encyclopaedia Britannica

26. _Pattison, Robert (1979). Tennyson and Tradition. Cambridge: Harvard University

27. https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Saxon_mythology

28. https://d.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/text/tennyson-idylls-of-the-king

29. https://www.enotes.com/topics/idylls-king/critical-essays/idylls-king-alfred-lord-tennyson

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