Idylls of the King

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The Idylls of the King (1885) is a sequence of poems by Alfred, Lord Tennyson that expresses the legend of King Arthur in terms of the psychology and concerns of nineteenth-century England.

Artist Britton LaRoche. The Lady of the Lake and King Arthur's sword Excalibur

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, the bastard son of Arthur—raised by King Lot and Arthur's half-sister Bellicent—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 fullfill 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 Chértien 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 treats the origin of King Arthur, his victory over the Saxons, the origin of Excalibur, Merlin, the Lady of the Lake, the Knights of the Round Table, the Holy Grail, the legend of Elaine (see The Lady of Shalott), Lancelot and Guinevere's affair, the decline of Camelot, and finally "The Passing of Arthur"—the poem Tennyson wrote first as Mort d'Arthur, and which inspired the sequence.

For the first poem written, Morte d'Arthur, Tennyson adapted the well-known title of Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, which had fixed the imagery of Arthur in the English imagination. The downfall of Arthur lies in the adultery of Queen Guinevere and Lancelot, and this signals the inevitable decay and fall of Arthur's kingdom. Other stories include Balin killing his own brother Balan, Gareth fighting the Black Knight to save Lyonesse, Galahad and his Grail quest, Merlin's fall to the temptress Vivien, Geraint marrying Enid, Guinevere's escape to the nunnery, and the death of Sir Tristram.

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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