Tennyson Brings The Monstrous Home More Literally Than Killham Had In Mind

By Author: Christ Paul
Total Articles: 55
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The heathen element infiltrating Arthur's kingdom from the outset has a complex set of implications. While these may be traced home ultimately to very personal crises in Tennyson's life, I shall elaborate first on what I have already described as a historicizing tendency. Kemble maintained that the events of Beowulf took place shortly before the Germanic migration to Britain, and that they probably brought the poem with them. Tennyson had no reason to doubt this scholarly opinion, and surely believed that both the poem and its bitter feuds and betrayals were more or less contemporary with Arthur's Britain. This is worth bearing in mind when we consider that the majority of the Idylls are dark in tone, and haunted by treachery that undermines the Round Table, culminating in tragic divisions and battles between Arthur and many of his former knights. Turner's History delves behind the chivalric myths and portrays an historical Britain no more civilised than the brutal feuds and aspiring war lords of Germanic society: The defective history of the period will not allow us to Thomas Sabo Bracelets ...
... present an accurate picture of this British polyarchy; but so many traits may be collected as will convey an impressive idea of this unfortunate political state unfortunate because it made the island but as a reed against foreign aggression, and because depopulation, ignorance, and ferocity must have been rapidly following in the train of those intestine conflicts, which almost every district witnessed.

The real Arthur was but one chieftain among many, and while Turner accords him a measure of greatness, there is nothing lofty or chivalric about his Britain. While Tennyson retains a set of noble ideals, he deflates much of the traditional mythic material, reducing the grail quest to an episode of collective hysteria, and making magic compete with science Merlin, for instance, hints that the weirdly shifting appearance of Camelot in the mist has more to Thomas Sabo Charms do with refraction than sorcery (Gareth, lines 248-55). Likewise Tennyson makes romance compete with history. If the infiltration of heathen elements threatens to collapse the identity of the kingdom into that of the Saxon hordes, it is because their feuds and squabbles are essentially similar. Aidan Day argues that the shortcomings of the kingdom point forward to modern Britain: when the British are tainted by the same degenerate behavior as those they rule, the Empire becomes unstable, threatened by an enemy within, unable to govern by higher spiritual and moral right. The impending fall of Britain and its Empire, through a collapse of spiritual resolve at home, is the nightmare and intended warning of Idylls of the King.

The case is strengthened if we consider that they point back as well, into the immediate past, where the spirit of feud and betrayal embodied in the Grendel-kin, those descendants of Cain, roamed large. On the darkling plain of history past, present and future only spiritual resolve raises us above barbarism. As Killham has said: 'Betrayal of national culture consists, in Tennyson, in turning aside from the great work in hand, the daily work which is a sublimation of the yearning of spirit and flesh, and a recognition that man is born to bring civilization out of his own discontents. Heroism is fighting the enemy within, putting to death the monster which seeks to defile'. In the Idylls, I suggest, Tennyson brings the monstrous home more literally than Killham had in mind.