Tennyson Devotes Most Of His Time At Cambridge To The Composition Of Poetry

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Tennyson was not the most studious of undergraduates, devoting most of his time at Cambridge to the composition of poetry, but his notebooks for 1830 include a glossary of Old and Middle English words, grammatical notes on Old English, and even a six-line translation of Beowulf, its first Thomas Sabo ever rendering by a major poet. His interest surely owed a great deal to John Mitchell Kemble, one of the most important Anglo-Saxonist pioneers of the nineteenth century, who published the second (and first substantially accurate) edition of Beowulf in 1833, followed by the first full English translation in 1837.

They were fellow undergraduate members, not just of Trinity College, but also of the exclusive 'Apostles' debating society, and remained close friends for several years. Tennyson's sonnet 'To J.M.K.' expresses a very high regard indeed and, in light of his later interest in Malory, it is hardly surprising that he was receptive also to the earlier part of the medieval canon under Kemble's direct influence. This interest apparently lay dormant until about 1876 when he ...
... translated the 'Battle of Brunanburh', not in itself a major enterprise, but still one of the most lively and engaging modern translations of Old English verse.6 It is fairly accurate and, although drawing heavily on his son Hallam's prose translation, he also consulted the original in Guest's History of English Rhythms. He clearly therefore retained throughout his life some ability to read Old English, and with the copy of Bosworth's Anglo-Saxon Dictionary that he acquired in 1844 he was well equipped to do so.

In the early part of his career, at least, this interest might be understood as part of a nascent historical consciousness. At the start of the century Anglo-Saxons had at best a marginal place in the national culture. When Sharon Turner published his pioneering History of the Anglo-Saxons, between 1799 and 1805, he felt obliged to Thomas Sabo Bracelets defend his enterprise against the general perception that they were uninteresting savages: We roam the most distant oceans, to explore the manners of uncultivated savages, and even the philosopher reads, with interest, every description of their customs and transactions. Why should he then despise the first state, and the improving progress of his Saxon ancestors? This nation exhibits the conversion of ferocious pirates, into a highly civilized, informed, and generous people in a word, into us. Can it be frivolous to depict the successive steps of this admirable change? Turner, a copy of whose book Tennyson possessed, brought about no sudden transformation, but a growing number of scholars began to take up the cause. The notion of sturdy, freedom-loving English yeomen falling beneath the Norman yoke was a long-established cliche that had never achieved a deep purchase upon historiography. Kemble, in his studies of legal documents, perceived a core of truth in the cliche and sought to put it on a sound scholarly footing. In the preface to his book The Saxons in England, another work Tennyson owned a copy of, he argues passionately for Anglo-Saxon traditions as the sustaining basis of modern British greatness: The subject is a grave and solemn one: it is the history of the childhood of our own age, the explanation of its manhood.