THE ARTHURIAN LEGEND. Throughout the mediaeval period three great cycles
of stories commanded the imagination of the poets. Of these cycles one,
the tale of Troy in its curious mediaeval guise, attested the potent
spell of antique legend.[1] The two other great cycles were of later
origin, and centred around the commanding historical figures of
Charlemagne, and the phantom glory of the legendary Arthur.
[1]The extraordinary interest in the half legendary career of Alexander
the Great must be noticed here, as also the profound respect amounting to
veneration for the Roman poet, Vergil.
The origin of the Arthurian story is involved in obscurity. The crudest
form of the myth has doubtless a core of historic truth, and represents
him as a mighty Celtic warrior, who works havoc among the heathen Saxon
invaders. Accretions naturally are added, and a miraculous origin and a
mysterious death throw a superstitious halo around the hero. When the
brilliant personality of Lancelot breaks into the tale, and the legend of
the Holy Grail is superadded, the theme exercised an irresistible
fascination upon the imagination of mediaeval Europe.
The vicissitudes of the Celtic inhabitants of Britain are as romantic as
any of which history holds record. After the departure of the Roman
invaders from the island, the native population swiftly reasserted
itself. The Picts of Caledonia and the Scots of Ireland were their
natural foes, but conflict with these enemies served only to stimulate
the national life. But actual disaster threatened them when in the fifth
and sixth centuries the heathen Angles and Saxons bore down in
devastating hordes upon the land. It is at this critical period in the
national history that Arthur must have lived. How long or how valiant
the resistance was we cannot know. That it was vain is certain. A large
body of Britons fled from annihilation across the channel, and founded in
the region of Armurica in France, a new Brittany. Meanwhile, in the
older Britain, the foe pressed hard upon their fellow-countrymen, and
drove them into the western limits of the island, into the fastnesses of
Wales, and the rocky parts of Cornwall. Here, and in Northern France,
proud in their defeat and tenacious of the instincts of their race, they
lived and still live, in the imaginative memories of the past. For them
the future held little store of earthly gain, and yet they made the whole
world their debtor.
Even in the courts of the conqueror Saxon their strange and beautiful
poetry won favour, and in a later century the Norman kings and barons
welcomed eagerly the wandering minstrels from Brittany and Wales. But it
was not from these scattered sources that Celtic traditions became a
European possession, as a brief statement of literary history will
clearly show.
The first recorded mention of Arthur's name occurs in a brief and
anonymous _History of the Britons_, written in Latin in the tenth
century, and attributed to Nennius. This history is curiously amplified
in the twelfth century by Geoffrey of Monmouth, first in a story dealing
with the prophecies of Merlin, and later in a _History of the Kings of
Britain_. This book, with its brilliant description of the court of
Arthur, gave the legend a widespread popularity. It was four times
within the same century translated into French verse, the most famous of
these renderings being the version of Wace, called _Le Brut_, which makes
some addition to Geoffrey's original, gathered from Breton sources. In
the same century, too, Chrétien de Troyes, the foremost of Arthurian
poets, composed his famous cycle of poems.
Of all these manifold sources Tennyson was confessedly ignorant. Where
the details are not of his own invention, his _Idylls of the King_ rest
entirely upon Malory's _Morte d'Arthur_, which Caxton printed in 1485,
supplemented in the case of _Enid and Geraint_, and _The Marriage of
Geraint_ by a translation of the Welsh _Mabinogion_ by Lady Charlotte
Guest.
THE STORY OF THE IDYLLS.--It is well to remember the events that led up
to Arthur's death. Guinevere's guilty love for Lancelot had been
discovered and revealed by Arthur's nephew, the traitor Modred. The
Queen fled the court and sought refuge with the nuns of Almesbury.
Lancelot fled to his castle in the north, where the King in vain besieged
him. Meanwhile Modred had stirred up a revolt, and leaguing himself with
the Saxon invaders, had usurped Arthur's throne. On his march southward
to resist his nephew, Arthur halts at the nunnery of Almesbury, and in
the Guinevere idyll the moving story of their last farewell is told.
Then the King advanced to meet Modred. The description of that "last
weird battle in the west" is given in _The Passing of Arthur_, and leads
up to the impressive line with which our present poem opens. Towards the
close of that fateful day, there came--
A bitter wind, clear from the North, and blew
The mist aside, and with that wind the tide
Rose, and the pale King glanced across the field
Of battle: but no man was moving there;
Nor any cry of Christian heard thereon,
Nor yet of heathen; only the wan wave
Broke in among dead faces, to and fro
Swaying the helpless hands, and up and down
Tumbling the hollow helmets of the fallen,
And shiver'd brands that once had fought with Rome,
And rolling far along the gloomy shores
The voice of days of old and days to be.
The King speaks despairingly to Bedivere, who answering, swears to him
undying allegiance, and points to the traitor, Modred, who still stands
unharmed: