Tennyson's Camelot

The Idylls of the King are not a medieval witness and are not treated as one here. They are the most influential reading of Malory ever produced, and they changed what the story is understood to be about.

Tennyson's move is to make Camelot a moral experiment. Arthur binds his knights by vows in order to build a civilisation out of a barbarous country, and the twelve idylls watch it decay from within as the vows fail one at a time. The frame is civilisational decline: a society rising and falling, rather than a fellowship and its sins. Almost every modern retelling inherits that frame from Tennyson rather than from the Middle Ages.

Three changes are worth naming.

The Grail quest becomes a mistake. Malory's Arthur grieves the vow; Tennyson's poem effectively agrees with him and goes further, presenting the quest as a mass enthusiasm that empties the hall of the men who were needed at home. What is a tragedy in Malory becomes something closer to an error.

Guinevere is judged. Malory refuses to condemn the love, and interrupts his own narrative to defend it. Tennyson gives Arthur a long speech of forgiveness delivered over a prostrate queen, and the effect is not mercy but sentence.

And Arthur becomes blameless. Malory's king sleeps with his half-sister, tries to drown a shipload of infants, marries a woman he has been warned about, and refuses to let Mordred go when he could. Tennyson's is an ideal betrayed by lesser people — which is a considerably less interesting man, and the one most readers picture.

None of this is a failure of Tennyson's. It is a nineteenth-century poem doing nineteenth-century work. But it is a version, and the point of reading it beside the others is that it stops being the story and becomes one voice among twelve.