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, Chretien 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: 

Thereupon:—­

    the King
  Made at the man:  then Modred smote his liege
  Hard on the helm which many a heathen sword
  Had beaten thin; while Arthur at one blow,
  Striking the last stroke with Excalibur,
  Slew him, and all but slain himself, he fell.