Selections From the Poems of Tennyson Author:Baron Alfred Tennyson Tennyson General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1907 Original Publisher: Scott, Foresman Subjects: Literary Criticism / General Literary Criticism / Poetry Poetry / General Poetry / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be t... more »ypos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: NOTES THE IDYLLS OF THE KING Tennyson's The Idylls of the King is a series of twelve stories connected by the fact that they all have to do with the history of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. Taken together they carry King Arthur's work from its glorious inception, through the early days of success, later through mistakes and sins on the part of many of the knights, to the final dissolution of the Order and the death of Arthur. The two books from which Tennyson gained his material for these stories are the Mabinogion, a collection of Welsh fairy tales and romances, translated by Lady Charlotte Guest, and published in 1838-49, and Malory's Marie d'Arthur. From the first of these books came The Marriage of Gcraint and Geraint and Enid, and details in other stories. The chief source, however, is the Morte d'Arthur, which was brought out by Caxton, the first English printer, in 1485. In a quaint preface Caxton tells us that the stories in the hook were taken by Sir Thomas Malory "out of certain French books and reduced into English." This was done, he says, because there were "many noble and divers gentlemen of this realm of England" who thought that King Arthur "ought to be remembered amongst us Englishmen tofore all other Christian kings." Malory's book was the first to gather together the stories about King Arthur, but the stories are themselves much older than Malory's time. In 1147 appeared Geoffrey of Monmouth's Histori...« less