Victorian Quest in a Medieval Romance: Alfred Tennyson's "Enid" (Critical Essay‪)‬

ABSTRACT The Victorian period produced a large body of Arthurian poetry: William Morris, Algernon Swinburne and Alfred Tennyson, to mention only a few, employed Arthurian motifs and created their own versions of the legend. Tennyson's Idylls of the king is probably an attempt on the largest scale to retell the story of King Arthur and his knights. However, in spite of their scope, Tennyson's Idylls did not succeed in evoking the spirit of the Middle Ages and should be seen as a product of the Victorian Age. This paper will concentrate on one of the Idylls from the 1859 edition, "Enid", which is based on the medieval "Geraint son of Erbin" from Mabinogion. Both texts present the story of a quest that Geraint embarks on to find and conquer a knight who offended Guinevere, and of another quest, which he pursues with Enid, his wife. The aim of this paper is to examine the differences between the medieval and the Victorian text and to analyse how, through omission, underlining some aspects of the source text or endowing his characters with Victorian sensibility, Tennyson transformed the original romance into a Victorian story of love.