In the Library
Idylls of the King
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, 1859
- Form
- Form Poem
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Demanding
- Reading time
- Reading time 6 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 14
- Length
- Length 84k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
The old order changeth, yielding place to new, / And God fulfils himself in many ways, / Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
The reading guide, in the app
How to Read Idylls of the King
The book has a reputation for medieval fog and Victorian solemnity, and the fog turns out to be the point, laid deliberately across twelve self-contained poems that run from May to midwinter.
The reputation says this is Victorian medievalism at its most airless, a long solemn pageant of knights and ladies got up to flatter a queen, and that you need to care about Arthurian legend before you can get anything out of it at all. What is actually on the page is twelve short narrative poems, each with its own plot and its own weather, coming to about eighty-four thousand words in total, which is shorter than most novels you have already finished. You can read one of them in an evening and stop there, and nothing waiting in the next one will be lost on you for having paused.
If you like this, try
Paradise Lost
John Milton
Milton builds an epic in blank verse around a fall from grace too, but his ruined order is cosmic where Tennyson's is only a table of men.
£1.99
The Faerie Queene
Edmund Spenser
Spenser sends knights on quests to embody virtues too, but Tennyson's knights fail the virtues one by one until the whole ideal collapses.
£1.99
Beowulf
Anonymous
Beowulf ends with a hero's world already ending too, but Tennyson stretches that same twilight across twelve idylls instead of one last fight.
£1.99
About the book
Camelot, one of these poems says, was built to music, and therefore never built at all, and therefore built for ever. Arthur raises his hall out of a wet, half-heathen Britain and binds his knights with vows pitched higher than men can keep, and for a while the vows hold. The rot begins in the one place a king cannot govern: his wife's love for his best knight. From that single unspoken thing it spreads outward through twelve poems, until the quest for the Grail empties the hall and the best of them ride out after God and do not come back. Tennyson worked at this for most of his life, and the blank verse has the smoothness of something turned over for decades, all mist and lilies and armour dulled by rain. The last battle is fought in a fog so thick that friends kill friends by mistake. No poem has made the death of a good idea feel so much like weather.