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The Review of English Studies Advance Access originally published online on October 3, 2008
The Review of English Studies 2009 60(245):460-474; doi:10.1093/res/hgn147
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© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press 2008; all rights reserved

Hengist's Brood: Tennyson and the Anglo-Saxons

Damian Love


  Abstract

Tennyson's Idylls of the King deepens its historical perspective through an awareness of the heathen as the future Anglo-Saxons. In possibly the first significant literary use of Beowulf, the poem incorporates motifs from Grendel's mere and the legend of Scyld Scefing, imposing them upon Arthur's kingdom and thereby undermining easy distinctions between Christian and barbarian. It invites a vision of civilisations rising and falling which, together with verbal echoes of In Memoriam, extends the evolutionary anxieties of that earlier poem to the realm of human history. The heathen elements from Beowulf become images of doubt about absolute Christian truths, and of the monstrous within that must be overcome for civilisation to prosper. The presence of those elements in the ‘Morte d’Arthur’ shows Tennyson's doubts and anxieties entwined with the death of Hallam, and the Idylls follow In Memoriam as another attempt to work through that grief and its attendant scepticism towards positive values. The Saxon conquest as an evolutionary step towards the British Empire is one such possible value.


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