nstrels from Brittany and Wales. But it
was not from these scattered sources that Celtic traditions became a
European possession, as a brief statement of literary history will
clearly show.

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;
N