SOURCE: "The Epic Plight of Troth in Idylls of the King," in ELH, Vol. 58, No. 3, Fall, 1991, pp. 701-20.

In the following essay, Tucker finds that in the Idylls, Tennyson "did some of the most interesting ideological work of nineteenth-century epic by abdicating his own initiative in favor of the authority of legend."

I

Epic poetry, we are told by a firmly consensual line of Romantic theorists from J. G. Herder to Northrop Frye, teaches a nation its traditions.¹ Epic tells a culture-making story, which both embodies in the incidents it narrates, and enacts in its narrative practices, values that bind a people in a common identity. According to the vision of history that is privileged in epic, this identity originates with the event that grounds the plot: Rome founded, Jerusalem delivered, the fall of Troy or Man, the twilight of the Gods, Camelot made and broken. The inaugural...