With Professor Helen Fulton

Tennyson was the pre-eminent poet of the Victorian era in nineteenth-century Britain, the poet laureate appointed by Queen Victoria. It was Tennyson who helped to bring the figure of King Arthur back into public awareness after many centuries of neglect.

Building his epic cycle, ‘Idylls of the King’, around Arthur, a cycle which took decades to complete, Tennyson reshaped the medieval Arthur into an imperial ruler at the height of the British Empire, making him a hero for Victorian Britain.

This lecture looks at Tennyson’s adaptation of Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur, a fifteenth-century work that gave Tennyson the blueprint for his poetic masterpiece.