romances reach Wales, and modify, in translations, the original Welsh
legends, or, in part, supplant them.

Amplifications and recastings are numerous. In 1485 Caxton publishes
Malory's selections from French and English sources, the whole being
Tennyson's main source, Le Mort d'Arthur. {13}


Thus the Arthur stories, originally Celtic, originally a mass of
semi-pagan legend, myth, and marchen, have been retold and rehandled
by Norman, Englishman, and Frenchman, taking on new hues, expressing
new ideals--religious, chivalrous, and moral. Any poet may work his
will on them, and Tennyson's will was to retain the chivalrous
courtesy, generosity, love, and asceticism, while dimly or brightly
veiling or illuminating them with his own ideals. After so many
processes, from folk-tale to modern idyll, the Arthurian world could
not be real, and real it is not. Camelot lies "out of space, out of
time," though the colouring is mainly that of the later chivalry, and
"the gleam" on the hues is partly derived from Celtic fancy of
various dates, and is partly Tennysonian.

As the Idylls were finally arranged, the first, The Coming of Arthur,
is a remarkable proof of Tennyson's ingenuity in construction. Tales
about the birth of Arthur varied. In Malory, Uther Pendragon, the
Bretwalda (in later phrase) of Britain, besieges the Duke of
Tintagil, who has a fair wife, Ygerne, in another castle. Merlin
magically puts on Uther the shape of Ygerne's husband, and as her
husband she receives him. On that night Arthur is begotten by Uther,
and the Duke of Tintagil, his mother's husband, is slain in a sortie.
Uther weds Ygerne; both recognise Arthur as their child. However, by