In “To the Queen,” the verse epilogue to his great Arthurian work, Idylls of the King, Alfred, Lord Tennyson assured Queen Victoria that rumors of the British Empire’s demise were no more than:
morning shadows huger than the shapes
That cast them, not those gloomier which forego
The darkness of that battle in the West,
Where all of high and holy dies away.” (“To the Queen” ll. 63-66)
Of course, Tennyson missed the mark with his prophecy of a long enduring empire; within a hundred years, the British Empire as he knew it would effectively be no more. But this passage is interesting not for the accuracy (or lack thereof) of Tennyson’s prediction, but for the promise that the empire would avoid “[t]he darkness of that battle in the West.” The “battle in the West” was the battle of Camlann that brought an end to King Arthur’s reign, recounted only a few pages prior. This juxtaposition of the destructive finale of Arthur’s kingdom with the promise of unending prosperity for Victoria’s own realm reveals the ambiguity with which Victorian Britain treated the Arthurian story. Not since the Tudors had the country’s elites been so intent on locating the nation’s roots in a legendary Arthurian past. At the same time, however, the sorrowful conclusion of Arthur’s tale weighed heavily upon their minds as a fate that modern Britain must strenuously avoid.
In this atmosphere, it is no surprise that the myth of Arthur’s return enjoyed a resurgence of popularity. After all, it put a happier spin on the end of his reign and raised hopes for a glorious future. But by this time, the Last World Emperor idea that had done so much to give belief in Arthur’s return a veneer of legitimacy had long since lost currency in Britain. A new explanation of Arthur’s immortality and subsequent return was needed. In addition, while the popular idea that Victorians were by-and-large a devoutly religious people is very much an exaggeration, Christianity retained an enormous amount of cultural capital and would have to be reckoned with in any new account of the return. At the same time, the nineteenth century saw an explosion of alternative beliefs, with systems as diverse as Unitarianism, Spiritualism, Theosophy, and a revived Rosicrucianism all gaining a foothold in British society. This encouraged a kind of spiritual experimentation in which even the fundamentals of the Christian faith could be radically reinterpreted. Within such an eclectic atmosphere, the relationship between Arthur and Christ as future saviors could be reimagined in strikingly new ways. And no one did more to encourage this than the Poet Laureate himself.
Tennyson did not hold conventionally Christian beliefs. But if there was one thing about Christ that fascinated him, it was the promise of the Second Coming and future millennial reign. This is particularly evident in his famous poem, “Ring Out, Wild Bells” that forms canto CIV of In Memoriam A. H. H. and has since become both a New Year’s standard and Christian hymn. That poem looks toward the new year and dares to hope that it shall bring about the Millennium as foretold in Revelation. It begins by describing the utopian conditions Tennyson hopes will prevail in that time—“Ring out the feud of rich and poor, / Ring in redress to all mankind (ll. 11-12)—before moving on to an explicit invocation of the millennial age itself—“Ring out the thousand wars of old, / Ring in the thousand years of peace” (ll. 27-28). Immediately afterward, the poem offers a remarkable vision of the Second Coming:
Ring in the valiant man and free,
The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be. (In Memoriam CIV ll.29-32)
This imagines the Second Coming of Christ as the arrival of a “valiant man and free” who will, through his boundless compassion, set “the land” in order by driving “the darkness” out of it.
Given these attributes, this figure already sounds like a great king, someone like the idealized King Arthur that Tennyson was already writing about. In addition, what Tennyson says in his last line is interesting. He speaks of “the Christ that is to be.” The fact that this is a “Christ that is to be” suggests that it is not simply a returned Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ who has been. Rather, it shall be a new figure, a successor to the role of Christ. To expect a new Christ instead of the return of Jesus of Nazareth is blasphemous in all traditional forms of Christianity. But it was welcomed by proponents of the various new spiritualities swirling around at the time. Anna Kingsford, for instance, in an open letter to the Theosophical Society, would call them to an increased focus on “the religious science” of “Esoteric Christianity” in hopes of “making known to a desponding and divided Christendom the advent of the Christ that is to be” (Maitland 154). Thus, this line of Tennyson’s acted as an invitation to rethink traditional doctrine on the singularity of Christ’s incarnation, a fact not lost on his more spiritually radical contemporaries.
In his Arthurian works, particularly in the Idylls of the King, Tennyson similarly invites his readers to see Arthur as a godlike and even Christlike figure Tennyson changes Arthur’s birth dramatically so that, instead of being born through Uther’s deception, Arthur descends from the heavens:
Beheld, so high upon the dreary deeps
It seem’d in heaven, a ship, the shape thereof
A dragon wing’d, and all from stem to stern
Bright with a shining people on the decks,
And gone as soon as seen. And then the two
Dropt to the cove, and watch’d the great sea fall.
Wave after wave, each mightier than the last,
Till last, a ninth one, gathering half the deep
And full of voices, slowly rose and plunged
Roaring, and all the wave was in a flame:
And down the wave and in the flame was borne
A naked babe, and rode to Merlin’s feet
Who stoopt and caught the babe, and cried “The King!
Here is an heir to Uther!” (“The Coming of Arthur” ll. 372-85)
There is here no room for a natural conception or even a natural birth, and the impropriety of Uther’s deception of Igraine is sidestepped entirely. This Arthur is not even born in a true sense. He merely descends from some other, mysterious world, traveling through the sky, then through flame, and finally through water. A “shining people” seem to have given him to Britain as some sort of divine gift. Arthur’s departure from this life will reverse the process:
Thereat once more he [Bedivere] moved about, and clomb
Ev’n to the highest he could climb, and saw,
Straining his eyes beneath an arch of hand,
Or thought he saw, the speck that bare the King,
Down that long water opening on the deep
Somewhere far off, pass on and on, and go
From less to less and vanish into light.
And the new sun rose bringing the new year.” (“The Passing of Arthur” ll. 462-69)
Here, Arthur goes into the water before being absorbed back into the light, neatly pairing his end with his beginning and bringing everything full circle. Thus, when his coming and going are taken together, they suggest that he is some sort of higher being who is merely on a sojourn from a world of light in the heavens. His life in this world is merely a kind of passing through, as even the titles of these two idylls have in the completed text, “The Coming of Arthur” and “The Passing of Arthur,” suggest.
This mystery is emphasized throughout, as Merlin’s phrase, “From the great deep to the great deep he goes” (“The Coming of Arthur” ll. 410) is repeated several times across the idylls. But Arthur’s coming and going are not the only things that make him seem like an incarnate divinity. There is also his earthly personality. Gone are the vices and mistakes of earlier Arthurs. This Arthur does not incestuously conceive Mordred nor does he show a dangerous hunger for territory. He is, in fact, portrayed as a perfect being, filled with kindness and compassion, whose only flaw is that his own perfection keeps him from understanding human frailty and weakness. In addition, references are made to Arthur’s immortality and future return. Here, however, the narrative seems strangely noncommittal. Considering the possibility after his mortal wounding at Camlann, Arthur is skeptical, “Tho’ Merlin sware that I should come again / To rule once more; but, let what will be, be” (“The Passing of Arthur” ll. 191-92). However, his skepticism is not denial; the possibility of Arthur’s return inevitably hangs over the whole narrative, investing him with an even stronger air of divinity and mystery.
Intriguingly, this was Tennyson at his most subdued. He had once been much more overt about the connection between Arthur’s apparent divinity and his future return. For “The Passing of Arthur,” while coming last in the completed sequence of idylls, was actually written and published first as “The Morte d’Arthur” in 1842. There, the poem was placed within a frame narrative entitled “The Epic,” in which Tennyson dared to image what Arthur’s return in the modern day would look like. At the end of “The Epic,” after Tennyson-as-narrator as fallen asleep, he has a peculiar dream:
till on to dawn, when dreams
Begin to feel the truth and stir of day,
To me, methought, who waited with the crowd,
There came a bark that, blowing forward, bore
King Arthur, like a modern gentleman
Of stateliest port, and all the people cried,
“Arthur is come again, he cannot die.”
Then those that stood upon the hills behind
Repeated—“Come again, and thrice as fair;”
And further inland, voices echoed—“Come
With all good things, and war shall be no more.”
At this a hundred bells began to peal,
That with the sound I woke, and heard indeed
The clear church-bells ring in the Christmas morn. (“The Epic” ll. 177-90)
This dream vision of Arthur’s return is striking and powerful. Remarkably, it lines up quite well with the millennial career of the “Christ that is to be” in “Ring Out, Wild Bells,” written roughly around the same time and published as a part of In Memoriam in 1850. Arthur is here imagined to be, like the new Christ, the ruler of a utopian future. Just as the new Christ’s come will “[r]ing out the thousand wars of old,” when Arthur comes again, “war shall be no more.” Furthermore, because Arthur “cannot die,” there is a sense that his reign shall be eternal, just as Christ’s is to be at the end of the world. Then there is the fact that this vision, like that of “Ring Out, Wild Bells” is tied closely to the ringing of bells, even if it is their ringing that wakes Tennyson from his prophetic dream. Furthermore, while “Ring Out, Wild Bells” is often thought of as a New Year’s poem, the bells in the poem are ringing to mark the coming of Christmas day. This means that there is connection between Christmas bells and a millennial vision of peace in each poem, suggesting that the messages of two poems are also deeply connected.
That connection extends not just to the millennial mission of the future Christ and the returned Arthur but also to a singular attribute that they both share: their newness. For even though Arthur returns, he does so in the form of “a modern gentleman.” This suggests that he shall come back in the guise of a contemporary figure rather than as the medieval king of legend. And the fact that he is proclaimed to be “thrice as fair” implies a change from and even an improvement over the version of Arthur found throughout Tennyson’s poetry. It is clear, then, that this Arthur will be different from the original and appear in a form more suitable for the modern age. Indeed, he will be quite like “the Christ that is to be” in that he will fulfill the same function but will offer a new take on the persona rather than simply being a reversion to the original.
This is certainly in keeping with how Tennyson often presents history as a kind of progression of the idea embodied by Arthur. For example, in his last Arthurian poem, “Merlin and the Gleam,” Tennyson has Merlin distraught after the fall of Camelot because Arthur “cannot die” (l. 81) but has still disappeared. But, because he notes that Arthur served to incarnate an idea called “The Gleam”—“on the forehead / Of Arthur the blameless / Rested the Gleam” (“Merlin and the Gleam” ll. 73-75), Merlin finds comfort in the realization that the idea is still spreading across the world on its own:
And broader and brighter,
The Gleam flying onward,
Wed to the melody,
Sang thro’ the world.” (ll. 96-99)
This, and the poem as a whole, indicates that this idea of “The Gleam” has been embodied and encapsulated throughout history, always moving onward and spreading further. When the message of this poem is taken together with Tennyson’s earlier works, readers are led to the conclusion that Arthur was one such manifestation of this idea and that the Christ who is to be will be another.
Of course, as noted above, for there to be a Christ who is to be, there must have been a Christ that was, and thus Jesus of Nazareth must by implication be part of the list of previous manifestations. This in turn creates a kind of parity between Arthur and Jesus in that it suggests both to be previous manifestations of the same idea or spirit. Furthermore, the similarities between the returned Arthur of “The Epic” and the “Christ that is to be,” as outlined above themselves suggest that those two shall themselves be the same person. Either Arthur himself is the “Christ that is to be” or that future Christ is to be understood as a further manifestation of the spirit or idea that both the medieval Arthur and Jesus of Nazareth were incarnations of.
This is a remarkably radical idea, one that demonstrates how easy it became, once the clarifying notion of the Last World Emperor was lost, to jumble together not only Arthur and Christ’s apocalyptic roles but even their personal identities. For Tennyson establishes an equivalence and a level of identity between Arthur and Christ. This is farther than even the staunchest medieval partisans of Arthur would go, for it raises Arthur to a spiritual level reserved to Christ alone. And Tennyson seems to take it quite seriously; the dream in “The Epic” happens at dawn, after all, when truly prophetic dreams are traditionally said to occur, implying that it should be read as at least symbolically true. This, then, represents a daring, unconventional, and even unprecedented shift in how Arthur and Christ were held to relate to one another. With all that said, however, Tennyson did not go so far as to force a complete identification of Arthur and Christ on an individual level. Even if they are manifestations of some overarching force, they are allowed to have distinct personalities and destinies. Otherwise, the “Christ that is to be” would be exactly the same as the previous Christ. But instead, they maintain a kind of individuality, even if Arthur can now claim a share of the divinity previously allotted to Christ alone.
All of this is to say that Tennyson never went so far as to present Arthur and Christ as the exact same person, even if he may have hinted at that with regards to the “Christ that is to be.” Even as co-incarnations of a transcendent divine force, they remained distinct. Thus, Tennyson’s Arthurian thought was radical but not as extreme as it could have been. Instead, it would fall to a couple of his American imitators to demolish the remaining sense of distinctness between Arthur and Christ in favor of a clear and openly millennialist identification of the two. The story of how this came about in a time of civil war is one of the strangest in the history of American literature.
Works Cited
Alfred, Lord Tennyson:
Idylls of the King. Edited by J. M. Gray. London: Penguin Books, 1983.
“In Memoriam A. H. H.” Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139583251.106.
“Merlin and the Gleam.” Demeter and Other Poems, 1889. Web. The Camelot Project. University of Rochester. Accessed 15 April 2022.
https://d.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/text/tennyson-merlin-and-the-gleam.
“The Epic, including The Morte d’Arthur.” Poems, 1842. Web. The Camelot Project. University of Rochester. Accessed 15 April 2022. https://d.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/text/tennyson-epic.
Anna Kingsford:
Maitland, Edward. Anna Kingsford, Her Life, Letters, Diary and Work. 3rd Edition, Volume II, Edited by Samuel Hopgood Heart. London: John M. Watkins, 1913.
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=msu.31293006582799&view=1up&seq=11.
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