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The traditions may be found in Lady Charlotte Guest's translation of the "Mabinogion," 2d ed., London, 1877, p. 471. III. CHILDREN OF LIR The lovely legend of the children of Lir or Lear forms one of those three tales of the old Irish Bards which are known traditionally in Ireland as "The Three Sorrows of Story Telling."
The first four Idylls of the King, 1859, with those since added, constitute, when taken together, an epic poem on the old story of King Arthur. Tennyson went to Malory's Morte Darthur for his material, but the outline of the first idyl, Enid, was taken from Lady Charlotte Guest's translation of the Welsh Mabinogion. In the idyl of Guinevere Tennyson's genius reached its high-water mark.
The Arthur of the Idylls is not the Arthur of The Mabinogion nor of Malory. Indeed, Tennyson makes him "almost too good to be true": he is "Ideal manhood closed in real man, rather than that gray king" of old.
This was the poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson. He told them in poetry. Tennyson calls his poems the Idylls of the King. Idyll means a short poem about some simple and beautiful subject. The king that Tennyson sings of is the great King Arthur. Tennyson takes his stories, some from The Mabinogion, some from Malory, some from other books.
The more strictly Romantic Literature of Wales has been less fortunate, though not less deserving of critical attention. This contains, besides poems, the prose romances known as Mabinogion. The Mabinogion, however, though thus early recorded in the Welsh tongue, are in their existing form by no means wholly Welsh. They are of two tolerably distinct classes.
Therefore, although I have translated and examined them, I have given them no place in these volumes. There is one argument in favour of the high antiquity in Wales of many of the Mabinogion, which deserves to be mentioned here. This argument is founded on the topography of the country.
Enid was finished in Wales in August, and Tennyson learned Welsh enough to be able to read the Mabinogion, which is much more of Welsh than many Arthurian critics possess. The two first Idylls were privately printed in the summer of 1857, being very rare and much desired of collectors in this embryonic shape.
He says nothing of the "Mabinogion." He had apparently never heard of the pedestrian Iolo Morganwg. He perhaps never saw Stephens' "Literature of the Kymry." His knowledge was picked up anyhow and anywhere from Welsh texts and Lhuyd's "Archaeologia," without system and with very little friendly discussion or comparison. Wales, therefore, was to him as wonderful as Spain, and equally uncharted.
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