ABSTRACT
Published 1872. In Feb. 1861, T. ‘read of Sir Gareth in the Morte d’Arthur’ (Mem. i 471). T.’s wife records, 7 Oct. 1869: ‘He gave me his beginning of Beaumains… (the golden time of Arthur’s Court) to read (written, as was said jokingly, “to describe a pattern youth for his boys”).’ T. set it aside for a while. On 5 April 1872, he wrote to Knowles (Letters iii; Mem. ii 113n): ‘Gareth is not finished yet. I left him off once altogether, finding him more difficult to deal with than anything I had ever tried, excepting perhaps Aylmer’s Field. If I were at liberty, which I think I am not, to print the names of the speakers ‘Gareth’, ‘Linette’, over the short snip-snap of their talk, and so avoid the perpetual ‘said’ and its varieties, the work would be much easier. I have made out the plan, however, and perhaps some day it will be completed; and it will be then to consider whether or no it should go into the Contemporary or elsewhere.’ T. sent it to press, 9 July 1872 (Letters iii; Mat. iii 186). Based on Malory vii; T.’s lines 1–430 have no counterpart in Malory. For the MSS and trial edition, see Wise, Bibliography i 216–21; E. F. Shannon, Bibliographical Society of America xli (1947) 321–40; and J. E. Hartman, Harvard Library Bulletin xiii (1959) 239–64. There is also a MS in the Bodleian Library. For T.’s prose drafts (H.Nbk 40 and 32, and fragments at the University of Texas at Austin), see D. Staines, Harvard Library Bulletin xxii (1974) 294–306. Staines shows that T.’s original plan would have deprived the completed series of any idyll which features the full glory of the Order.
