ABSTRACT
The Arthurian past remains for Tennyson either embedded in a mythic past or an equally mythic apocalyptic future, when it enters the present it does so with a resounding thud. As we all know, the Arthur cycle, lying as dormant as enchanted Merlin for most of the eighteenth century, was revived in the early nineteenth century as part of general renewal of romance that accompanied the rise of British romanticism. Neither Tennyson's nor Morris' deployment of Arthurian narratives is finally satisfactory, then, for both lead to positions that prove, by their own logic, untenable. In Morris' hands, what Guenevere reminds the Victorian audience and a twentieth century one as well is this, that narratives such as Guenevere's are always written from the point of view of Gauwaine. A structural anthropologist, for example, would want to speak of the ways that the Arthurian narratives served the classic function of myth, mediating cultural conflict, recounting and thus reconciling the antinomies of experience.
