ABSTRACT
Printed privately in 1857. Published 1859, the first half of Enid. The title Enid was expanded to Geraint and Enid in 1870 (‘1869’); the poem was divided into two parts in 1873; and the final titles given in 1886. H.T. notes: ‘In 1857 six copies of Enid and Nimuë: the True and the False were printed. This Idyll is founded on Geraint, son of Erbin, in the Mabinogion, translated by Lady Charlotte Guest [1840, collected 1849, vol. ii], and has “brought the story within compass”. It was begun on 16 April 1856, and first published in 1859 in the Idylls of the King. My father had also read Erec and Enid, by Chrestien de Troyes. The greater part of the Idylls contained in the volume of 1859 was written at Farringford. But the end of Geraint and Enid was written in July and August of 1856 in Wales, where he read, in the original, Hanes Cymru (Welsh history), the Mabinogion, and Llywarch Hen.’ T. is very close in incidents and often in wording to the Guest translation; for a detailed comparison, see H. G. Wright, Essays and Studies xiv (1929) 80–103. G. C. Macaulay’s edition (1892), pp. xxviii–xxx, lists T.’s possible debts to the French versions. For a detailed account of T.’s textual changes, see Richard Jones, The Growth of the Idylls of the King (1895), chapter ii. There is a copy of Enid and Nimuë (1857) in the British Library; an edition was printed from this in 1902.
