ABSTRACT
Published 1859 as Vivien (the final title in 1870 [‘1869’]). ‘Begun in Feb. and finished on March 31st, 1856’ (H.T.). On 15 July 1856, James Spedding wrote to T. objecting to Merlin’s seduction by Vivien (Lincoln). Sir Charles Tennyson says that in 1854 T. ‘had already begun work on a poem about the enchantment of Merlin, but he laid this aside for Maud’ (CT, p. 282); T. wrote to Simeon, c. 20 March 1856: ‘I have done some of my Merlin Idyl which promises well I think’ (Letters ii 147). T.’s trial edition of Enid and Nimuë: the True and the False was set up in the summer of 1857; there is a copy in the British Library (from which an edition was printed in 1902). For details of T.’s revisions, see Richard Jones, The Growth of the Idylls of the King (1895), Chapter ii; and Sir Charles Tennyson, Cornhill cliii (1936) 534–57. H.T. com-ments: ‘My father created the character of Vivien with much care — as the evil genius of the Round Table [note: Even to the last. See Guinevere 97–8.] — who in her lustfulness of the flesh could not believe in anything either good or great. The story of the poem … is essentially original, and was founded on the following passage from Malory’ [iv 1, slightly bowdlerized by H.T., here restored]:
