Rotten Love
Tennyson wrote 'Merlin and Vivien' first in his great reworking of the Arthuriad, 'The Idylls of the King': the doomed obsession of a cold enchanter with an ambitious beauty. This is Vivien's song.
In Love, if Love be Love, if Love be ours, Faith and unfaith can ne’er be equal powers: Unfaith in aught is want of faith in all. It is the little rift within the lute, That by and by will make the music mute, And ever widening slowly silence all. The little rift within the lover’s lute, Or little pitted speck in garner’d fruit, That rotting inward slowly moulders all. It is not worth the keeping: let it go: But shall it? answer, darling, answer, no. And trust me not at all or all in all.
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What we love about this passage…
Vivien, sometimes called Nimue (or, fashionably in this period, Nimuë) and many other variants, is also associated with fairy lovers and water spirits in the earliest Arthurian legends. She is first named as Merlin’s captor in the influential set of Old French Arthurian stories known as the ‘Vulgate’ cycle, which also emphasise the Holy grail and the Lancelot-Guinevere romance. In some versions of this story, Merlin lecherously pursues Vivien and tries to trade his secrets for her love, but there is always the same end awaiting him, a fate he foresees but cannot escape: she will use what she learns of his magic to trap him forever underground, in a cave, or in an old oak tree. In some versions (including the Estoire de Merlin) Vivien does this not out of defence or hatred, but passion, continuing to visit him in a sealed haven away from the world.
Tennyson’s Vivien is strikingly instead a master of pitiless manipulation, and has no link with the world of fairy. She enters Arthur’s court as an agent of espionage and chaos, cleverly spreading discord through gossip and whispers. She truly hates Arthur and all his knights for their pretensions to purity as well as the battle that killed her parents. Merlin, at the centre of that courtly power, quickly becomes her target. Her careful skill and patient artifice as she demands the total trust of Merlin is sweetly ironic; she herself is the ‘little rift’ seeking to quietly bring destruction. She follows this song with the chilling provocation:
‘O Master, do ye love my tender rhyme?’
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About the Author
Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892) was an English poet and Victorian poet Laureate. His interest in Arthurian legend led to many poems on these stories, including, ‘The Lady of Shalott’.
To read alongside…
Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur (a fifteenth-century elaboration of the intricate medieval tradition) was a major influence on Tennyson, who also wrote his own Morte. Malory’s Nimue, in strong contrast to Tennyson’s, simply enchants Merlin to stop him repeatedly sexually harassing her. She is a friend to the knights of Camelot and also performs a number of other protective acts for Arthur and others. She is more typical of other medieval versions.
Whilst the love of Tennyson’s Vivien is a malicious pretence, Tennyson’s work influenced Edwin Arlington Robinson’s far softer Merlin. Robinson’s Merlin withdraws from the world to live happily with Vivian in Broceliande Forest (Brittany). At the last, however, Merlin painfully leaves her behind to be with Arthur in his final doomed battle. He recalls her memory as he watches darkness fall over the kingdom:
[...] I see her, still in green, Beside the fountain. I shall not go back. We pay for going back; and all we get Is one more needless ounce of weary wisdom To bring away with us. If I come not, The lady Vivian will remember me, And say: 'I knew him when his heart was young, Though I have lost him now. Time called him home, And that was as it was; for much is lost Between Broceliande and Camelot.'
The Arthurian legends have also inspired numerous novels, many of which toy, like Merlin himself, with fate, history, memory, and even time travel. Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) is a burlesque on nineteenth-century medievalist ideals in which an engineer named Hank travels through time to the court of Camelot. Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant (2015) is set in a post-Arthurian world in which a terrible blight of severe amnesia—‘the mist’—afflicts the population.
Tracy Deonn’s YA fantasy novel, Legendborn (2020), directly confronts the toxicity of Merlin’s history of magic and manipulation. Bree, a black teenage girl who has recently lost her mother, infiltrates a historically white University society and confronts ‘Merlin’ figures who have the power to control and obliterate memories. This novel was in turn inspired by folkloric fantasy novels such as Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising (1973).
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