Idylls Of The King Part VI Balin And Balan - Analysis

The crown meant to tame him

This episode turns on a cruel irony: the very symbol Sir Balin chooses to lift him into Arthur’s civilization becomes the object through which his violence finally destroys what he loves. Balin comes back from exile hungry to be remade, to move in music with his Order and the King. He asks to bear Guinevere’s crown-royal on his shield as a kind of moral weight, a public reminder that he is no longer Balin, ‘the Savage’. Arthur even treats it as practical medicine: this will help him of his violences. But Tennyson makes the token double-edged. Once Balin pins his reform to an image—courtly purity, queenly light—any crack in that image threatens to crack his mind.

From fountain clarity to court music

The poem begins in a clean, almost crystalline world. Arthur finds Balin and Balan statuelike by a spring under a plume of lady-fern, where the water sang and even the sand danced. That scene matters because it shows what the brothers want: pure glory, simple contest, a life that can be judged in visible strokes. Arthur answers them in their own language—he lightly smote them down—and just as lightly vanishes, leaving them to be summoned into a more complicated realm, where status depends on inner discipline and mutual trust.

When Balin is welcomed back, the hall becomes a collective instrument: cups clashed, banners stir, the Lost one Found is greeted with almost religious joy. The tone here is bright and generous, and Balin tries to believe in it. Yet the poem keeps slipping in the pressure point: Balin’s honesty is praised—Thou hast ever spoken truth—but his truthfulness is fused to a dangerous pride: Thy too fierce manhood. He can’t lie, but he also can’t easily live with what he sees.

The real “demon”: wounds from behind

The quest for the “Wood-devil” sets up the poem’s deeper conflict: harm that comes indirectly, like rumor, insinuation, and unseen malice. The woodman’s legend describes a man wounded by blind tongues who now strikes from behind. That image keeps reappearing in different forms: the literal shadow of a spear that runs along the ground behind Balin, the unseen rider who flashes and vanishes, and, later, Vivien’s weaponized story about Lancelot and Guinevere—another strike from behind, because it lands where Balin cannot verify or confront it cleanly.

Even Arthur’s early maxim, Man’s word is God, is tested here. The court is built on speech: oaths, courtesy, reputation, the assumption that fellowship means restraint. But this is also what makes the Round Table fragile. If word is the divine part of man, then a poisoned word can feel like a kind of spiritual murder.

The hinge in the rose-walk and lily-walk

The poem’s decisive turn happens in the garden, where Balin overhears Guinevere and Lancelot. He sits Close-bowered while the Queen comes down the range of roses and Lancelot takes the long white walk of lilies. The contrast is not just decorative; it dramatizes the split between human warmth and an ascetic ideal. Lancelot speaks of a saintly maiden with a lily in hand and praises the perfect-pure emblem that no flush should stain. Guinevere answers with the garden rose Deep-hued and many-folded, with the bloom of May and remembered rides not all as cool as these. Their conversation is charged with intimacy, denial, and longing; it is also, for Balin, unbearable ambiguity.

His mind collapses into frantic, self-lacerating contradiction: Queen? subject? then Damsel and lover? He both distrusts his senses and cannot escape them. The tone swerves from the earlier hall-music into panic and disgust: A churl, a clown! He rides off mad for strange adventure, as if motion could outrun perception. This is the hinge because from this moment Balin stops trying to be shaped by the Order and starts demanding that the world match the purity his token promises.

Sacred objects used for earthly rage

Pellam’s hall is a parody of holiness: relics, thorns of the crown, shivers of the cross, and the spear that pierced Christ—yet the place feels deadened, bushed about with gloom, with leaves pressed flat against the panes and branches that whined. Balin arrives bearing Guinevere’s crown and is asked, again and again, Why wear ye that sign. In this hall, the crown stops being a help and becomes an accusation, a magnet for mockery. Sir Garlon attacks the Round Table’s central fiction—wife-worship as cloaks a secret shame—and Balin’s self-control is shown as almost physical strain: he grips a massive goblet stamped with Joseph’s legend, then releases it because the token on his shield weighted down his arm. He tells himself, I will be gentle, but the gentleness is a lid on boiling water.

When the lid blows, it is catastrophic. Balin smites Garlon with So thou be shadow and tries to make him ghost, and then he grabs the longest lance in the chapel—Pellam’s holy spear—to escape. Pellam cries that Balin defileth heavenly things with earthly uses. The line lands as moral diagnosis: Balin’s tragedy is not only that he is violent, but that he keeps borrowing sacred language and sacred objects to authorize his violence.

Vivien’s “fire of Heaven” and the final misrecognition

Vivien enters like a new kind of demon: not claws and darkness, but song. Her refrain—The fire of Heaven is not the flame of Hell—is a seduction aimed directly at Balin’s confusion, teaching him to rename appetite as holiness and to imagine that the Table’s Christian restraint is merely frosty. She spots the discarded crown and then performs a false appeal to Arthur’s purity, calling him blameless and pure as any maid, even as she plans to break the King. Her lie about the scene at Caerleon—Lancelot knelt, Guinevere saying Thou art my King—is the precise kind of “spear from behind” the woodman described: a story Balin cannot bear and cannot check.

His response is pure self-undoing. He tramples the crown under his mailed heel, stamps it into defacement, and emits a weird yell that Balan mistakes for the Wood-devil. The most painful twist is that Balan’s moral clarity—his earlier warning to treat moods as outer fiends—cannot save him from misrecognizing his own brother. The brothers crash together, and the holy spear, once red with sinless blood, is now Redded with sinful. Tennyson makes the tragedy feel not fated by prophecy but manufactured by a chain of misunderstandings, pride, and opportunistic speech.

What if the “Order” is also a burden he cannot carry?

Balin fears, early on, that Too high is this mount of Camelot for him, that high-set courtesies will make him Fierier from restraint. The poem never fully denies that fear. It shows a man trying to climb into a moral altitude where every glance and greeting carries meaning—and that very altitude makes him dizzy. The question the poem presses is not whether courtesy is good, but what happens when a person uses courtesy as a costume instead of a practice, a cognizance instead of a slow change of nerve and habit.

Brothers locked in one doom

The closing scene restores, too late, the human truth Balin kept outsourcing to symbols. When he crawls to Balan and recognizes the true face from cradle-time, the poem drops the courtly abstractions and returns to family. Balan names the real enemy plainly: Vivien lied, Garlon is a liar, and Pure is the Queen as our own true Mother. But the vindication is useless, because the damage was never only factual; it was psychological. Balin’s final words—My violences—admit what no token could cure: anger was not merely an action he committed but a lord he served.

Still, Tennyson gives the brothers a last, hard tenderness. Balin whispers Goodnight, expecting only darkness; Balan answers goodmorrow there. They die together, locked in each other’s arms, as if the only stable “Order” left is the bond that existed before Camelot, before glory, before crowns—two lives that began side by side and, because one could not master his inner fiend, must end the same way.