Idylls Of The King Part X Pelleas And Ettarre - Analysis

Introduction and Tone

This section of Tennyson’s Idylls presents a melancholy, elegiac narrative that shifts from bright, romantic expectation to disillusionment and rage. The poem begins with sunlit, pastoral imagery and the excitement of knighthood, then moves into mockery, cruelty, and finally violent despair. The tone slides from idealistic and reverent to bitter, anguished, and accusatory.

Historical and Authorial Context

Alfred Lord Tennyson, a leading Victorian poet, retells Arthurian material in order to explore moral ideals and their failure in a modern age. The poem reflects Victorian anxieties about honor, social roles, and the fragility of ideals; it also takes part in the 19th-century revival of medieval romance as a vehicle for contemporary moral critique.

Main Theme: Idealized Love and Its Betrayal

The dominant theme is the collision between romantic idealization and brutal reality. Pelleas projects a pure, quasi-religious love onto Ettarre—calling her like Guinevere—and interprets her fleeting favors as vows. Imagery of worship (his face like a priest’s, vows, the circlet as prize) underscores his devotion; Ettarre’s laughter, public mockery, and final infidelity expose that devotion as misplaced and lead to Pelleas’s disillusionment and fury.

Main Theme: Chivalry, Honor, and Corruption

Tennyson interrogates chivalric ideals by showing how formal honor fails the sincere. Pelleas’s fidelity and physical prowess win the circlet and the sword, yet chivalric institutions—damsels, knights, even Arthur’s court—do not protect him. Gawain’s theatrical substitution and Lancelot’s ambiguous intervention show how the code is performative and susceptible to deception, leaving true loyalty undermined.

Main Theme: Appearance versus Reality

Repeated contrasts between surface beauty and inner worth emphasize falsity: Ettarre’s outward charm masks cruelty; the tournament’s public pageantry conceals private treachery. Pelleas’s initial merging of his own soul’s beauty with Ettarre’s external charms illustrates how appearances deceive and self-deception compounds the harm.

Symbols and Vivid Images

The golden circlet functions as both prize and false promise: it marks public honor yet becomes the instrument of humiliation when Ettarre crowns herself and then scorns Pelleas. The sword recurs as a symbol of martial honor and near-vengeance—left across sleeping throats it becomes a moral test Pelleas cannot bring himself to fail. Garden imagery—the roses and moonlit pavilions—juxtaposes cultivated beauty with secreted betrayal; sleep and waking operate as moral states, with sleep signifying complacent guilt or trapped innocence, and waking signifying painful recognition.

Ambiguity and a Question

The poem leaves an uneasy ambiguity about responsibility: is Ettarre merely a selfish noble, or does her behavior reflect a social order that trains cruelty as pastime? One might ask whether Pelleas’s idealism is itself culpable for blinding him to social realities, or whether he is purely a victim of others’ cynicism.

Conclusion

Tennyson’s episode dramatizes the collapse of romantic and chivalric ideals under human vanity and duplicity. Through vivid symbols—the circlet, the sword, the moonlit roses—and a steady tonal descent from light to fury, the poem indicts a world where noble vows and appearances fail to secure justice or compassion, leaving sincerity broken and honor compromised.