In a letter to Hallam Tennyson, William Makepeace Thackeray reflects on first reading Idylls of King and concluding that neither awful truth from science, nor and raptures and roses of Swinburne, nor vivisoulections of Contemporaries and Fortnightly Reviews need put away clanging of King sword ... and Excaliburs, I thank God our fathers have always held. (1) It is a piquant moment: author of a Novel Without a Hero wants a hero--when, as Lord Byron once observed, every year and month sends forth a new one--and preferably a sword-wielding one. However, many readers and critics might fairly wonder how accurately Thackeray's comments reflect their experience of Idylls of King. Throughout years, it has been alleged that Alfred work is bedizened with its own share of melodies and raptures and roses, and many would contend that they have found, rather than Thackeray's clear clanging, what Everard Hall in The Epic (Morte d'Arthur) describes and dismisses as faint Homeric echoes. (2) Moreover, for many, to their disappointment, Arthurian work appears to be lacking anything like spirit of red-blooded, boys'-book swordplay that Thackeray suggests here. Thus did T. S. Eliot famously charge Tennyson with making the great British epic--in Malory's handling hearty, outspoken and magnificent into suitable reading for a girls' school. (3) That Tennyson (pace Eliot and Thackeray) may have been deliberately seeking a complicated alternative to Malory's hearty, outspoken magnificence can be gauged from those [curiously plural] and other Tennysonian swords in Idylls of King. Where Thackeray sees heroic, ownership of sword (those Excaliburs ... our fathers have always held), many readers might say that they are left instead with a clearer image of swords breaking throughout Idylls, breaking as if falling short of their ostensible purpose. In episode Balin and Balan, Tennyson lingers on how Sir Balin's blade, in combat with Sir Garlon, flew / Splintering in six, and clinkt upon stones (ll. 389-390). Similarly, Sir Gareth shatters his sword utterly to hilt (Gareth and Lynette, 1. 1120), and in his idyll he triumphs over his foe without valiantly wielding a sword; one of his adversaries slips in a stream while Gareth hurls another headlong o'er [al bridge (l. 1125). As for Excalibur itself, in many of its appearances in work, it functions more as an ornate objet d'art than as a martial weapon. To be sure, Thackeray's remarks, insofar as they use Excalibur as a vehicle for discussing Idylls of King, foreground just how central famous sword is to particular Arthurian undertaking. A conventional strain in Idylls of King criticism makes an analogy between Arthurian project and Excalibur. Thus, Michael Hancock writes Tennyson's poem is itself a collection like sword, encrusted with a dragon's hoard of jewels. (4) of course, was foundational for rule and reign. In her discussion of Victorian visual conceptions of Arthurian themes, Debra N. Mancoff writes that Arthur's youth was encoded in a single subject: taking of Excalibur, a taking that marked his right to rule. (5) Similarly, Excalibur occupies a place of equal prominence to Tennyson, albeit, again, not in quite manner Thackeray (or, indeed, Mancoff) would suggest. What seems most central to epic poem is not Thackeray's eternal possession of but, in fact, renunciation of it and all this might imply. By all indications, Tennyson himself seemed to place Excalibur--and its renunciation--at center of his Arthurian project. Certainly earliest stage of Arthurian work suggests Excalibur's significance: first substantial Arthurian poem was Morte d'Arthur and its framing poem The Epic. …