‘From scarped cliff and quarried stone a thousand types gone’

Tennyson’s knowledge of Anglo-Saxon is reassessed in order to disprove the common opinion that he had only rudimentary knowledge of the language, and relied mainly on his son’s prose translation of The Battle of Brunanburh in order to make a poetic version of that text. Detailed examination of manuscript evidence proves that Tennyson applied himself to serious and sustained study of Anglo-Saxon, and this chapter identifies for the first time texts, including dictionaries, that he used to teach himself Anglo-Saxon. It is argued that Tennyson’s poetry exhibits traits of both phases of nineteenth-century Anglo-Saxonism that Fossil Poetry identifies. The chapter closes by reading the Anglo-Saxonist etymological layer of several poems by Tennyson, including In Memoriam.