We offer a reading of “Merlin and Vivien” to argue that Merlin’s initial inability to reconcile the promise of love with his fixation on his utility complicates how we might think about happiness in relation to utility. Our reading somewhat shifts the central problem from what previous critics have identified as one of the reason versus passion (Adler 1397) to one of happiness versus utility. We draw from Giorgio Agamben’s concept of profanation that suggests that a sacred object’s utility is only possible in the realm of men when it is profaned, and an object’s utility is negated when it is elevated into the realm of the sacred through sacrifice (73–74). However, we suggest that in Tennyson’s imagining an object can still become useful even as it enters the realm of the sacred. This idea is dramatized when Merlin does not entirely lose his “use, name and fame” when Vivien uses the charm to trap him in the oak tree for eternity, which we consider an act of, borrowing Walter Benjamin’s words, mythic and divine violence.