Talk to The Once and Future King like its author wrote you back.
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What it argues
T.H. White's The Once and Future King is the definitive retelling of the Arthurian legend in the twentieth century, and it is a much stranger, sadder, and more ambitious book than its reputation as a children's classic suggests. White began the project in the late 1930s with The Sword in the Stone — a comic, tender account of the young Arthur's education by Merlin, who teaches him about the nature of war and civilization by turning him into various animals — and ended with a last section, The Book of Merlyn, written during the Second World War and so soaked in despair that his publisher initially refused to include it.
The four volumes trace the entire arc of Arthur's story: from the educated, hopeful boy who pulls the sword from the stone and tries to build a civilization on justice rather than force, through the creation of the Round Table and Camelot's high noon, into the long collapse driven by Guinevere's affair with Lancelot and the machinations of Mordred. White is always writing about the Europe he watched destroying itself in the 1930s and 1940s. Arthur's project — can you found a civilization that uses organized force to prevent the chaos of might-makes-right? — is the central political question of the twentieth century dressed in chain mail.
What it gets right
- 1.
Arthur's Round Table is a genuine philosophical project — an attempt to use force to prevent force — and the novel's tragedy is that the project fails not because it was wrong but because people are what they are.
- 2.
White's Lancelot is the most psychologically complete character in the book: a man who knows he is capable of both sainthood and ruin and who chooses both, in sequence, without being able to stop himself.
- 3.
The Merlin-as-educator sections are not whimsical escapism but the book's actual argument about what education is for — understanding the world from positions other than your own, which is ultimately what Arthur fails to make his people do.
What it covers
Who wrote it
T.H. White (1906–1964) was a British author, naturalist, and falconer whose most lasting work grew from an obsession with the Arthurian legend begun in the late 1930s. He lived much of his adult life in Ireland, hunting, fishing, and writing in isolation. The Goshawk, his memoir of training a hawk, and England Have My Bones are his most admired nonfiction works. The Sword in the Stone was published in 1938 as a standalone novel; The Once and Future King, which incorporates and expands it along with three additional books, appeared in 1958 and was later adapted as the musical Camelot. White never married and described himself as living principally through his obsessions and his books.
