The Once and Future King


The Once and Future King is a work by T. H. White based upon the 1485 book Le Morte d'Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory. It was first published in 1958. It collects and revises shorter novels published from 1938 to 1940, with much new material.

Summary

Most of the book takes place in "Gramarye", the name White gives to Britain, and chronicles the youth and education of King Arthur, his rule as a king, and the romance between Sir Lancelot and Queen Guinevere. Though Arthur, if he existed at all, would have ruled some time around the 6th century, the book is set around the 14th century, and the actual monarchs of that period are referred to as "mythical". The book ends immediately before Arthur's final battle against his illegitimate son Mordred. Though White admits his book's source material is loosely derived from Le Morte d'Arthur, he reinterprets the epic events, filling them with renewed meaning for a world recovering from World War II.
The book is divided into four parts:
A final part, called The Book of Merlyn, was published separately following White's death. It chronicles Arthur's final lessons from Merlyn before his death, although some parts of it were incorporated into the final editions of the previous books. Although it does conclude the story of Arthur, The Book of Merlyn had also been the workshop in which White first wrote the adventures with the ants and the geese. Much of it became redundant once they were transferred to the revised The Sword in the Stone. But as the only text in which all Arthur's animals were brought together, and the final parts of his life were related, lovers of the story would not like to lose it.

Plot

The story starts in the final years of the rule of King Uther Pendragon. The first part, "The Sword in the Stone", chronicles Arthur's upbringing by his foster father Sir Ector, his rivalry and friendship with his foster brother Kay, and his initial training by Merlyn, a wizard who lives through time backwards. Merlyn, knowing the boy's destiny, teaches Arthur what it means to be a good king by turning him into various kinds of animals: fish, hawk, ant, goose, and badger. Each of the transformations is meant to teach Wart a lesson, which will prepare him for his future life.
Merlyn instills in Arthur the concept that the only justifiable reason for war is to prevent another from going to war and that contemporary human governments and powerful people exemplify the worst aspects of the rule of Might.
White revised the original Sword in the Stone heavily for the four-part book in 1958. He took out the wizards' duel between Merlyn and Madame Mim, the adventure with T. natrix the snake, and the episode with the giant Galapagas. The first of those was replaced with the adventure of the ants, but fortunately the duel was included in the Disney film. In the Wart's adventure with Merlyn's owl, Archimedes, the boy Arthur becomes a wild goose instead of visiting the goddess Athena. In the adventure with Robin Hood in the original book, the outlaws take the boys to attack the cannibal Anthropophagi and the Wart kills a Sciopod. In the 1958 version, the boys lead an attack on Morgan le Fay's Castle Chariot and Kay kills a griffin. The revisions reflect White's preoccupation with political questions in The Once and Future King, and generally give the first part of the work a more adult flavour.
In part two, "The Queen of Air and Darkness", White sets the stage for Arthur's demise by introducing the Orkney clan and detailing Arthur's seduction by their mother, his half-sister Queen Morgause. While the young king suppresses initial rebellions, Merlyn leads him to envision a means of harnessing potentially destructive Might for the cause of Right: the chivalric order of the Round Table.
The third part, "The Ill-Made Knight", shifts focus from King Arthur to the story of Sir Lancelot and Queen Guinevere's forbidden love, the means they go through to hide their affair from the King, and its effect on Elaine, Lancelot's sometime lover and the mother of his son Galahad.
"The Candle in the Wind" unites these narrative threads by telling how Mordred's hatred of his father and Sir Agravaine's hatred of Lancelot caused the eventual downfall of Arthur, Guinevere, Lancelot, and the entire ideal kingdom of Camelot.
The book begins as a quite light-hearted account of the young Arthur's adventures, and King Pellinore's interminable search for the Questing Beast. Parts of "The Sword in the Stone" read almost as a parody of the traditional Arthurian legend by virtue of White's prose style, which relies heavily on anachronisms. However, the tale gradually changes tone until "Ill-Made Knight" becomes more meditative and "The Candle in the Wind" finds Arthur brooding over death and his legacy.

Characterization in the work

White reinterprets the traditional Arthurian characters, often giving them motivations or traits more complex than or even contradictory to those in earlier versions of the legend. For example:
White allows Sir Thomas Malory, in the form of a young page named Tom, to have a cameo appearance towards the end of the final book. Due to his living backwards, Merlyn makes many anachronistic allusions to events in more recent times; of note are references to World War II, telegraphs, tanks, and "an Austrian who … plunged the civilized world into misery and chaos". A veiled reference to Nazism also occurs when Sir Agravaine suggests setting up an organisation of "National Communists" who use Jews as a scapegoat and have the fylfot as their badge.

Reception

praised The Sword in the Stone as "blithely comic and entirely delightful", stating that it was "in utter contrast to the mounting tragedy" of the other three volumes of the series. Fantasy historian Lin Carter wrote, "... the single finest fantasy novel written in our time, or for that matter, 'ever' written, is, must be, by any conceivable standard, T. H. White's The Once and Future King. I can hardly imagine that any mature, literate person who has read the book would disagree with this estimate. White is a great writer."

Film, television, and theatrical adaptations

Although Walt Disney initially purchased the film rights to The Ill-Made Knight in 1944, he eventually produced an adaptation of The Sword in the Stone. This movie reflects more the sense of humour of Disney's team of animators than White's. The movie adds a more comical side to the original story, including song and dance, as in most Walt Disney films.
Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe's 1960 musical Camelot is based mostly on the last two books of The Once and Future King and features White's idea of having Thomas Malory make a cameo appearance at the end, again as "Tom of Warwick".
BBC Radio produced a dramatised version of "The Sword in the Stone" for Children's Hour shortly after its publication in 1938. Incidental music for the serial was specially composed by Benjamin Britten.
A two-hour version of The Sword in the Stone, dramatised by Neville Teller, was first broadcast as a Saturday Night Theatre on Boxing Day, 1981. Michael Hordern played Merlyn and Toby Robertson was the Wart. The cast included Pauline Letts, David Davis, Jeffrey Segal and Lewis Stringer. Benjamin Britten's incidental music, played by the English Sinfonia, was used in the production, which was by Graham Gauld.
BBC Radio 4 serialised the book in six one-hour episodes dramatised by Brian Sibley, beginning on Sunday 9 November 2014 with Paul Ready as Arthur and David Warner as Merlyn.

Other references

Film