T.H. White's retelling of the "
Matter of England", the
King Arthur story.
White used
Sir Thomas Mallory's
Le Morte d'Arthur as his primary source, which is a great idea from a poetic standpoint but
godawful in
historical terms. There's a lot to be said about the historical
King Arthur, but none of it is said in
The Once and Future King.
White makes
Arthur a
Norman in conflict with
Saxons and such, which makes him two invasions late.
White made no bones about this; at one point he gives dates for the
reign of
Arthur's father,
Uther Pendragon: It's about two and a half centuries.
White was trying to manage both some rudiments of real history, and also a great mass of addlepated material that
Mallory stole in the fifteenth (?) century from earlier wildly fictionalized
French sources.
Mallory massaged the stuff himself.
White's solution was
Alexandrian: To hell with it, stick with
the logic of fiction,
myth, and
tragedy; hang history.
White cared about
Arthur and
England and all that jazz, but the novel he wanted to write was a long and ultimately very bleak meditation on
human nature,
war,
power,
corruption,
the sins of the fathers being visited upon the sons, and
the impossibility of redemption. It's a
literary freak, a mass of
anachronism and
idiosyncracy and the odd rant about
fox hunting.
Due to the
Disney and
Broadway crap with
The Sword and the Stone,
The Once and Future King has been mistaken for a "fun kids' book". It is, but don't hand your kids
The Once and Future King if you don't feel they're ready to learn about
incest, despair,
murder,
evil, despair,
adultery, despair, war, betrayal, evil, and despair.
The Sword and the Stone is conventionally "fit for children", but he's going somewhere with it.
The Once and Future King is divided up into four novels:
- The Sword and the Stone (whence a Disney movie and a Broadway musical) concerns the youth of Arthur, and his accession to the throne.
- The Queen of Air and Darkness concerns the youth of Sir Gawaine and his three brothers Agravaine, Gareth, and Gaheris in the Orkney islands; it also concerns their mother, Morgause. This is where things begin to turn dark; we start finding out about Arthur's family history, which is bloody and terrible and which will ultimately come back to haunt everybody.
- The Ill-Made Knight begins with the young Sir Lancelot, a good man who ends up causing untold harm in later years. Most of it is about the Round Table and the quest for the Holy Grail. Decades pass.
- The Candle in the Wind: Decadence followed by civil war. Everything goes to hell, all gains are lost, all losses are compounded, all chickens come home to roost. It's so desperately bleak I can't even read it through to the end any more.
There's another volume,
The Book of Merlyn, which is talky and
didactic and tries to sum up the whole thing. There is also an alternate version of
The Sword and the Stone, which is significantly different.
Omnibus editions of the initial
tetralogy always have one version, but there's a stand-alone
edition of
The Sword and the Stone which is the other. The
omnibus one is less child-oriented; the parts of it which differ are mostly reproduced in
The Book of Merlyn. It's worth reading both versions of
The Sword and the Stone.
kanon42: True, and nicely put. For those (if any) who missed it, there's a legend that
King Arthur is on the isle of
Avalon,
not dead but sleeping, and that he'll return when
England is in danger.
Another thing that occurred to me this morning is that
The Once and Future King is also about what it means to be an adult, mainly
compromise: Living with sin and imperfection and finding that you
can live with sin and imperfection. Yeah, he more or less just
says that, but it's worth mentioning because we've said that he's discussing this and that, but what does he conclude? Pretty much just that:
Compromise. Accept a certain amount of
evil because trying to
eradicate evil turns out to be a greater
evil, and it won't work anyway . . .