The Once and Future King

Most of the book takes place in Gramarye, the name that 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. Arthur is supposed to have lived in the 5th and 6th centuries, but the book is set around the 14th century. Arthur is portrayed as an Anglo-Norman rather than a Briton; White refers to the actual monarchs of that period as "mythical". The book ends immediately before Arthur's final battle against his illegitimate son Mordred. White acknowledged that his book's source material is loosely derived from Le Morte d'Arthur, although he reinterprets the events of that story from the perspective of a world recovering from World War II.

The book is divided into four parts:

• The Sword in the Stone (1938), detailing the youth of Arthur (a revised text of the original publication, which both adds and removes certain parts)
• The Queen of Air and Darkness (1939), published separately in somewhat different form as The Witch in the Wood
• The Ill-Made Knight (1940), dealing mainly with the character of Lancelot
• The Candle in the Wind (1958), first published in the composite edition

A final part called The Book of Merlyn (written 1941, published 1977) 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, mostly The Sword in the Stone, after White became aware that the compiled text of The Once and Future King would not include his final volume. The Book of Merlyn was the volume that first contained the adventures with the ants and the geese. However, it still has independent value as the only text in which all Arthur's animals are brought together, and the final parts of his life are related.[3]

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 (known as "Wart") 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. 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 Anthropophagi (cannibals) 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 adopt to hide their affair from the King (although he already knows of it from Merlyn), 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 cause 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 Arthurian legend by virtue of White's prose style, which relies heavily on anachronisms. However, the tale gradually changes tone: The Ill-Made Knight becomes more meditative, and The Candle in the Wind finds Arthur brooding over death and his legacy.

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:

• Arthur grows from a fallible but inquisitive and enthusiastic youth ("the Wart") to an individualised and psychologically complex man.[4]
• Lancelot is no longer the handsome knight typical in the romances, but is instead portrayed as the ugliest of Arthur's knights. He is also intensely introspective and obsessively insecure, traits which lead to bouts of self-loathing. He seeks to overcome his flaws by becoming Arthur's greatest knight.
• Merlyn lives through time backwards, making him a bumbling yet wise old man who is getting younger. He makes many anachronistic allusions to future events, including references to World War II, telegraphs, tanks, and "an Austrian who … plunged the civilized world into misery and chaos" (i.e., Adolf Hitler).[5]
• Sir Galahad is not well liked by many of the knights, as he is too "perfect"—to the point of being inhuman.
• Sir Bors (whom White labels "Sir Bors the misogynist") is depicted as so devoted to his religious convictions that he is willing to do harm to others and the world around him rather than risk sacrificing his purity. His holy goodness is juxtaposed with Sir Lancelot's worldly goodness, with many of the characters favouring Lancelot.

Floyd C. Gale 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.[6] Fantasy historian Lin Carter called it "the single finest fantasy novel written in our time, or for that matter, ever written."[7] Constance Grady of Vox also praised the novel, stating: "White was writing for a post–World War II audience, but his book has a vigor and clarity that makes it an urgent and important read today."[8]

Although Walt Disney initially purchased the film rights to The Ill-Made Knight in 1944,[9] he eventually produced an adaptation of The Sword in the Stone (released in 1963). This film reflects more the sense of humour of Disney's team of animators than White's. The film adds a more comical side to the original story, including song and dance, as in most Disney films.

Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe's 1960 musical Camelot (which was made into a movie in 1967) 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.[10]

Wikiquote has quotations related to The Once and Future King.

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Wikimedia Commons has media related to The Once and Future King.

• The Once and Future King at Faded Page (Canada)
• The Book of Merlyn title listing at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• "NLS/BPH: Minibibliographies, The Once and Future King" by T. H. White
• Essay: "The Importance of the Second World War to T.H. White's Once and Future King".
• 1958 review by Ken Slater