The Once and Future King
by T. H. White
Summary
T. H. White combines four linked books, most published individually two decades earlier and revised here, into one continuous account of King Arthur's life, from a boyhood spent being secretly tutored by the time traveling wizard Merlyn, who ages backward and already knows how Arthur's story ends, through his crowning as king after pulling the sword from the stone, to the slow collapse of the Round Table he builds to turn England's warring knights toward justice instead of plunder. Merlyn's lessons, transforming the young Arthur into a fish, a hawk, an ant and a goose in turn, teach him early lessons about power and cooperation that the grown king spends the rest of the book trying, and largely failing, to apply to actual government. The later books trace the long, slow betrayal at the center of Arthur's court, the love between his best knight, Lancelot, and his wife, Guinevere, and the campaign against them waged by Arthur's illegitimate son Mordred and the bitter knight Agravaine, which finally splits the Round Table apart entirely. On the night before his last battle against Mordred, Arthur meets a young page and, sensing the end has come, sends the boy away from the fighting with instructions to remember and retell everything Arthur has tried to build, naming him Thomas Malory, the medieval author whose own account of Arthur White had drawn on to write this one; the book ends there, on the eve of Arthur's death, with the idea of his kingdom handed forward rather than the battle itself shown.
White writes the early chapters as genuine comedy, warm and often very funny, before the tone darkens steadily book by book into real tragedy, and that shift is deliberate and part of the book's real subject, that even the best intentions toward power curdle given enough time; readers who start with the playful Sword in the Stone section are sometimes unprepared for how bleak the later books become.
White wrote much of the book while living alone in rural Ireland, working obsessively on falconry and animal husbandry himself in between drafts, research that gives the book's animal transformations and its hunting scenes a level of physical detail few fantasy novels of the period attempted.
Historical Context & Significance
Collins published The Once and Future King in 1958, gathering and revising three books White had published separately between 1938 and 1940 and adding a fourth, The Candle in the Wind, that appeared for the first time in this volume; no major literary prize took up a fantasy novel built this way, an adult reworking of material some readers still associated with a children's book. Reviewers split largely by which part of the book they weighed most: Floyd C. Gale praised the early Sword in the Stone section as blithely comic and entirely delightful, while later critics tended to rate the darker, more political later books higher, and the fantasy historian Lin Carter eventually called the completed work the single finest fantasy novel of its time.
Its afterlife runs almost entirely through adaptation rather than prizes. Walt Disney's animated Sword in the Stone in 1963 drew only on the book's lightest opening section, and the 1960 Lerner and Loewe stage musical Camelot, filmed in 1967, drew instead on its final, tragic books, so that most audiences have met White's Arthur in two very different moods without realizing both come from the same novel.