**** spoilers below ****
‘Whoso pulleth out this Sword of this Stone and anvil,
Is rightwise King born of all England.’
Some stories get told over and over again. Stories that are told often enough, become legends. T H Whites version of the King Arthur legend has been a childhood staple for decades, but does it still stand up today? Mallory’s Le Mort d’Arthur looms large, but as tensions emerge and jostle against one another, The Once and Future King takes on a power and voice of its own. Tradition Vs Progress, Service Vs Ambition, Honour Vs Love – can these contradictions ever be reconciled?
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Book one of four, The Sword in the Stone, takes us back to Gramarie, an ancient England inhabited by witches, griffins and the peculiar Questing Beast. In this lawless land, the Celts fight the Saxons, the nobles fight each other, and the Normans fight everyone. Young Arthur – here called The Wart – is ward of Sir Ector, and lives in his castle on the edge of the wild woods. While searching for a lost kestrel, young Wart encounters mad King Pellinore, and the great wizard Merlin (who’s even more mad). Pellinore is a relic of the old world; the wizard offers the possibilities and challenges of a new one. It’s the mysterious Merlin who agrees to tutor the lad, and prepare him for the challenges ahead.
Or rather the challenges behind. Merlin – in a brilliant, heartbreaking concept – is moving backwards through time. He knows how to help Wart become King Arthur, because he has already seen him do it. While Wart was brought up on chivalric ideals, his brief time with the wizard exerts just as much influence on the man he will become. Chivalry gives a specific code and expectation of behaviour. Merlin doesn’t offer answers so much as ever more puzzling questions. He doesn’t clarify, he complicates. He isn’t even in charge of his own destiny. Doomed to be imprisoned by the treacherous Nimue, Merlin is also a man trapped by his own foreknowledge of events to come.
And so Wart’s magical education sees him transformed into various animals. He must learn not only how to swim like a fish and fly like a peregrin, but also how to communicate with these strange and wonderful creatures. How is their society structured? What do they value? What do they fear? So much of what you want comes from where you are in the world. And those that flourish aren’t always the strongest, or bravest, or even the smartest.
The next book, The Witch in the Wood sees the Wart follow a more straightforward quest – to help Robin Hood and his Merry Men rescue captives of the dark witch Morgana. She is one of the native Fairy folk, and woe betide any human foolish enough to cross them. But Wart has a bronze blade and strong allies – if he learns their ways of stealth and combat, he’ll emerge victorious. Except, it’s Kay who slays the Griffin, and gets the glory. Wart gets a dislocated shoulder for his trouble. Chivalry is more straightforward than diplomacy, but the results are usually messier.
Things jump forward in book three – The Ill Made Knight. The Wart has grown into good King Arthur, and has established his Round Table at Camelot. His righteous knights keep peace throughout the realm, and Arthur’s fame spreads far and wide. A young lad called Lancelot seeks to serve him and become the greatest knight in the world. While shot through with flashes of savagery, there is an aching, nostalgic quality to the first two books – like fondly remembered school holidays. But our story is now dealing with adults, and becomes correspondingly darker. People are even trickier to work out than animals; their motives obscure and their methods confusing, even to themselves. Lancelot wants to serve a higher aim, but he is ultimately driven by pride and fear. Is he doomed to failure because of his base motives? Or is his attempt to overcome this corruption itself an act of glory?
The driving force of this story is the clash between ideals of chivalry, which demand violence in the defense of the weak, and the horror and reality of war. Arthur tries to enforce lawful justice with the strength of his knights. But chivalry is by nature competitive, which ultimately creates division. Arthur then tries to use strength to serve godly justice, by sending his knights to find the Holy Grail. This ends badly too – the violent, wordly knights are unworthy of the divine.
Arthur thus concludes that violence and justice cannot be reconciled on earth. Any use of force will always lead to rule by strength, rather than justice. No earthly soul can completely or successfully serve God, or bring his law into the corrupt and conflicted world.
And so, with a sense of inevitability, the final book – The Candle in the Wind – sees the end of the Round Table, and the destruction of King Arthur. We are left with a potent final image of an elderly Arthur, worn out and weary, alone in his tent on the eve of battle. While he is doomed, his legacy endures – the best anyone can hope for, says Merlin.
The strength of White’s story is his complete lack of interest in why people fall short, or do bad things. He takes failure as a given. Not only because Arthur is destined to die, to see his Round Table broken up, its ideals scattered. But because it’s human nature. The pure and glorious Galahad barely gets a look in here. It is with ugly, conflicted Lancelot that the story really soars.
Our Lancelot is no shining paragon brought low by a scheming, lustful queen; but a man riven by conflict, aware of his base, human nature and appalled by it. Determined to hone his crude sinew into a tool for justice and righteousness on earth, he channels all his self-loathing and doubt into a determination to do the right thing. Which he then entirely fails to do.
Perhaps that’s the paradox of every human heart. Only those who understand sin can hope to avoid it. Yet the only way to understand sin is to experience it. Not even to act on it, but to feel it inside, needling you. And knowing you’re lost because you’ve already let the idea in. To look ahead at the damage you’ll do, and do it anyway, then grieve for what you’ve done.
Why do Lancelot and Guenever have an affair? Because they love each other. Why does Arthur sleep with Morgeuse? Because he was young and she was hot. There are no clean hands in this story. Those who try to navigate through without creating too much carnage are the ones we should pity, and those who aim for as much carnage as possible are the ones we should condemn.
I’d often find myself shaking my head at Lancelot and Guenever, yet the image of the middle-aged knight brushing her long silver hair would warm a harder heart than mine. Intriguingly we never see Arthur and Guenever alone together. Is this because the lovers are just more interesting? More sympathetic? More sinful? Or can the myth of Arthur not stand that kind of scrutiny? Real people are so very complicated. At one point even White throws up his hands and concedes: ‘It is very hard to write a real person’. Perhaps that’s less an admission of failure than a fitting conclusion to a great story: no myth, however long lived, can match the glory and the folly of the human soul.
Clever and melancholy, The Once and Future King stands up as a fitting re-imagining of a famous and thrilling tale. More than that, it’s a spiritual successor to Mallory’s opus. Like Merlin, we already know how the story will end. But White’s masterful telling makes the journey worthwhile.
What did you think? Were you underwhelmed by the barely-there Morgana? Would you actually like to meet Merlin? (I’m not so sure) How did you feel about Lancelot and Guenever? As ever, let me know!
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