The Once and Future King

"T. H. White’s The Once and Future King. White is less famous than Lewis and Tolkien, but he was a better writer, at least as far as style goes, and his book is a true masterpiece in its own right – a thoroughly modern re-imagining of the great English epic, the story of King Arthur. Like Tolkien, White takes an ancient, mythic landscape and scales it down to human size (or perhaps he scales us up). But White’s world is more brightly lit than Tolkien’s – he dispenses with all those Wagnerian storm clouds. White’s England is all streaming banners and sun-splashed meadows and shining walls, and he lingers longer over his characters, making them more complex and flawed and divided against themselves. The first part alone, “The Sword in the Stone”, about Arthur’s early years and his education by Merlin, may be the best story of a childhood ever committed to paper."

"You know, there are some books that you read last month and you can barely remember what they were about, but I remember very specifically reading The Once and Future King. I was eleven years old, and we were doing English in primary school in America. I was in the top group, and we were allowed to read a book, any book we wanted, as long as there were five words in the first ten pages that we didn’t know, and then we had to look them up. And I remember so vividly reading this book. I remember the beginning of The Once and Future King , which had the word ‘astrolabe’ in the first two sentences. It goes: ‘On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays it was Court Hand and Summulae Logicales, while the rest of the week it was the Organon, Repetition and Astrology’… No! They wouldn’t allow me to. And in the next sentence, ‘the governess was always getting muddled with her astrolabe’. So already I’ve got three words that I had never heard. What’s an astrolabe ? I looked them up… summulae logicales is a logical treatise. So I was just like, whoa… What is this lesson? I remember so much about this book. I remember sentences from it – let alone the characters. And I was just thinking this morning, it’s probably why I ended up doing Medieval Studies at Yale. The book had the most tremendous impact on me. It’s four books collected under the title The Once and Future King , which is a beautiful title, and it’s because Arthur becomes part of the sleeping army myth. I’ve actually written a book called The Sleeping Army ; across most cultures, there’s the idea that the king and his knights are asleep under a mountain – under the Tower of London, or the Terracotta Army in China… It’s a very general worldwide myth, and Arthur is now part of that. So he’s the future king, because one day he will wake up and save the kingdom. The book is set in medieval England. But what really got me, I think, was the funny, casual, easy way T.H. White tells this story. He’s taking a story that I knew, but treating it in a totally different way. I could not wait for my time to read this book during the school day. I also took it home because it was just overwhelmingly interesting. Now, the first one is The Sword and the Stone which is more aimed at children, I think, and the other three most definitely are not. It was eye-opening, the affair of Lancelot and Guinevere, who he calls Jenny. I love that. He has a jaunty, funny style. He also talks a lot about chivalry. What does it mean to be chivalrous? Of course, he’s living during the World Wars. Arthur wants to be a good king – what’s stopping him? It’s about warfare. How do you put things right? How do you correct things? It’s about being brought down by your own flaws – and also by curses and myths and magic – but you have these very real people. I was also fascinated by the third book, which I think is probably my favourite, called The Ill-Made Knight . It’s about Lancelot being hideously ugly, which is not how you think of him. And the line I remembered was right at the end, “The miracle was that he had been allowed to do a miracle.” And that’s the whole story of the ill-made knight. I learned about chivalry and the whole pageantry of it, but all in a jaunty style, and these people seemed very real to me – not stiff – they were very, very human. It’s a fantastic book. I’m sure it’s why I did medieval studies. It’s only because of this interview that I thought about it, but I’m sure this is what kicked it off. I love all that – I love the Provencal singers, I love the idea that there was something called courtly love. …And of course knights were bloodthirsty. They were like hoodlums. But this idea that somehow they were bound by this code of chivalry, and then the way that Christianity got its tentacles in there and tried to make the quests about something else, about purity… What does it mean to be pure? And to what extent can you resist your fate? All these ideas are in there, but it’s an incredibly fun and interesting read. I’m amazed how much I remembered from reading it when I was eleven."

"Well, T H White wrote this in the 50s when a lot of people were writing fantasy epics, like Tolkien and C S Lewis , Mervyn Peake and all these British writers who were writing masterpieces after the war. But I think what the books all did was to take the myths of the Nordic and Celtic peoples and make them available to a traumatised post-war populus and reintroduced romanticism in a context that people who’d fought in those wars could understand. This is the King Arthur story and I guess it’s about compassion. He doesn’t want to be king, he becomes king, his best friend and his wife fall in love and he is compassionate and understanding about that and he’s always trying to put the bigger picture first. It’s that thing of no good deed goes unpunished because in the end he dies, of course, by the hand of his son and sister. But he has done his best and been a good man throughout. The writing is beautiful beyond belief and it’s incredibly funny, particularly the first book, The Sword in the Stone. Again, the theme with these books is that they show you the bigger picture of people doing their best in difficult circumstances and whether they succeed or fail isn’t really the issue. The issue is that they are authentic as people. Well, the early years of autism are all about dealing with suffering. Your child is suffering, with neurological traumas, you are suffering with helplessness and fear and loss of dreams, helplessness. And the suffering of when he kicks off in public. Yes. You are basically like knights on a quest as an autism parent. You are questing for solutions and for a holy grail that may or may not exist. I guess when we went to Mongolia you could say that was a classic quest. I had to ask myself: what if there’s no change in Rowan at all? But that doesn’t matter because at least the diagnosis of autism didn’t stop us having an incredible adventure like that as a family. In fact it made us do something more beautiful and extraordinary than we would have done otherwise. So, suddenly, autism becomes a great gift and that shifts your perspective. In the event there was all this extraordinary change in Rowan. But these classic quest stories are always assumed to be allegorical in the western intellectual world, when, in fact, a lot of life is composed of very real questing and you need to have a bit of that in your bloodstream if you’re going to get through difficult situations in life. These situations where logic and reason and science suddenly aren’t helping you. You need a non-rational set of ideas to draw on. No. But Rowan made his first friend on the journey, a Mongolian boy we met outside Ulan-Bator, the son of our guide. So, in the end, there were two dads and two boys on the steppe travelling up into Siberia to the reindeer people and the shaman where the big changes happened. The changes have not only lasted but the shaman said we should do a healing journey every year until he was nine when the negative effects of autism would leave him. So we’ve been doing that. We were with the bushmen in Namibia and then last year we saw an aboriginal shaman and this year we’ve just got back from the Navajo reservation in Arizona where the most profound and immediate changes since Mongolia happened. We’re a bit freaked out actually, because Rowan is now scarily normal. We went with another autism parent and her son is much more severe, completely non-verbal and quite violent. I just got an email from her this morning saying he’s no longer biting and kicking and he’s becoming verbal. But it’s not a one-shot deal; you have to go back for top-ups."

"The Once and Future King is probably my favourite retelling of the Arthurian epic. I like that it’s written so colloquially and in such a friendly way. I like how it progresses through Wart’s – or Arthur’s – childhood, and then we get into adulthood. Merlyn is a very convincing and beloved character to me in this book. It’s one that I read out loud to my children, because it is so accessible; it does give such a clear retelling of the Arthurian legend, and yet at the same time, it makes all of the characters very human and very relatable. It’s not like power is conferred upon Arthur the moment he pulls the sword from the stone. We see him being baffled by the fate that has descended upon him – and that is just one of the wonderful aspects of that retelling. There’s a lot of characterization – Sir Kay and Sir Ector are given a lot of character. And of course, Merlyn has a very distinct characterization – the Disney cartoon of The Sword in the Stone does not do The Once and Future King the justice it deserves. There’s a lot of filling in the background, a lot of, “Why is Arthur who he is?” Merlyn takes Arthur through a number of transformations to teach him about the world. For instance, there’s one episode where he turns him into a wild goose, so that he flies over the countryside with the migrating geese. And he comes to understand that borders and boundaries are simply lines on a map. They’re not real – the wild geese pay no attention to them. And there’s another section when he is turned into an ant near an ant colony, and he thinks like an ant… I’m afraid I’m doing terrible spoilers for anybody who’s not read this book, and I that’s a huge disservice. So I will simply say that the magic that transfuses the book is wonderful, and very thoughtful, and full of ideas. And I’ll stop there."