mskala

Last night I finished The Once and Future King by T.H. White, because I felt like it was time I made a real foray into the Arthurian legends. The actual first Arthurian book I read was The Mists of Avalon, but that was years ago and before I had heard the full story about Marion Zimmer Bradley. This book takes a decidedly different tone. I’m sticking to the most common name spellings for all of the characters here, because spellings do vary across all versions of these legends.

The first thing that surprised me about The Once and Future King is that it’s funny, and frequently in an absurd, dorky kind of way. Knights failing tilts because their visors fell over their eyes wrong, Merlin accidentally zapping himself away in the middle of a lesson because he was in a temper, the Questing Beast “falling in love” with two men dressed in a beast costume, that sort of thing. This silliness is largely concentrated in the first quarter of the book, which is about Arthur’s childhood, but it’s never fully lost.

The second surprise was how long the book focuses on Arthur’s childhood, but then again, it is setting the scene for Arthur’s worldview and the lessons he internalized as a child which shape his approach to being king.