Must Reads: The Once and Future King by T.H. White

Professor Claire Waters helps us launch a (more or less) regular series of book recommendations by teachers in the UC Davis English Department.

This book came into my hands when I was about nine years old and remains one of my favorites of all time. The animals that are so prominently featured in this 1970s cover image are probably its most famous legacy. T.H. White greatly elaborated the story of the future King Arthur’s boyhood education at the hands of Merlin—a lot of which involves turning Arthur into various kinds of animals, which is not much of a feature in medieval legends of the once and future king.

That said, it’s a tradition for writers of Arthurian works to pull together the materials of those who came before them and then put their own spin on those materials. White follows Sir Thomas Malory (author of the fifteenth-century Morte Darthur) very closely in some ways, and entertains himself by pulling in bits of other medieval narratives at moments. Both the first section, “The Sword and the Stone,” and the second, “The Queen of Air and Darkness,” add a great deal to the story by exploring the childhoods not just of Arthur but also of his nephews—Gawain, Agravain, Gaheris, and Gareth—who become central to the later parts of the legend.

The third section, “The Ill-Made Knight,” is the one that features the character whom both Malory and White seem to have found most compelling: Arthur’s greatest knight and betrayer, Sir Lancelot. White’s brilliant innovation here is to make Lancelot ugly and—for reasons that are never explained, except that “it is so fatally easy to make young children believe they are horrible”—prone to terrible self-loathing. These qualities are, paradoxically, the source of his goodness and greatness, which make everyone else love him. As White puts it, “He felt in his heart cruelty and cowardice, the things that made him brave and kind,” so that Lancelot becomes a hero who never feels he should be one.

White thought of his book as a “preface” to Malory, but it’s more than that. White is the twentieth-century Malory, and while The Once and Future King becomes even more enjoyable if you read Malory—because you can see what White changed, and kept, and moved around, and turned on its head—it stands on its own as one of the great works of modern medievalism.