A few weeks ago I was lucky enough to go on a falconry experience day. I've always loved history, and love that sensation that you get when you realise you're doing something that has been such an important part of the past; whether it's treading along a pilgrim road, or training spaniels to quarter ground (though I think in medieval times they'd have been out hunting rabbits rather than frisbees). I've always been entranced by hawks, and stepping into the mews at the Raptor Foundation was like a step back in time. Yes, they were clean, and had electric light, but in essence I felt that I'd been here before and that nothing fundamentally had changed; and, of course, I had, when I was a child, and first read T.H. White's The sword in the stone.
My friend, Spike, the Harris Hawk
White would later re-write his tale of the youth of King Arthur (modelled closely on Thomas Malory's medieval masterpiece Morte d'Arthur) as the first part of a re-telling of the whole of Morte d'Arthur from the arrival of Merlin to the end of the Round Table - The once and future King. Some years later, another book was added to the tetralogy, when The book of Merlyn was published. This was originally intended to be part of the whole, but was ditched (according to Sylvia Townsend Warner's preface) due to wartime restrictions on paper-production. I am not convinced that this was the real reason. Merlyn re-uses a lot of earlier material from The sword in the stone, and if White had intended it to be an integral part of the original, I suspect that Sword in the stone, as it is as part of The once and future King, would have been much more heavily edited (it was already substantially re-written from the stand-alone, published-separately edition).
So first a look at the original tetralogy. It's been quite a while since I read The once and future King, and I had completely forgotten the sheer wonder and magic of this book. It's breathtakingly wonderful. Perhaps because of the joy of the Disney cartoon....
Perhaps because of the magical element, The once and future King seems doomed to remain a children's read, the critics may have said that it was better than Lord of the Rings, but it seems to be largely forgotten what an adult read this is, as the book becomes much darker and more complex once Wart becomes King Arthur and takes on the management of an unruly Kingdom that refuses to be managed. Along the way his knights age, become selfish, and forget the purpose of chivalry; but Arthur continues to try to do his best. He's a wonderfully human figure, who knows that ultimately he's not going to succeed, he's not going to attain world peace, there's a limit to how much you can fight against history; but he's at least going to try.
On one level it is an old fashioned story of knights and ladies, but it's also about honour and evil, loyalty and betrayal, a story about growing up, and how nothing is ever quite as simple as you would like it to be; a story that in its simplicity reveals the complexities of life. If Sword in the stone is sweet and comical, the last book The candle in the wind is touching and sad. Here Arthur has grown up mentally, physically and emotionally; this was reflected in my own reading of the book too. I took very different things away from this read than I would have done when I first read the whole of The once and future King in my early 20's.
Caerleon Amphitheatre - reputed home of the Round Table
The book of Merlyn, the alleged extra book of The once and future King has been on my shelves for some years, but it was only after this re-read that I finally got round to tacking it on to the end of White's opus. To be blunt, it doesn't really fit. Arthur meets up with Merlin again on the eve of his last battle, and is re-united with the animal characters who first educated him in The sword in the stone. Some of these characters were mentioned in the longer (i.e. separately published) Sword in the stone, but not in the SitS that formed the first book of the tetralogy. This makes for some confusion.
Many parts are straight quotes from SitS, so feel redundant, and the writing is confused, though there are some moments, not least when Arthur is saying farewell, that you get a glimpse of how good this could have been. It certainly brings a happier, more rounded feel to The once and future King, it also makes it once more a more childlike read. If it's not exactly "Happy ever after", it's a happier ending than the elderly, sad man left on the eve of battle at the end of The candle in the wind.
And yet......surely this is what this novel is about. It's about life, which doesn't always (even usually) give you happy ever after. And yet, there's a glimmer of light and hope, Thomas Malory makes a guest appearance, as a young hopeful page desperate to do his bit, and you know that through him, Arthur and the Round Table, and their hopes for goodness and gallantry and justice and kindness will continue. I was reminded forcibly of another fictional representation of Sir Thomas Malory in Cynthia Harnett's The load of unicorn, in which an elderly knight sees the tomb of his former liege lord, and against the odds writes a stunning tale to show that however grim the world may seem, there is always room for hope.
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