The narrative seems both faraway and yet contemporary. But never fear: it is brilliant from beginning to end, and has much to say about the present as well as the past. What if it’s passé, I wondered when I decided to reread it. White also explores the tragedy of broken ideals. It has the charm of a buoyant fantasy, tied together with world history, philosophy, chivalry, and Arthur’s creation of the Round Table to do away with hierarchy. This luminous retelling of the King Arthur legend is unlike any other, and there are many. I read widely…and decided eventually what to study.ĭuring my down time, I read one of the sweetest, most whimsical of novels, T. I skipped “Rocks for Jocks” (geology) to peruse Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson (out-of- print then, but at the library), Trollope, Thomas Mann, Ovid, and, bizarrely, Le Morte d’Arthur. The novels were famously adapted into the Disney film The Sword in the Stone in 1963.When I was a student, discovering world literature, I neglected my work to read books not on any syllabus. He continued to explore the Arthurian mythos in four further volumes – The Witch in the Wood, The Ill-Made Knight, The Candle in the Wind and The Book of Merlyn – a sequence collectively known as The Once and Future King.

He found success with his ‘preface to Malory’, The Sword in the Stone, a wonderfully imaginative retelling of King Arthur’s early life. He has inspired generations of fantasy writers, from Neil Gaiman to JK Rowling.īorn in India in 1906, White studied at Queens' College, Cambridge, where he wrote a thesis on Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur. Lewis and Mervyn Peake as one of the 20th Century’s greatest British fantasists. White died in 1964, leaving a literary legacy that places him alongside J R.R.

The Once and Future King, contains all five books about the early life of King Arthur (The Sword in the Stone, The Witch in the Wood, The Ill-Made Knight, The Candle in the Wind and The Book of Merlyn).Įxquisite comedy offsets the tradegy of Arthur’s personal doom as White brings to life the major British epic of all time with brilliance, grandeur, warmth and charm White’s masterful retelling of the Arthurian legend is an abiding classic. The extraordinary story of a boy called Wart – ignored by everyone except his tutor, Merlin – who goes on to become King Arthur.

King arthur the once and future king