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Recent Reading: The Once and Future King
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.
The Once and Future King strives to make every character, if not sympathetic, then at least understandable, which also came as something of a surprise to me. For instance, there is the tale of the knight Meliagrance kidnapping Guinevere and holding her hostage in his castle until Lancelot comes to her rescue. In The Mists of Avalon, Meliagrance is a cunning thug seeking to force a concession of power out of Arthur through Guinevere, and he brutally and explicitly-on-the-page rapes her before Lancelot is able to reach the castle. In The Once and Future King, Meliagrance is a thoughtless fool who kidnaps Guinevere because he is genuinely in love with her, almost immediately realizes he’s made a giant mistake, and tries as he can to facilitate a peaceful resolution of the situation while keeping Guinevere as comfortable as she can be. Obviously, period-typical misogyny abounds in both cases, where Guinevere is treated like a possession, but the tone of the two encounters is wildly different.In fact, on the whole I was shocked by how little misogyny there is in this book. It was written in the 1950s, and I had been bracing myself for how Guinevere was going to be handled. I was prepared for her to play both the frigid, harpy wife and the unfaithful mistress, but White does not go there. (In The Mists of Avalon, there’s nothing likeable about the preachy, whiny Gwenhwyfar, who is insufferable virtually at all times.) Instead, he acknowledges that people are complicated, that Guinevere loved Arthur, but that she also genuinely loved Lancelot. He acknowledges that as a noblewoman of the time, Guinevere had few outlets for her passions: Lancelot can pick her up and put her down as he will, and when they’re on the outs, he can run off on a quest or a war or something else to keep himself busy, but Guinevere is stuck in Camelot, and bored.
He really makes all three sides of the famous love triangle believable and understandable. When I saw how sympathetic he was to Guinevere, I sort of expected Arthur to take the fall then as the stupid cuckold who deserved to be taken advantage of for being such a fool, but that wasn’t the case either. In fact, it’s long implied that Arthur knew about the affair, and simply wasn’t troubled by it until politics forced his hand. Arthur is a man who seems to lack a jealous impulse of any kind, which took me aback in a male hero both of the medieval period as well as a book from the 1950s.
Unfortunately, where White does not fall prey to the sexism of his time, he does submit to the racism of the time. Not with Palomides, the Black knight, who is generally portrayed as heroic, kind, and a stand-up friend, but in the fact that White obviously does not think very highly of the Irish, and in a number of unnecessary and derogatory comparisons to Native Americans early in the book. This is the only really knock against the book I feel the need to point out. These things don’t happen often, but they are there, and I wish they weren’t. And of course, England comes off as the hero in general, because this is the English mythos.
The Once and Future King also made me enjoy Arthur in a way I didn’t really expect. In my cultural osmosis of the tales, Arthur comes off as a puzzling nothingburger of a character, given that the legends are named after him. And after he becomes king, The Once and Future King focuses a lot less on him than it does on others around him, but watching Arthur desperately try to reign in the violence of his time, try to sort out right from wrong as a leader and how to guide the country into a peaceful future, endeared me quite a lot to him. In spite of everything that happens, Arthur is someone who never stops trying to do what’s right, even when he isn’t completely sure what that is, and I enjoyed that.
On the whole, I see why this book is beloved the way it is, and it has interested me in exploring more of the legends, which I will probably do with Le Mort d’Arthur. Unfortunately, an exploration into screen adaptations suggests that there really haven’t been many worthwhile ones (excepting The Green Knight, my beloved). My feeling is that Bollywood, with its practice in adapting the Indian epics, could probably put out a delightful adaptation of this English epic. Fingers crossed for the future.
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i think i read an english version of Le Mort d’Arthur. i know for sure that i read The Mists of Avalon after having seen the tv movie of it.
the 4 book* series covering the Arthurian legend by Mary Stewart is pretty good, IMHO. although those are mostly from the POV of merlin.
*wikipedia tells me there is a 5th book years later that i didn't know about. but i think the Arthurian legend was pretty well concluded at the end of book 4.
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And the Witcher novels have an Arthurian connection, which was really weird to me but I guess makes sense.
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