I’ve had a copy of The Once and Future King hanging around for several years now, and every time I see it I think, ‘I really want to read that!’ and then I don’t. And I feel a little guilty because when I finally picked it up it wasn’t really to read it in its own right, as it were. As I may have mentioned, the third and last Sylvia Townsend Warner reading week is coming up. Since STW was accomplished at so many forms of literature, I’ve always tried to include a variety in my reading for this; she wrote a biography of T.H. White which I thought would be nice to write about for this year.
Alas, second-hand copies including delivery to Belgium are now so expensive that I have changed my mind. The very least I could do to make it up to T.H. seemed to write a post about this, his most famous book in his Arthurian quartet.
The Sword in the Stone is about the boyhood of King Arthur; specifically, his education. The boy Wart has been fostered by Sir Ector and brought up alongside Sir Ector’s biological son, Kay, in the Castle of the Forest Sauvage. Lost in the forest one day, Wart stumbles across Merlin’s cottage and Merlin decides to become his tutor. Naturally the lessons Merlin teaches are not the tedious grammar ones to which Wart has been accustomed up until now. He is transformed into different animals and birds and in one of my favourite episodes he and Kay meet Robin Hood and rescue Friar Tuck and the Dog Boy from Morgan le Fay’s fortress, CastleChariot. Finally, on a trip to a jousting tournament in London, Wart draws out a sword from an anvil because Kay needs it. This sword is the magic one which proves he must be the next king of England.
(John Lawrence, illustration for the Folio Society edition of The Once and Future King, 2013)
I will quote the description of Morgan Le Fay’s castle here because I love it so much:
It was a castle made entirely out of food, except that on the highest tower of all, a carrion crow was sitting, with an arrow in its beak. [...] It rose from its lake of milk in a mystic light of its own – in a greasy, buttery glow. It was the fairy aspect of Castle Chariot, which the Oldest Ones [...] had thought would be tempting to the children [Wart and Kay]. It was to tempt them to eat. [...] They plodded over the filthy drawbridge – a butter one, with cow hairs still in it – sinking to their ankles. [..] In the end they came to the inner chamber, where Morgan le Fay herself lay stretched upon her bed of glorious lard.
People sometimes talk about ‘comfort books’, and this is a comfort book. A ‘bed of glorious lard’! It is a comforting book to read, because it is amusing, it is about childhood, it is grounded in a wonderful natural world and it allows wish-fulfilment. Like Narnia, the world of the Castle of the Forest Sauvage is a place we long to visit. It is a self-consciously ‘hyperreal’ version of the Middle Ages, with proper snowy winters and old oak trees and feasts and jousting, all the Middle Ages one could wish for. Society is ordered and dangers are successfully overcome. And it is funny. However, it was also a comforting book for White to write. According to Kevin Crossley Holland, in the foreword to my edition, White had a miserable childhood and for the rest of his life used education as a means of comforting himself. So in this novel Wart learns what it is like to live in an ant society and a goose society; when to fear a pike; what falcons discuss at night. And we learn how to shoot a bow and joust a knight on horseback and hunt a wild boar – but like Wart, we have fun while we learn.
White writes in a dry, amusing tone and there are great comic moments in this novel. He also has a lot of fun with the concept of historical fiction, throwing anachronisms around gleefully to underline the fantastical nature of the book. Look, he seems to be telling us, it’s just a story, let’s enjoy ourselves! And we do.
(Photograph of T.H. White, found here)