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A place to ponder books.

Friday, February 17, 2012

#3 The Sword and the Stone by T.H.White

 This first part of The Once and Future King is a wide introduction. The story begins with a young boy Wart who meets Merlyn an old man with a talent for magic. Merlyn guides Wart through a series of lessons, some of which he is transfigured into a certain animal (like a fish or an ant) and converses with the other animals of his kind. Other times, he meets up with people for a journey or the hunt.
 
Wart is an ‘improper child’ and often admires friend Kay who is destined to become ‘Sir Kay’ the owner of the estate and an honorable knight. Oh, but irony would have it that at the end of part one, the destined ruler of the land with the ability to pull the famous sword from the stone and succeed the throne upon the death of the King Uther Pendragon is in fact, Wart aka Art or just, Arthur.

This telling is surprisingly more colorful and silly than I had expected. Sometimes it screams J.K. Rowling to me, which is more accurately described as the other way around. I see now that the Harry Potter series holds various ties to the world of magic inside Arthurian legend. The talking owl Archimedes, the hedge-pig, and the badger vaguely feel as if they fall under the same umbrella category, though these are distant resounding themes. Not to mention Dumbledore is obviously the archetype formerly established by the powerful and wise wizard of the more common spelling, Merlin.

Merlyn is the character who makes the story most quirky and is essential to the incorporation of fantasy into Arthur's tale. This introduction really captures Merlyn's character when he meets Wart at first by chance. But Merlyn already knew to set breakfast for two. Wart asks him how he could have known and Merlyn explains,

“....Now ordinary people are born forwards in Time, if you understand what I mean, and nearly everything in the world goes forward too. This makes it quite easy for the ordinary people to live, just as it would be easy to join those five dots of a W if you were allowed to look at them forwards, instead of backwards and inside out. But I unfortunately was born at the wrong end of time, and I have to live backwards from in front, while surrounded by a lot of people living forwards from behind. Some people call it having second sight.”

Merlyn is not the only recognizable mention, insofar. Wart and friend Kay are sent to Robin Hood for a lesson, and informed by Little John that his name was never 'Hood' at all. It was, Robin Wood. Maid Marian is mentioned as Wart describes a “golden vixen” and she is a female outlaw who wriggles like a snake, faster than most the others walked. And plus she wields a bow, which gives her an extra tray of brownie points, in my opinion.

At this point though, I'm almost convinced this particular telling is the very one which inspired most of Disney's The Sword in the Stone. Though, I'm not sure how much weight this version holds to the whole of Arthurian legend and immortality of this story. I mean it was written in the 20th Century.  So, although it is a great read for those unacquainted with Arthur, it is actually just the tip of the iceberg when it a comes to generations of folklore dating back to the Middle Ages and the global audience backing the legend of King Arthur.

And by global I mean BBC's Merlin in 180 countries.

T.H. White.  The Once and Future King.  (New York:  Ace Books, 1987), 35, 107.

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