The Once and Future King is a collection of fantasy novels by T. H. White about the legend of King Arthur. It is loosely based upon the 1485 work Le Morte d'Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory. It was first published in 1958 as a collection of shorter novels published from 1938 to 1940, with some new or amended material. The title refers to a legend that Arthur will one day return as king.
Summary
Most of the book takes place in Gramarye, the name that White gives to Britain, and chronicles the youth and education of King Arthur, his rule as a king, and the romance between Sir Lancelot and Queen Guinevere. Arthur is supposed to have lived in the 5th and 6th centuries, but the book is set around the 14th century. Arthur is portrayed as an Anglo-Norman rather than a Briton; White refers to the actual monarchs of that period as "mythical". The book ends immediately before Arthur's final battle against his illegitimate son Mordred. White acknowledged that his book's source material is loosely derived from Le Morte d'Arthur, although he reinterprets the events of that story from the perspective of a world recovering from World War II.
The book is divided into four parts: The Sword in the Stone (1938), detailing the youth of Arthur (a revised text of the original publication, which both adds and removes certain parts) The Queen of Air and Darkness (1939), published separately in somewhat different form as The Witch in the Wood The Ill-Made Knight (1940), dealing mainly with the character of Lancelot The Candle in the Wind (1958), first published in the composite edition
A final part called The Book of Merlyn (written 1941, published 1977) was published separately following White's death. It chronicles Arthur's final lessons from Merlyn before his death, although some parts of it were incorporated into the final editions of the previous books, mostly The Sword in the Stone, after White became aware that the compiled text of The Once and Future King would not include his final volume. The Book of Merlyn was the volume that first contained the adventures with the ants and the geese. However, it still has independent value as the only text in which all Arthur's animals are brought together, and the final parts of his life are related.
Plot
The story starts in the final years of the rule of King Uther Pendragon. The first part, "The Sword in the Stone", chronicles Arthur's upbringing by his foster father Sir Ector, his rivalry and friendship with his foster brother Kay, and his initial training by Merlyn, a wizard who lives through time backwards. Merlyn, knowing the boy's destiny, teaches Arthur (known as "Wart") what it means to be a good king by turning him into various kinds of animals: fish, hawk, ant, goose, and badger. Each of the transformations is meant to teach Wart a lesson, which will prepare him for his future life.
Merlyn instills in Arthur the concept that the only justifiable reason for war is to prevent another from going to war and that contemporary human governments and powerful people exemplify the worst aspects of the rule of Might.
White revised the original Sword in the Stone heavily for the four-part book in 1958. He took out the wizards' duel between Merlyn and Madame Mim, the adventure with T. natrix the snake, and the episode with the giant Galapagas. The first of those was replaced with the adventure of the ants. In the Wart's adventure with Merlyn's owl, Archimedes, the boy Arthur becomes a wild goose instead of visiting the goddess Athena. In the adventure with Robin Hood in the original book, the outlaws take the boys to attack the Anthropophagi (cannibals) and the Wart kills a Sciopod. In the 1958 version, the boys lead an attack on Morgan le Fay's Castle Chariot and Kay kills a griffin. The revisions reflect White's preoccupation with political questions in The Once and Future King, and generally give the first part of the work a more adult flavour.
In part two, The Queen of Air and Darkness, White sets the stage for Arthur's demise by introducing the Orkney clan and detailing Arthur's seduction by their mother, his half-sister Queen Morgause. While the young king suppresses initial rebellions, Merlyn leads him to envision a means of harnessing potentially destructive Might for the cause of Right: the chivalric order of the Round Table.
The third part, The Ill-Made Knight, shifts focus from King Arthur to the story of Sir Lancelot and Queen Guinevere's forbidden love, the means they adopt to hide their affair from the King (although he already knows of it from Merlyn), and its effect on Elaine, Lancelot's sometime lover and the mother of his son Galahad.