The Once and Future King
T. H. White's modern classic about King Arthur. This particular edition may have been published in Russia, but it is in fact written in English. I just finished reading this edition on the Open Library. I wonder why it is described as being written in Russian?
Stats for nerds
13recommend
31mentions
26people
2010–2026years
42% recommend55% neutral3% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- The Once and Future King by T.H. White. Fantasy fiction.
- As far as enjoying it at the time I was reading it?
The Once and Future King.
I was on summer vacation while camping and fishing and I read the entire book in a couple of days in the evenings. Maybe it was the lack of distraction, but the Arthurian legend of that book has influenced a ton of modern fiction.
- The whole of the context* of the LOTR can best be understood through the lens of this comment by Tolkien:
> My Sam Gamgee is indeed a reflexion of the English soldier, of the privates and batmen I knew in the 1914 war, and recognized as so far superior to myself
Paul Fussell in “The Great War and Modern Memory” (which I highly recommend) tied comments like these to the change in mentality of the (primarily) English upper classes and gentry. Just living and working closely with working and agrarian class soldiers led to a realization that yes, they struggled with poor boots through no fault of their own (an example Fussell quotes), only visible because for the first time they saw them as comrades due to the shared experience in the trenches.
And that changed the mentality of many in the upper classes, who came back from the war and voted liberal or even labour when before that would not have been even imagined.
This essay talks about the effect of capitalist colonialism in Viet Nam (I agree with the author’s point here) but Tolkien’s experience reflected the consequence of an interesting domestic shift in the British isles, as industrialization increased the separation between the classes. Contrast the comradeship of Henry V in Shakespeare’s eponymous play: a group of aristos and a mob of peasants looking for money and just a change of being stuck on the land: the trench experience was a forced reversion to a social propinquity common from ~800s to the 1700s.
* I don’t mean to imply there is a “correct” reading: it’s an adventure story, a masterful recreation of the tradition of the Sagas, and other things. But even as a naive 12 yo in the 1970s I realised it was a deeply conservative story.
Not a reactionary one: Tolkien doesn’t appear to want to go back. But a recognition of what (in his mind) was lost. Good riddance, as far as I’m concerned!
That sense of loss IMHO is much better captured by T. H. White’s roughly contemporaneous “Once and Future King”, a much more sophisticated, but less filmable, book.
- The Once and Future King, by T.H. White.
The Sword in the Stone is probably my favorite Disney movie so I was delighted to discover the movie was based on a book which was even better.
- I really liked Merlyn in "The Once and Future King". I feel like the animal metaphors worked as a good teaching tool, and I feel like he sort of worked to push the books theming and philosophy forward.
- A few:
"The Once and Future King", T.H. White -- best novelization of the problem of power
"Don Quixote", Miguel de Cervantes -- why stories matter
"Essence of Decision", Graham Allison -- how views of a historic episode vary with the theory you apply
"Abraham Lincoln: His Speeches and Writings", Basler/Sandburg -- The application of reason to the problems of law, morality and politics
Related
The Pale King
19 recommend · 43
The Once and Future World
4 recommend · 19
The sword in the stone
0 recommend · 2
The Wheel of Time
57 recommend · 242
The Dark Tower
27 recommend · 89
The Return of the King
7 recommend · 49
A Song of Ice and Fire
41 recommend · 215
