Sword in the Stone

What Hacker News says

1. dtgriscomNov 2024
   I loved The Sword in The Stone as a child, and should probably re-read it someday. However, I found the later books were nowhere near as interesting, with characters going into long monologues that were just White propounding his own theories through his characters mouths.
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2. gumbyMar 2024
   The lord of the rings is a good one, especially if you skip the songs. Then it’s simply an adventure story.

   The Sword in the Stone is pretty good in this regard. Apart from that first book (which is published as a standalone book) the entire Once and Future King is too complex for a child, I think (instead it would come off as boring and obscure).

   But in general almost any book a kid wants to try to read will be fine.

   Also: back in the day when small towns had a single cinema screen, movies would travel around as physical media and play for a week or two. So they had to be appropriate for anyone in town else the cinema owner wouldn’t take them.

   My kid loved those Fred Astaire musicals. I do too. For him they were just fun. To me, many of them were quite racy and quite explicit! But all that just went over his head.

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3. pgeMar 2017
   I would add that he also does a wonderful job capturing and describing human nature. He is writing right after WWII, and the Arthurian legend is just a vehicle for his observations about humanity (and the war).

   Wonderful book - I just finished reading the first section (the Sword in the Stone) out loud to my daughter, and I hope as she gets older, she will read the rest on her own.

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4. 52-6F-62Nov 2024
   There is no singular, “real” Grail story as such. Ignore the lines about Disney, though I enjoyed their version of the sword in the stone. Thats from a retelling written in the early 20th century.

   The grail legend as we have it was largely assembled in the middle ages, but it is fundamentally a Celtic tale in that the primary thematic elements that are at the heart of it come down from Celtic myth and culture. Which in turn came from even older Celtic myth and culture which in turn came from the common soup of Indo-European myth. That means if you broaden your scope enough, you’ll see elements of the tale everywhere in the eastern and western world, it’s true.

   But speaking of Arthur…

   There are many translations of old texts. One of the oldest that mentions Arthur is Y Gododdin by Aneirin (ca 6th century) I mentioned, which has helped fuel speculations about a northern origin rather than one in the south or Wales (as what is now Scotland and Wales and some northern English counties was a series of Celtic and Romano-Celtic kingdoms joined by a similar culture and language). The poet Taliesin is also worth studying as he writes about Arthur and Merlin as well. Both of those poets are from around the same time period. The Oxford Dictionary of Celtic Mythology is an excellent and very rich resource to tie it all together. (https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/acref/978019...)

   It may also help to go down a wikihole on some contemporary figures (like Urien mentioned in the poem noted above: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urien)

   The Irish tales go back even further in some cases. They had the advantage of a bit of isolation—slightly less cultural domination and churn for a little while at least.

   If you’re savvy, it helps to dabble in linguistics and etymologies. Some of the mystery is shrouded in the language itself. It might surprise you how many cultures are tied together conceptually through a handful of simple syllables.

   People who havent really studied this stuff get really hung up on the window dressing. Chivalry, Christianity, noble and ignoble knights—these were the dressings of the middle ages applied to archetypal patterns telling a more profound cosmological and philosophical view that came from the way the Celts saw their place in the world (and pretty much every other ancient cultures share similar perspectives if you study symbols).

   It’s quite hard to get the most important things across in life. Most people want you to shut up, pay up, or get out of their way while they pay for a new bathroom or something. These stories are regularly adapted by fans but also by people who want to ensure the important themes make new inroads into the imaginations of the time because thats where everything good and bad begins.

   Being a good king isn’t about the castle.

   I hope you read into it. There’s something funny in it all. It seems to begin and end with a question.

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5. jar067Feb 2023
   The character was in the initial version of the Sword in the Stone. The Once and Future King has a revised version without Madam Mim along with other modifications. The Once and Future King is not a novel but a collection of four previously published works. It is also missing the beautiful finale: The Book of Merlyn.

   You can still buy the Sword in the Stone as a standalone novel, which will be the original version and includes the character. I bought an illustrated copy for my son.

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6. eezurrFeb 2022
   Did you read any interesting novels or books last year? Please share them with us. Some of my favorites from 2021:

   * East of Eden by John Steinbeck. Steinbeck beautifully captures and shares the culture of old America through the lives of two families that become interwoven over time.

   * H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald. Macdonald's book is part auto-biography (dealing with depression), part biography on T. H. White (of Sword in the Stone's fame), and lightly part guide on caring for hawks.

   * The Foundation Series by Isaac Asimov. This was actually a repeat read for me after 7+ years of my first read through. Two new foundations are created to save the milky way galaxy from 30,000 years of war and anarchy after the fall of the galactic empire. Their goal is to limit that period to 1,000 years.

   This post is inspired from 2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17513576

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