 | The Once and Future King | The story of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. From early childhood Arthur(then known as Wart) is guided by Merlin, and is educated via Merlin's magical abilities to transform Arthur into different creatures. Then he becomes King, and the legends unfold. | This was pretty good, mostly. TH White wrote five separate books originally, published between 1938 and 1940, but then combined them all into this one novel. Very funny in places, especially some of the anachronisms eg Merlin lighting his pipe with safety matches. Gets a bit dull in places with some seemingly endless moralising. Also I thought there would be a bit more jousting action, and although there is lot of detail on training and how it works, there aren't so many actual battles. He does say several times that we should refer to Thomas Malory (1485) if we want all the gruesome details. I re-read this because it is mentioned in the Sam Leith book about childhood reading. |
