The Once and Future King

The Once and Future King gathers the fantasy novels in which T. H. White retells the legend of King Arthur, first collected in one volume in 1958. It is loosely based on Le Morte d'Arthur, the 1485 work by Sir Thomas Malory, and it gathers shorter novels published between 1938 and 1940 along with new and amended material, assembled after the success of the first volume in the United States. The title comes from the belief that Arthur will return one day to rule again.

White calls Britain Gramarye and sets most of the book there; it covers Arthur's boyhood and education, his reign, and the affair between Sir Lancelot and Queen Guinevere. The narrative opens near the end of the reign of Arthur's father, King Uther Pendragon, and it stays close to ordinary life in a country castle. The first volume follows the boy known as the Wart, a child who is not important enough to be educated properly.

Merlyn is his tutor, a wizard living backwards through time who knows who the boy will become. He turns him into a fish, a hawk, an ant, a goose and a badger so that he can learn what it is like to be something other than a human being, and he teaches him that the only justifiable war is one fought to prevent another. The later volumes follow Arthur from the throne to the Round Table and the war against his own son.

The four volumes are The Sword in the Stone, The Queen of Air and Darkness, The Ill-Made Knight and The Candle in the Wind. White's version keeps Malory's plot while adding a tutor who comments on politics, and the collection is the source of the Arthurian material many later retellings build on and of the musical and film Camelot.