The Sword in the Stone

The Sword in the Stone is a novel by the English writer T. H. White, first published by Collins in 1938 as a book on its own. It later became the first part of his tetralogy The Once and Future King.

The book covers the boyhood of King Arthur, called the Wart while he is growing up as an unimportant relation in the castle of Sir Ector. Merlyn becomes his tutor, and the education he gets is mostly practical: turned into a fish, a hawk, a badger and a snake, the boy is shown what it is like to live in other kinds of body and under other kinds of law. Kay, Sir Ector's son, is being trained for knighthood, and the difference between the two boys is the problem the book is built around. White mixes legendary material, the history of medieval England, comedy and a good deal of anachronism, with a Merlyn who lives backwards through time and remembers the future.

The novel was adapted into an animated film by Walt Disney and into radio by the BBC, and it is the lightest part of the sequence it opens, which turns much darker as Arthur grows up and takes the throne.