Retro Rants: T.H. White and The Once and Future King

Blow Me To Bermuda!

I don’t know about you, dear reader, but I truly enjoyed Disney’s The Sword in the Stone.

Believe it or not, it’s actually one of my favorite Disney movies of all time!

What’s that you say? That random little life fact seemed incongruous with a title referencing T.H. White’s keystone novel of modern Arthurian legend?

Wrong!

Yes, you head me right, Disney did in fact base The Sword in the Stone off of The Once and Future King. Well, the first part of that novel anyway….kinda.

The novel itself is broken up into two parts: the first which follows Arthur as the young gangly ward of Sir Kay and the second which follows the Ascendant (and soon to be tragic) King whose legend we’ve all grown so familiar with over the years.

Really if you toss out the musical numbers, talking owl, and a highly questionable squirrel-related romance subplot and the Disney version is damn near a one for one animated adaptation of Part One.

Fucking Furries

What the Disney version fails to adequately adapt however, is T.H. White’s take on the Knights of Camelot.

There’s a sort of antiquated naivety to the characters in The Once and Future King, dear reader. A tinge of Don Quixote in White’s retelling wherein they remain earnest in their pursuit of knightly ideals even as they do so with a consistently petulant childishness.

Characters are simultaneously simple and complex, possessing deep motives while also appearing simple, pouty, and (dare I say) possibly even stupid at times.

Now, here’s the thing, dear reader: this actually works.

I know, I know! I’m as shocked as you are.

The fact remains however, that White somehow manages to convey a sense of innocence in The Once and Future King that somehow meshes the familiar technicolored fairytale-esque retelling of Arthurian lore with something deeper and more tragic than what one might initially suspect.

Arthur, Gwynevere, their Knights- all aren’t so much stuffy nobles and grim warlords as boys and girls frozen forever in time as they romp through the perpetually sunlit halcyon days of youth, playing make believe and falling in love in some Grand Adventure of their own design. Even as the story progresses and they grow older those Halcyon days seem to follow right along with them…right up until they don’t.

The blessing and the curse of The Once and Future King is that it places its characters as poetic idealists living in an antiquated Garden of Eden constructed *by* those same ideals. It’s only once those characters abandon those ideals they realize (far too late) they’ve sown the seeds of their own destruction: Greed, lust, jealousy- all creep into the Round Table and turn friend to foe, leaving Arthur a sad and lost man struck down as he tries to hold it all together.

But he tries, dear reader, and that fact somehow bites deeper the more I think about it.  

It’s truly fascinating how White manages to paint such a lighthearted romp while also presenting a poignant and tragic loss of innocence without it seeming the slightest bit off. You get a sense while reading this book that something so pure was not meant to, nor indeed could survive the wanton destruction of man but you also step away from reading it with a hope (hell, a promise!) that one day we may all overcome ourselves and obtain Camelot once again.

In case it wasn’t obvious I fucking love The Once and Future King, dear reader.

I wholly endorse it and, if you haven’t read it before I encourage you to rectify that immediately.

And if you haven’t, well…why not give it a go? You may laugh and wince at cringe at times but you could say the same thing about cable.

And, hey, you just might step away from reading it feeling a little something.