61 pages • 2 hours read
T. H. WhiteThe Once and Future King
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 1958A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Loss of Idealism
In many tellings, White’s included, the rise and fall of Camelot marks the rise and fall of a noble ideology. When a young Arthur pulls Excalibur from the stone and ascends the throne, he is young and naïve enough to believe, with Merlyn’s prodding, that a nation of warring fiefdoms and brutal warlords can be united under a single banner and enjoy an unprecedented peace. For a time, it seems he is right. Soon, however, cracks appear in the façade. Arthur discovers that using might to enforce right—the entire basis of his new code of chivalry—is a premise built on a shaky foundation. Endowing armored warriors with the power to enforce justice at whim is a disaster waiting to happen: When England flourishes and his knights have no more wrongs to avenge, they turn on each other. Arthur course corrects by sending them on a quest for the Holy Grail, imagining the spiritual dimension of the quest is the proper medicine for their indulgences and infighting. That spiritual dimension, however, reveals his knights’ frailties and flaws, and many do not survive. Confronted with a splintering kingdom, Arthur clings to the rule of law to reign in humanity’s negative impulses. That rule of law turns on him, however, and he is forced to sacrifice his wife in its name. Only Lancelot’s heroics prevent Guenever’s death, but they lead to the war that will result in Arthur’s own death.
The overall trajectory of Arthur’s story thus centers on the tragic loss of idealism and innocence—a trajectory the novel makes explicit by likening it to the biblical fall. As a newly crowned king, the narrator says, “Arthur was happy. Like the man in Eden before the fall, he was enjoying his innocence and fortune” (226). The comparison suggests that Arthur’s loss of idealism is inevitable, as fallen humanity has an inherent inclination toward evil, according to Christian teaching. This very idea haunts Arthur in the hours before his death: “For if there was such a thing as original sin, if man was on the whole a villain, if the bible was right in saying that the heart of men was deceitful above all things and desperately wicked, then the purpose of his life had been a vain one” (629).
However, the novel never quite abandons its idealism. As he waits for battle, Arthur continues mulling over potential solutions to the problem, toying with the idea that vengeance or property might be at the heart of humanity’s troubles. The latter leads him to reflect more broadly on the idea of possessiveness and individualism:
[I]t would not be a question only of sharing property, as such. It would be a question of sharing everything—even thoughts, feelings, lives. God had told people that they would have to cease to live as individuals. They would have to go into the force of life, like a drop falling into a river (633).
Arthur soon sets this idea aside as asking too much of people, but the same water imagery recurs in the novel’s last sentences, which proclaim that “The fate of this man or that man was less than a drop, although it was a sparkling one, in the great blue motion of the sunlit sea” (639). The phrasing hints at a reconciliation of some of the tensions with which Arthur grappled (e.g., the individual versus the community). Ultimately, the novel ends not on a tragic but a bittersweet note, its final words—“THE BEGINNING”—holding out hope for the future.
Might Versus Right
As a young man bedecked in his armor and wielding his mighty Excalibur, Arthur sees only the glory and “fun” of war. Only with Merlyn’s patient prodding does he begin to see the true victims of war: not the rich nobles who can afford armor and weapons but the serfs who are sent out first as cannon fodder. This is his first major epiphany, and he seeks to correct this injustice. However, Arthur inherits a lawless and brutal country. His task is to unite a disparate group of factions under one banner by persuading the warlords to change their ways. To do so, he recruits the best knights in the country to beat the oppressors at their own game. While it’s a successful strategy in the short term, White suggests that using force against force—even for good—is a slippery slope that will inevitably corrupt both sides.
Arthur’s core idea is to repurpose the human tendency toward violence: “The Might is there, in the bad half of people, and you can’t neglect it. You can’t cut it out, but you might be able to direct it […] so that it was useful instead of bad” (248). To that end, Arthur first subdues the warring factions and then sends out knights to combat violence on an individual level by killing monsters, avenging murders, and more. However, as external threats evaporate, the knights begin to turn on one another due to the “unchastened” power Arthur has endowed them with. The implication is that force by its very nature requires aggression, which is inconsistent with virtue no matter how noble the intention. Arthur consequently finds himself trapped in an endless cycle of war and vengeance, and as an old man, he agonizes over what seems to be the inevitability of war.
Only near the end does Arthur see his own folly, and the final days his rule are spent crafting a system of justice that relies on trial and evidence. Such a system, he believes, would sidestep the reality that different people have different ideas of what is moral, ensuring one universal, objective standard for the application of force. This too proves futile, however: “He had tried to codify the evil uses of might by individuals, so that he might set bounds to them by the impersonal justice of the state […] [But] the Principle of Might had sprung up behind him in another form” (629). Indeed, the novel ends with the country once more wracked by war and Arthur puzzling over the roots of violence, which he worries may be intractable. Nevertheless, his memories of the peaceful geese and their borderless world suggest that one day, the puzzle may be solved.
The Importance of Cultural Myths
In keeping with its simultaneous idealism and sense that idealism is impracticable, the novel has a complex attitude toward myth. As an Arthurian story, it deals with larger-than-life figures, but it avoids archetypes of heroism or villainy in favor of psychological realism. This is evident in its depiction of Guenever, whom the narrator at one point insists on removing from the legendary context entirely:
People are easily dazzled by Round Tables and feats of arms. You read of Lancelot in some noble achievement, and, when he comes home to his mistress, you feel resentment at her because she cuts across the achievement, or spoils it. Yet Guenever could not search for the Grail. […] It was her part to sit at home, though passionate, though real and hungry in her fierce and tender heart (472-73).
The passage locates Guenever with reference to the historical realities of medieval women’s lives and thus encourages readers to understand her as a person rather than as an archetypal seductress or damsel in distress.
The same broad tendency recurs throughout the book and informs its tone, which features frequent comical touches that undercut the apparent seriousness of the subject matter. For example, of Bors’s success in the Grail mission, Arthur remarks that “although he was not quite a virgin, [he] turned out to be a first-class theologian” (460). The novel even pokes fun at the legendary status Arthur and his court attain while they are still alive: “[I]n their hearts the new generation was quite sure that the great Dulac did no such things [as eat, drink, or sleep]” (421). Given how much Lancelot struggles with his inability to live up to his own reputation, this reaction seems not only misguided but also almost unwittingly cruel.
Yet the novel is not a simple satire of Arthurian legend. White’s Arthur in large part is what he has been mythologized as: a model of virtue in a barbaric world, a man who seeks the best in humanity despite the betrayals and the warfare, and (as he strikes the younger generation of knights) “the idea of Royalty” (421). Moreover, it is this legacy that Arthur takes care to safeguard as he prepares for death, entrusting his page with remembering and imparting the core ideas of Arthur’s reign. The page promises to tell Arthur’s story to “English people,” evoking the centrality of the legend to English cultural memory, but it is the page’s identity as Sir Thomas Malory that is particularly important, as it links him to White’s own story and thus imbues the latter with new authenticity. White, like Malory, becomes what Arthur calls a “vessel” for the Arthurian myth, which may take different forms (much as Arthur himself is prophesied to return) but always centers on the same essential truths.
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