The Sword in the Stone is the story of Wart’s political education, which takes the form of him getting turned into various animals by Merlyn and seeing how they run things.

(White first published The Sword in the Stone as a standalone novel for children in 1938, then revised it for inclusion in The Once and Future King.) But it is - especially in the revised form it takes as the first book of The Once and Future King, the part that covers King Arthur’s childhood as the cheerfully dim orphan boy Wart. If you read The Sword and the Stone as a child and haven’t come back to it since, or if you’ve seen the Disney movie, you might be surprised when I say that it’s an extended political allegory. A huge part of The Once and Future King is an extended political allegory And the whole thing is written with some of his most lucid and loveliest prose. White was writing for a post–World War II audience, but his book has a vigor and clarity that makes it an urgent and important read today.ĭrawing painfully from the demons of his own past, White uses the Arthurian legend as a way of thinking about war and power and the proper uses of violent force - at the state level as well as the individual level. White’s The Once and Future King, written in 1958. There’s a sense that the story has been twisted around and retold so often that there’s nothing left of it to explore beyond our collective mental image of a tall blond guy with a crown and a sword.īut there is something out there that makes an argument for the Arthurian legend as a story with meaning, one that’s compelling to modern audiences: T.H. Ritchie’s King Arthur flopped at the box office, and some have suggested that’s because there’s nothing for today’s audiences in the Arthurian legend. The BBC’s recent Merlin series made it a madcap buddy-cops-in-fantasyland show Guy Ritchie’s new King Arthur: Legend of the Sword uses it as the launchpad for a new superhero-in-all-but-name franchise. The legend of King Arthur is one of those stories that has been around for so long and retold so many times that you can more or less make it do whatever you’d like it to do, like the stories of Robin Hood or Superman.

The sword in the stone by th white