Note on the photo above: I went to the ruins of a French castle with my Dad as a kid, and I wanted to find a picture of that, but there weren't any, so here's one of us just hanging out.
Arthurian legend is one of those weird things in our culture where only the parodies really have relevance anymore. People mostly know king Arthur from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and the vast majority of times I hear “Lancelot,” it’s a sarcastic way of calling someone annoyingly moral*. Most animated movies based on these stories have a moment where they try to prove that “this isn’t your classic story” by showing a self-reliant damsel or bumbling knight, but what kid in the audience knows about the classic stories anymore? What adult, even?
It’s not all that complicated why things got to be this way: the stories and tropes stuck with Western culture even as the poems that inspired them became too archaic for most people to take the time to read**. We still have a vague sense of the chivalrous battles and heartfelt romances of the Knight of the Round Table, a sense of a purer time when our culture was young and our world was simpler. Maybe it’s just me, but I could get nostalgic for the stories of the Round Table even before I knew anything about it.
I don’t think it’s just me though. And the way that T. H. White plays with that nostalgia is what makes The Once and Future King so effective.
It’s a difficult book to get through, funny and charming much of the time, but filled with digressions made for a readership with better attention spans than most of us have anymore. And, though it’s populated with Arthur, Merlin, Lancelot, Guenever, and all the other old names, it almost never deliver what we expect from an Arthurian story: romance and combat. Swordfights and jousts are often the most boring parts of the book, and usually the shortest, with White often dismissing an entire battle with a sentence like “They fought on foot for two hours.” We get a lot of dialogue around the morality of battle and the effect it has on the knights and the world around them, but the actions itself is rarely a draw. Meanwhile, the relationship between Lancelot and Guenever, the only real instance of romantic love in the book, is almost entirely out offscreen or told in summary. I don’t just mean sex; we hardly ever see real affection between Guenever and Lancelot. As with fighting, we know an awful lot about the romance’s results: Lancelot’s conflict between his religion and his love, Guenever’s growing envy as Lancelot spends more time with his actual wife, and we know both characters well enough to care about each of them. But as for proof of real love between the two of them, it’s almost completely absent.
This absence of the core appeals of Arthurian legend doesn’t make The Once and Future King a bad book by any stretch. In fact, it’s what makes it so great. Because it’s important to remember that, as old as the book may seem at times, chivalry was as foreign and fantastical to the world it was written into as it is to ours. Those readers had come looking for the same Arthurian tropes, and so they, like the modern reader, were a little confused that all the good stuff was kept hidden and undramatized, and a little anxious to see when it would be out in the open.
And White puts it out in the open at the most tragic time: when we already know it’s over. By this point the reader knows that a faction of rebellious knights are planning to catch Lancelot and Guenever in their affair. Even Lancelot knows on some level, he’s been warned, but he goes to Guenever’s chambers anyway, and dotes on her and brushes her hair. They’re already old by this time: her hair is white, the excitement of their love is past. But there’s a gentle affection between the two of them. And when we see it, it feels so much more powerful than if the love had been introduced outright, because it isn’t a simple love, it isn’t a love without stakes. It’s a love with a cost, the cost of Camelot itself, and so it means something.
The same pattern recurs a few pages later with the other element of chivalric tales: fighting. A knight arrives to catch Lancelot in the act. Lancelot goes up against this armed and armored challenger almost naked and wins. It’s the only fight scene in the novel that feels truly tense, mostly because it’s the only fight scene White chose to dramatize. And, like the scene with Guenever, the fight has the same melancholy aura to it. Even if you didn’t know that this was where the Arthurian legends turned sour, you could guess that, when Lancelot kills the knight sent to arrest him, things can never be the same again. The one fight we got to see was our last.
If White had written the story the way it’s expected to be written, with steamy romance and epic battles from the start to the end, it would’ve been awfully boring. That’s because the same quality that makes these things easy to romanticize and dream about also makes them dull to focus on for very long: they’re weightless. A knight and lady falling in love with only trivial obstacles, who never sacrifice anything to be together, doesn’t really matter much. Neither does a battle against a knight too evil or a monster too dumb for their death to matter. But we still love these things, in a sidelong and absent-minded way, because they’re uncomplicated enough to be loved easily. White takes that love and makes it tragic, because whatever is easy can’t last. Even though I’d never want to take the time to read the battles and romances that White skims over, I still miss them once I know that they’re over. I miss them in the same way I miss childhood; not any particular time or experience in it, but just the general emotions I might not have ever really felt as a kid, and that I don’t have a prayer of articulating now anyway**.
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* Which is kind of ironic, since Lancelot is mostly characterized as a guy cheating on his best friend’s wife, who knows it’s wrong but can’t help himself.
** Having read one genuine Medieval poem (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which is widely regarded as one of the most accessible), I can say that yes, they really are a struggle, even if, in this case, it was worth it.
** Sorry for not doing something more timely in such a crazy and depressing week. Honestly, I felt I needed to write this as a sort of distraction from all the craziness and depression. Then the post turned out pretty depressing in its own right. Sorry.
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