T H White: The Once and Future King

[sgt.null]

I remember enjoying it as a kid. I remember the meeting of Hood.

sad that many seem to be saying it would not hold up nowadays.

[peter]

I will continue with it .......Some times I just need really light easy reading material and it does thus far seem to hit that particular brief.

[Cord Hurn]

It's a fair read, far more tolerable to me than Tennyson's Idylls of the King.

[deer of the dawn]

I read TOAFK a few years ago. "Whimsical" is the word I would use.

Although I am not crazy about other books by Stephen Lawhead, his Merlin was exquisite.

Also, I adore the made-for-TV Merlin starring Sam Neal, Isabella Rosselini, Martin Short, Miranda Richardson, etc. (The sequel, Merlin's Apprentice, was a sad piece of crap, however.)

[Avatar]

I liked his "Silverhand" Not sure I ever finished the series though.

--A

[peter]

All changed in the second book The Witch in The Wood. Here an element of casual cruelty entered the work that I find entirely distasteful. I could not think of such things without revulsion, and would never write them .......and certainly won't read them! The book goes into the bin.

[Holsety]

I have only read this work once. It's probably my favorite work of Arthurian fiction for the way it adds gentle and weird humor while also maintaining a grasp of the importance of life. I remember it capturing absurdities of battle that perhaps never really quite existed, but still in some sense still capture for me what it was like for me to engage in serious things.

A quick parallel to another good work:

Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun has SeverIan reflect to a shade of one of his former masters that there are 7 relations between god and man, or providence and man, or something like that.

SeverIan relates a varying level of structures; most primal is either loyalty to the godhead itself, or perhaps loyalty to the king who represents the godhead. Most advanced is loyalty to the system of government and laws which express the will of the godhead.

SeverIan is asked to which his loyalty is directed, and I believe he responds "to the first, if at all." (i.e. if he is loyal it is directly towards god or the most evident manifestation on earth, and likely he admits to a figure/shade he has a feeling of closeness to that he has no loyalty).

...

I believe towards the end of The Once and Future King, Arthur determines that he has contorted Camelot from the most basic towards the most advanced/sophisticated systems, to the point where he must obey the rulings of judges he has put in place, or feels he must (to sentence Guinevere and Lancelot harshly). I'm not completely confident that Arthur's understanding of the expanding complexities of government are itemized exactly the same way as SeverIan's, but I do believe the similarities are there.

I've gone by the name Severian online for a long long long time. Few people would deign to call Severian a good person. He is, however, thoughtful.

[Cord Hurn]

All changed in the second book The Witch in The Wood. Here an element of casual cruelty entered the work that I find entirely distasteful. I could not think of such things without revulsion, and would never write them .......and certainly won't read them! The book goes into the bin.

I'm guessing that's where the witch Morgause boils a cat alive to create a spell. Poor kitty, indeed.

[Avatar]

Funny, stuff like that in books doesn't really bother me...don't have much emotional reaction to cruelty etc. in fiction. Funnily enough, I do to the opposite.

--A

[peter]

If I recall correctly, the description of the cat being boiled alive contained just that - a description of it's reactions, sufficiently graphic to lend me belief that the author had done his research. Not nice. No place in my mind for this.