They eat ham and jam and Spam a lot, what?
Mar. 2nd, 2012 10:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodygranuaileSo, after getting myself all caught up on Merlin via Netflix last month while I was all super busy, I decided to continue with the King Arthur thing, and picked up a copy of T.H. White's The Once and Future King, since I had run across a small excerpt in one of the Prentice Hall Lit books I did some projects on at work (and in return, I was gifted with the entire set of them! Yay!).
This book starts off very silly, with "the Wart"'s "eddication" under Merlyn, which seems to consist predominantly of getting turned into animals, except the time he and Kay go on adventures with Robin Hood. The tone of the whole thing is kind of like having the story told to you at a club by a slightly tipsy nineteenth-century British gentleman who thinks you have never heard of the Middle Ages before, by which I mean is is charmingly silly, sometimes casually racist and sexist in that cheerful sort of way that passed for being very progressive a hundred years ago, and full of extremely dated references drawing parallels between Arthur's Gramarye and "modern" Britain (and when I say extremely dated, I mean extremely dated--there are references to a bunch of famous cricket players I've never heard of). He also employs the delightfully out-of-date traditions of phonetically writing out everybody's accents and wandering off into treatises on Natural Philosophy, putting the feel of the book squarely fifty years before it was written (it was written between 1938 and 1941, apparently) at the latest, the exception being some of Merlyn's more anachronistic statements (Merlyn is "born backwards in time" in this one, and is played as an extremely comic character--a curmudgeonly absent-minded professor type who keeps saying things about evolution and Victorian fox-hunting that nobody else understands.)
The later bits of the story turn from comedy into melodrama, telling of Arthur's seduction by Morgause and the feud with the Orkney clan, and the insanely long and convoluted love affair between Guenever and Lancelot, and Mordred's revenge on Arthur and how he manages to turn everyone against each other and basically screw everything up. The darkest one of these is the story of Lancelot, which involves not one but two instances of the "bed trick," which is a terrible euphemism for "rape by fraud as a literary device". After the second time, Lancelot goes mad, and since this is the Middle Ages and everyone is stupid (although, sadly, there are a lot of people who are still this stupid), everyone is all like "What's his deal? Why did he go mad? Does it run in the family?" as if it were surprising that someone might go mad after being raped twice. Being a self-loathing sort, after Lancelot stops being mad, he ends up living for several years with Elaine and helping to raise their insufferably holy child, who later becomes the Sir Galahad who finds the Holy Grail. Eventually, however, he moves back to Camelot and continues to have a tortured love square with Guenever, Arthur, and God, for the next thirty or so years.
My favorite character in the lot is probably King Pellinore, who spends most of his life questing after the Questing Beast, with whom he has an odd sort of bond, due it being his destiny to quest after her and her destiny to be quested after by Pellinores forever, and the quest is apparently supposed to never end, so when he catches her it generally means something is wrong and they have to sort it out. There is a rather hilarious subplot in which Pellinore stops questing because he is in love, and Sir Grummore and Sir Palomides dress up as the Questing Beast to try and get him to chase them and stop moping, and then the actual Questing Beast shows up, and thinks they are her mate, and then everyone is lovesick and King Pellinore says "What?" a lot.
Overall, I quite enjoyed it! It has definitely stoked my interest in reading every version of the Arthur legends I can get my hands on.
This book starts off very silly, with "the Wart"'s "eddication" under Merlyn, which seems to consist predominantly of getting turned into animals, except the time he and Kay go on adventures with Robin Hood. The tone of the whole thing is kind of like having the story told to you at a club by a slightly tipsy nineteenth-century British gentleman who thinks you have never heard of the Middle Ages before, by which I mean is is charmingly silly, sometimes casually racist and sexist in that cheerful sort of way that passed for being very progressive a hundred years ago, and full of extremely dated references drawing parallels between Arthur's Gramarye and "modern" Britain (and when I say extremely dated, I mean extremely dated--there are references to a bunch of famous cricket players I've never heard of). He also employs the delightfully out-of-date traditions of phonetically writing out everybody's accents and wandering off into treatises on Natural Philosophy, putting the feel of the book squarely fifty years before it was written (it was written between 1938 and 1941, apparently) at the latest, the exception being some of Merlyn's more anachronistic statements (Merlyn is "born backwards in time" in this one, and is played as an extremely comic character--a curmudgeonly absent-minded professor type who keeps saying things about evolution and Victorian fox-hunting that nobody else understands.)
The later bits of the story turn from comedy into melodrama, telling of Arthur's seduction by Morgause and the feud with the Orkney clan, and the insanely long and convoluted love affair between Guenever and Lancelot, and Mordred's revenge on Arthur and how he manages to turn everyone against each other and basically screw everything up. The darkest one of these is the story of Lancelot, which involves not one but two instances of the "bed trick," which is a terrible euphemism for "rape by fraud as a literary device". After the second time, Lancelot goes mad, and since this is the Middle Ages and everyone is stupid (although, sadly, there are a lot of people who are still this stupid), everyone is all like "What's his deal? Why did he go mad? Does it run in the family?" as if it were surprising that someone might go mad after being raped twice. Being a self-loathing sort, after Lancelot stops being mad, he ends up living for several years with Elaine and helping to raise their insufferably holy child, who later becomes the Sir Galahad who finds the Holy Grail. Eventually, however, he moves back to Camelot and continues to have a tortured love square with Guenever, Arthur, and God, for the next thirty or so years.
My favorite character in the lot is probably King Pellinore, who spends most of his life questing after the Questing Beast, with whom he has an odd sort of bond, due it being his destiny to quest after her and her destiny to be quested after by Pellinores forever, and the quest is apparently supposed to never end, so when he catches her it generally means something is wrong and they have to sort it out. There is a rather hilarious subplot in which Pellinore stops questing because he is in love, and Sir Grummore and Sir Palomides dress up as the Questing Beast to try and get him to chase them and stop moping, and then the actual Questing Beast shows up, and thinks they are her mate, and then everyone is lovesick and King Pellinore says "What?" a lot.
Overall, I quite enjoyed it! It has definitely stoked my interest in reading every version of the Arthur legends I can get my hands on.
