King Arthur’s Youth: Growing Up in The Once and Future King
T.H. White’s twentieth-century contribution to the canon of King Arthur explains lifelong virtues (or vices) by the light of the lessons of childhood.
By Shawn Phillip Cooper
The story of King Arthur has been, at least in its outlines, familiar to most readers of English literature for the better part of a milennium. Although he is the son of King Uther, Arthur grows up in the household of Sir Ector. After Uther’s death, Arthur’s destiny is revealed when he draws a sword from a stone (or anvil), establishing his right to rule England as King. Bewitched by his half-sister, he unwittingly sleeps with her, conceiving a child who is both nephew and son: Mordred, who will be partly to blame for the downfall of Camelot. The rest of that blame rests upon Arthur’s best knight, Launcelot, and his Queen, Guinevere. Their ongoing affair provides Mordred the opportunity to drive a wedge into the Arthurian court, dividing Arthur’s Round Table knights against themselves, and bringing the realm to ruin.
In 1937, T.H. White set out to write The Sword in the Stone, a book that would eventually be included as the first volume of The Once and Future King. His intention was to create a “preface” to Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur, a mid-fifteenth century work that combined various Arthurian chronicles and romances into a single, cohesive text. Though the tales had originated centuries earlier, Malory’s take on the Arthurian legend had become the one with which most people were familiar, and White was an expert: it had been the topic of his thesis at Queen’s College, Cambridge, where he had earnt a first-class degree in English. When White decided to flesh out the story of Arthur’s youth—something which, in Malory’s text, is reduced to a single episode across a few pages—he did so with an intimate knowledge of the characters and the tragic arc of Malory’s story.
In setting out, initially at least, to flesh out the early years of the Malorian Arthuriad, White provided histories and childhoods not only for Arthur and the Orkney Clan, but also for Kay (alongside Arthur in The Sword in the Stone), Launcelot (in The Ill-Made Knight), and others besides. In the final volume, The Candle in the Wind, which would eventually conclude The Once and Future King, his characters mature into the adulthood in which they are found in Malory. But in the first three books, it is their youth which is the focus, and the setting-up of what will become the great drama and tragedy of their lives. Yet the temptation, when thinking of childhood in The Once and Future King, is to focus only upon young Arthur—”the Wart”—and his studies with Merlyn. The popularity of Disney’s animated version of The Sword in the Stone might encourage this attitude, but so does White’s text, with Merlyn’s pedagogy specifically intended to form Arthur in a particular way. Merlyn is a tutor, and he has a didactic function in the text that the experiences of the Orkney boys and Launcelot do not.
White’s Merlyn is a philosopher, even a political philosopher, and the lessons that he seeks to inculcate in the young Arthur are mainly White’s own views.
White’s familiarity with the Malorian approach to King Arthur ensured that his depiction of familiar characters felt like a genuine part of the existing tradition, even though the episodes in his book were both novel and fantastic. Just as important were the Freudian influences on White’s writing, shown particularly in his narrative exploration of character motivation—not for Arthur so much as for Launcelot, Guinevere, and the Orkney boys (and Mordred in particular). Although many of Freud’s theories are somewhat discredited today, they were widely accepted in White’s time, and consequently became, in the most general sense, a part of our assumed understanding of human nature. Their presence adds to the sense that the characters have complex and psychologically real motivations. And, whether one subscribes to Freudian readings or not, the presence of a systemic order to the development of character psychology means that as White’s characters mature, the experiences of their youth are as seeds which sprout and eventually bloom in adulthood.
But just as White’s version of Merlyn lives backwards, growing ever younger and remembering what will happen instead of what has happened, White himself had to create his version of the Arthurian characters by moving backwards: imagining the experiences of their youth by reverse-engineering what Malory relates about their adulthood, refracted through a prism of psychological realism. Hence Malory’s description of the conflicted interpersonal relationships of the “Orkney Clan”—King Lot, Queen Morgause, and her sons: Gawain, Agravain, Gaheris, Gareth, and Mordred—are spun backwards by White into a tapestry of their own origins, which he brilliantly depicts in The Queen of Air and Darkness. For White believed, as all great dramatists do, that a true tragedy must have its end in its beginning. Even the malevolent, twisted figure of Mordred must have a tragic origin in the innocence of youth, when the wide horizon of possibility is yet open to him.
White, through Merlyn, is teaching not only Arthur but also the reader; for White’s Merlyn deviates greatly from Malory’s version of the sorcerer, whose magical interventions are largely limited to some convincing disguises and a bit of prophecy. White’s Merlyn is a philosopher, even a political philosopher, and the lessons that he seeks to inculcate in the young Arthur are mainly White’s own views. But to note this is not to suggest that those views are wrong, or that White should have written instead a philosophically “neutral” Merlyn (whatever that could mean). Nor is the intention to suggest that Malory was wrong when he did the same thing: for the Morte has also a political dimension, and Malory occasionally deviates into making explicitly political statements, just as White does. Yet these interventions are not unwelcome, so beguiling are both authors in their efforts to draw readers into their world.
Arthur’s political struggle is to change the idea of governance itself: to move it away from “Might is Right,” and towards something else—a new order under a set of just laws equally applied, and in which those bellicose urges can be channelled into something constructive.
The episode during which Merlyn turns Arthur into an ant, in the eighth chapter, is one of the best known: the banner reading “EVERYTHING NOT FORBIDDEN IS COMPULSORY”; the stripped-down, helpless conformism of the ant colony; and the endlessly repeating voice of the hive, with its fruitiness and its bellicose absurdity, are instantly memorable. The singing of “Antland, Antland Over All” and slogans like “I Vow to Thee, my Smell,” invoke contemporary political songs and propaganda. And the “communism” of the hive is mentioned explicitly, lest there should be any doubt on the part of the reader about what is being depicted. Arthur is heartily sick of the ants by the time he is freed from the lesson and able to be a boy once more: their inability to give voice to ideas like “freedom” or “goodness” proves to be even more suffocating than their irrational and utterly totalitarian warmongering.
The ants episode highlights points of especial concern for White, who was a pacifist, writing in a time of war, with deep commitments to the classical liberal order and to ideas about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (ideas which, the text notes, the ants cannot even conceive). Similarly, the episode in which Arthur is turned into a fish in the castle moat also draws attention to these authorial concerns. After several encounters with more or less benign fish, Merlyn takes Arthur, the boy who will be king, to meet an old pike, Black Peter, or Mr. P, who is the King of the Moat. From him, Arthur will learn what it is to rule:
“There is nothing,” said the monarch, “except the power which you pretend to seek: power to grind and power to digest, power to seek and power to find, power to await and power to claim, all power and pitilessness springing from the nape of the neck.” […] “Love is a trick played on us by the forces of evolution. Pleasure is the bait laid down by the same. There is only power. Power is of the individual mind, but the mind’s power is not enough. Power of the body decides everything in the end, and only Might is Right.”
Arthur is nearly gobbled up as he listens, spellbound, to this lesson, which, even more than that of the ants, becomes the central concern of The Once and Future King. Arthur’s political struggle is to change the idea of governance itself: to move it away from “Might is Right,” and towards something else—a new order under a set of just laws equally applied, and in which those bellicose urges can be channelled into something constructive. The lesson with the ants is a lesson in contemporary politics, but the lesson in the moat is historical: it is about something that has putatively occurred in the past—the development of the idea of the Common Law as the ultimate recourse in matters of strife, rather than a civilisational veneer for what is really little more than what Hobbes deplored as the “state of nature”: a war of all against all. But Merlyn is careful not to put these lessons in terms native purely to political science; rather, they are framed as moral, logical, and ethical considerations. Consequently, their effect upon the shape of the Arthurian polity follows from an assumption that the polity should conform to Western (and indeed Christian) moral, logical, and ethical traditions.
The reliance on Might must end if people are to have lives worth living.
It is true that Merlyn’s lesson in the moat is obviously political (as are his lessons more generally)—but it is also a lesson which all little boys must learn, as a corollary to the brutal lessons of the modern playground and the medieval training-yards, where Might has always made Right. The stronger boys knock down the weaker boys and so impose their will; hence, Merlyn’s lesson—White’s lesson—remains necessary. “Might is Right” must be met and exposed for the unfulfilling and empty philosophy that it is; and it must be countered with something that feels more just. Only then can the cycle of violence end and a cycle of justice begin. As Arthur realises later, in The Queen of Air and Darkness, “Might is not right. But there is a lot of Might knocking about in this world, and something has to be done about it.”
The reliance on Might must end if people are to have lives worth living. The old pike’s lesson on power nearly ends with Arthur being consumed, just as the pike himself has been consumed: old, bitter, weighed down with griefs, and yet as pitiless as the moon. “Might is Right” has made him a king and kept him in power, but it has done so at the cost of his soul: he has become no more than a death-machine, and his description of the nature of power expresses itself in the narrowest possible terms. There is no room for living, no room for loving, no room for joy or sorrow: there is only getting, killing, and eating. It is an existence as constrained as that of the ants, although the constraints are a choice rather than an imposition.
Merlyn’s lessons for the young Arthur are expressed in these active experiences: they are intended as lessons, and they are directed at Arthur. They are the fruit of Merlyn’s interest in Arthur both as a boy and as a future king, and the lessons are attempts to impart such understanding as will be beneficial to a political ruler. But The Queen of Air and Darkness also provides a window into different kinds of lessons—negative lessons, which come about through neglect or disinterest. Merlyn is a thoughtful gardener, tending to the bountiful soil of a young mind; but Morgause is indifferent to her sons and they suffer by it. Deprived of parental attention, they wander at will, hopeful of finding some way to catch their mother’s eye.
In the seventh chapter, the Orkney boys devise a plan to capture a unicorn and bring it to their mother, certain that she will shower affection upon them for such a mighty gift. But the ill-conceived plan goes badly awry: they kill the unicorn; unable to carry it, they make a butchery of its body; still too heavy, they saw off its head; and that, being unwieldly, they drag home with ropes. Covered in blood and offal, they present the foul object to their mother, who fails even to notice their condition or their “gift.” Only later, when she learns of it, does she have them whipped—not because of the foul deed, but because “she had spent an unsuccessful day with the English knights” who are a part of her present plot. Even the punishment is self-obsessed and disinterested.
But even this indifference is, somehow, preferable to its inverse and ironic corollary—the treatment that Mordred shall receive at his mother’s hand. It is in Mordred’s upbringing—not that of the other Orkney boys, and not even that of Arthur—that the The Once and Future King makes its most potent and necessary argument about parental love. The dangers of inattentive, disinterested, self-obsessed parents are, by now, well known. What happens to Mordred is a far better lesson for our age of “helicopter parents” and “tiger moms.” Somehow, even after all of the disinterest, there is still room for goodness in some of the other Orkney boys: Gareth, tutored by Lancelot, becomes a truly good knight; Gawain is, at least, a fearless leader and loyal advisor to Arthur; Gaheris stands against his brothers when they try to destabilise the Arthurian court. But for Mordred, there is only darkness.
The wreckage of Mordred’s upbringing is not confined within him, but rebounds upon both of his parents—the innocent and the guilty alike.
In the closing pages of The Candle in the Wind, White makes a narratorial diversion to explain how Mordred was doomed by his upbringing. “It was tragic to watch him,” White begins, “for he was doing what his mother did. He was acting, and had ceased to be real.” What follows then is the most astonishing passage in a book replete with astonishing passages:
People write tragedies in which fatal blondes betray their paramours to ruin, in which Cressidas, Cleopatras, Delilahs, and sometimes even naughty daughters like Jessica bring their lovers or their parents to distress: but these are not the heart of tragedy. They are fripperies to the soul of man. What does it matter if Antony did fall upon his sword? It only killed him. It is the mother’s not the lover’s lust that rots the mind. It is that which condemns the tragic character to his walking death. It is Jocasta, not Juliet, who dwells in the inner chamber. It is Gertrude, not the silly Ophelia, who sends Hamlet to his madness. The heart of tragedy does not lie in stealing or taking away. Any feather-pated girl can steal a heart. It lies in giving, in putting on, in adding, in smothering without the pillows. Desdemona robbed of life or honour is nothing to a Mordred, robbed of himself—his soul stolen, overlaid, wizened, while the mother-character lives in triumph, superfluously and with stifling love endowed on him, seeming innocent of ill-intention. Mordred was the only son of Orkney who never married. He, while his brothers fled to England, was the one who stayed alone with her for twenty years—her living larder. Now that she was dead, he had become her grave. She existed in him like the vampire. When he moved, when he blew his nose, he did it with her movement. When he acted he became as she had been, pretending to be a virgin for the unicorn. He dabbled in the same cruel magic. He had even begun to keep lap dogs like her—although he had always hated hers with the same bitter jealousy as that with which he had hated her lovers.
Abandoned by her sons in favour of Arthur, the half-brother whom she hates, the half-brother whom she has seduced through magic in order to conceive Mordred, Morgause pours out upon that unhappy child all of the attention that she has withheld from his half-brothers, Gawain, Agravain, Gaheris, and Gareth. The result is not merely his death but his living annihilation, his very soul overlaid with that of his mother. His actions are her actions, so much so that, as his mother sought to seduce the English knights who were her enemies, Mordred seeks to force Guinevere to marry him. Both prove fatal and both terminal strokes are delivered between parent and child: Morgause, caught in flagrante delicto, is slain by Gaheris; Arthur kills Mordred and is mortally wounded himself, in turn. The wreckage of Mordred’s upbringing is not confined within him, but rebounds upon both of his parents—the innocent and the guilty alike. And in the end, as Arthur wisely understood, Mordred is not only guilty: he is also innocent. The bloody plot against Mordred’s life in his infancy was carried out with Arthur’s assent. The stigma under which he lived was due to Arthur’s actions. In what is a source of intense guilt for the king, his actions doom Mordred, not Arthur himself. Indeed, for White, the doom of Arthur comes in his incestuous liaison with his half-sister, Morgause. In the final lines of The Queen of Air and Darkness, White writes:
It is the tragedy, the Aristotelian and comprehensive tragedy, of sin coming home to roost. That is why we have to take note of the parentage of Arthur’s son Mordred, and to remember, when the time comes, that the king had slept with his own sister. He did not know he was doing so, and perhaps it may have been due to her, but it seems, in tragedy, that innocence is not enough.
White is right when he observes that, within the genre of tragedy, innocence is not enough.
When, in The Candle in the Wind, Arthur is confronted with Mordred’s behaviour, which Lancelot and Guinevere rightly assume is but a step before treason, he chastens them, replying, “You forget that Mordred is my son. I am fond of him. I have done the boy a great deal of wrong… Besides I am his father. I can see myself in him.” Even as Arthur admits that Mordred is likely to be his death, his understanding of Mordred’s particular situation—his upbringing and the effects of their wider family situation—urges him towards compassion. White is right when he observes that, within the genre of tragedy, innocence is not enough. But within Arthur’s worldview—where earthly justice should reflect a higher, divine justice rather than the exigencies of narrative style—innocence should be enough.
Mordred comes to ruin, and few readers shed many tears over his death. Traitors, after all, should get what they deserve, and Mordred was a traitor many times over: to his King, to his father, to the Round Table, to England, and to his family. His death is not unjust, but it is tragic, because White provides a genesis for his death that seems to deprive him of freedom. Like the ants, whose minds are full of the fruity voice urging them inexorably on to ludicrous and irrational war, Mordred seems driven by fate, and the wickedness of others more than by any flaw or defect native to himself. They go down together—the king and his son—and in one battle, these two very different and very similar boys meet their ends, standing in opposition one against the other in the bodies of men.
White’s authorial intent is far murkier in this conclusion than in Merlyn’s pedagogical episodes because it is a conclusion not of his own making, nor even of Malory’s, but one which is a part of the Arthurian tradition. White nonetheless faithfully transmits this conclusion in the final pages of The Once and Future King, which suggests—especially in its posthumously-published final volume, The Book of Merlyn—that the lessons of youth can yet prove a compass and a guide even in the final moments of life, just as they can help one to live a life worthy of emulation, as Arthur more or less does, in stark contrast to his nephews. The lessons the Orkney boys received had to be sought as and when they could be found, and came from figures far less interested in moral and ethical formation than Merlyn. When their very different ends come, it is in ways for which even the best of them are unprepared, and all of them die violent deaths which leave the reader lamenting their choices. But Arthur’s lessons give readers a kind of clarity and resolution about his final decisions, even if he himself suffers from doubts.
We can feel a confidence that his choices are right—even the best that could be made—even if, ere he steps out to meet his son in the final and fatal battle, he reflects upon what he has sought to do in England, and fears it may not endure. But then, the enduring must always be left to others, in the end, and Arthur knows what he must do as he strides out to meet his final destiny. It is a lesson in which White’s contemporary, J.R.R. Tolkien, also believed, putting into the mouth of his own wizard the words, “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
