The Once and Future King

ONE

On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays it was Court Hand and Summulae Logicales, while the rest of the week it was the Organon, Repetition and Astrology. The governess was always getting muddled with her astrolabe, and when she got specially muddled she would take it out of the Wart by rapping his knuckles. She did not rap Kay s knuckles, because when Kay grew older he would be Sir Kay, the master of the estate. The Wart was called the Wart because it more or less rhymed with Art, which was short for his real name. Kay had given him the nickname. Kay was not called anything but Kay, as he was too dignified to have a nickname and would have flown into a passion if anybody had tried to give him one. The governess had red hair and some mysterious wound from which she derived a lot of prestige by showing it to all the women of the castle, behind closed doors. It was believed to be where she sat down, and to have been caused by sitting on some armour at a picnic by mistake. Eventually she offered to show it to Sir Ector, who was Kay s father, had hysterics and was sent away. They found out afterwards that she had been in a lunatic hospital for three years.

In the afternoons the programme was: Mondays and Fridays, tilting and horsemanship; Tuesdays, hawking; Wednesdays, fencing; Thursdays, archery; Saturdays, the theory of chivalry, with the proper measures to be blown on all occasions, terminology of the chase and hunting etiquette. If you did the wrong thing at the mort or the undoing, for instance, you were bent over the body of the dead beast and smacked with the flat side of a sword. This was called being bladed. It was horseplay, a sort of joke like being shaved when crossing the line. Kay was not bladed, although he often went wrong.

When they had got rid of the governess, Sir Ector said, After all, damn it all, we can t have the boys runnin about all day like hooligans after all, damn it all? Ought to be havin a first-rate eddication, at

T. H. White is the author of the classic Arthurian fantasy The Once and Future King, among other works.

A fierce and damaged man, T. H. White wrote about fierce and damaged people and children, and animals with a brilliant, painful innocence that has no equal in literature. He is so good at hurt and shame how did he also manage to be so funny? I have laughed at his great Arthurian novel and cried over it and loved it all my life. Ursula K. Le Guin
 
Certain books offer pleasures so rich and enduring, they become part of what defines us. The Once and Future King is like that for me. It manages by some miracle to be about its own time, and a distant, legendary time, and about today. It mingles wisdom, wonderful, laugh-out-loud humor and deep sorrow while telling one of the great tales of the Western world. I envy the reader coming to it for the first time. Guy Gavriel Kay
 
White took hold of the ultimate English epic and recast it in modern literary language, sacrificing none of its grandeur or its strangeness in the process, and adding in all the humor and passion that we expect from a novel. What was once as stiff and two-dimensional as a medieval tapestry becomes rich and real and devastatingly sad. Lev Grossman
 
Touching, profound, funny and tragic. Los Angeles Times
 
Richly imagined and unfailingly eloquent and entertaining, its appeal is timeless and universal. If a reader reads only one Arthurian tale, let this be it. Booklist
 
The Once and Future King is full of insights, scenes and flourishes that are really quite astonishing. The Guardian (U.K.)