The book is filled with eccentric characters, and passages like these, that acknowledge the silliness of much of human life without getting riled up about it.

Once I was reconciled to that, I found myself smiling and chuckling often. I’ve become (to my irritation) someone who’s always in a hurry to get through this book and on to the next one, and this book doesn’t consent to being “gotten through” it meanders. At first passages like this bothered me a bit, because they’re very leisured and slowed me down. It reminds me of a kinder, gentler Monty Python. Jousting is an absurd tradition, the narrator seems to say, but you can’t help but love these good-natured old “fellahs” who have time for polite conversation as they prepare to try and ram one another through. “Suppose we’d better have a joust, eh, what?” “Yes, they are interesting, aren’t they? Only you get tired of them,” added King Pellinore. “I have some better ones at home, but these are quite good, really.”

Would you like to see some fewmets?” (Fewmets are droppings of the beast pursued.) Take this short dialogue, in which two infinitely civil British noblemen prepare for a joust, as an example: Here’s what I liked, in ascending order:ġ.) The satire isn’t bitter. It’s not a children’s book, but it’s the most optimistic and lovingly written tale I’ve read in ages, and sometime before year’s end I’ll read (or reread, because I have a sinking feeling I’ve read them before but have virtually NO MEMORY of them!) the other tales that make up The Once and Future King. White’s The Sword in the Stone(1938) is spoken of in my Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia as “a witty and erudite fantasy of Arthur’s boyhood, which combines affectionate satire on 20th-century English manners and mores with broad humor and deep knowledge of both nature and the Middle Ages.” Thank you, Benet’s, for capturing my own hyperbolic reaction to the book so compactly, because otherwise I might ramble on and on about what it is before getting to why I liked it.

The sword in the stone 1938