T.H. White’s The Once and Future King is widely considered the most influential fantasy novel ever written. Drawn from Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, The Once and Future King’s retelling of the Arthurian legend has been an inspiration for authors ranging from J.K. Rowling (the Harry Potter series) to Lev Grossman (The Magicians) to Neil Gaiman (American Gods). 

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T.H. White wrote only one great book: The Once and Future King. But that book was written over the course of decades, and really encompasses several smaller novels, fitted together with master craftsmanship. 

It is a funny novel, a political novel, a novel of romance and adventure — but most of all, it is a novel about the relationships between human beings, and how they reconcile those relationships with eternal, meaningful values or whether the struggle and failure to do so is both the great human tragedy, and the source of man’s inherent dignity.

Subscribe and click the bell for more high quality living and elegant style. Give this a like and stay until the end – this book will take you away from your world. Grab a cup of tea. Get cosy. This is quite the compendium of multiple stories with one overarching narrative. 

T. H. WHITE: A SHORT BIOGRAPHY

Terrence Hanbury White was born on May 29, 1906, in British-occupied India; his father worked with the Indian police, and his mother was allegedly “psychopathic,” according to biographer Sylvia Townsend Warner. 

He attended Cheltenham College in England and then Queen’s College at Cambridge University, where he graduated with first class honours, having written extensively on fellow English writer, Thomas Malory.

He wrote novels during summer vacations, but it wasn’t until 1936 that he re-embraced the Malory legend. He wrote in his notes, “The whole Arthurian story is a regular Greek doom, comparable to that of Orestes.” He began work on the book that would become The Sword in the Stone. That book made him an overnight success.

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As World War II approached, he wrote the second book, The Witch in the Wood — which would later be re-edited and retitled The Queen of Air and Darkness, and then The Ill-Made Knight. Finally, in 1939, he completed The Candle In The Wind. He did write a fifth volume, The Book of Merlyn, but his publisher essentially rejected it; some editions of The Once and Future King now include it. In 1958, for the first time, the compendium known as The Once and Future King, which includes all volumes and The Book of Merlyn, was published.

Two years later, Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, creators of My Fair Lady, tried to turn the last three books into Camelot, a musical which contains a multiplicity of beautiful songs (How to Handle a Woman and If Ever I Would Leave You among them) but little of the magic of the book.

White was widely characterised as peculiar. He lived alone, pursued hobbies including hunting and fishing with alacrity, and was rumoured to be a homosexual and a sado-masochist in his personal life. 

He devoted himself to learning what Warner called “techniques,” adding “it was part of his theory about the Renaissance or polytechnic man who could shoot and hunt a hare in the morning, fell a tree in the afternoon, and write a sonnet in the evening. If he saw an implement—plough or paintbrush—he wanted to use it; if he watched a skill, to practise it, and having got what he wanted, went on to something else.”

He died at the age of 57, with The New York Times obituary quoting one reviewer who called White “a modern exile in time longing for the past. If he had lived in his beloved past, he might well have been hanged as a warlock.”

THE SWORD IN THE STONE: LEARNING TO BE HUMAN

The Sword in the Stone, which brought White to international prominence, has little connection to Malory; Malory’s epic does not cover Arthur’s youth. The Sword In The Stone posits Merlyn as a guide for a young bastard named Wart, treated well by his guardian, Sir Ector, but increasingly badly by his quasi-adopted brother Kay. 

Merlyn takes Wart under his wing and teaches him what he will need to know to become King of England, and the hero of legend. Merlyn doesn’t bother versing Wart in religion or politics directly; he understands that the best teacher is experience — and he understands that children must be allowed to take risks so that they may grow. Merlyn is no helicopter parent. “I will come,” he tells Wart on his first foray into the natural world. “But in future you will have to go by yourself. Edu- cation is experience, and the essence of experience is self-reliance.”

White describes the process of Wart’s education in romantic, exciting terms: “The Wart did not know what Merlyn was talking about, but he liked him to talk. He did not like the grown-ups who talked down to him, but the ones who went on talking in their usual way, leaving him to leap along in their wake, jumping at meanings, guessing, clutching at known words, and chuckling at complicated jokes as they suddenly dawned. He had the glee of the porpoise then, pouring and leaping through strange seas.”

As part of his education, Merlyn turns Wart into various types of animals and then allows Wart to learn of the benefits and drawbacks of each. He first turns him into a fish; Wart is confronted with the grave threat of absolute monarchy by the pike: “The great body, shadowy and almost invisible among the stems, ended in a face which had been ravaged by all the passions of an absolute monarch — by cruelty, sorrow, age, pride, selfishness, loneliness and thoughts too strong for individual brains.” The King of the Moat speaks only a few words:

There is nothing … 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 paid on us by the forces of evolution. Pleasure is the bit 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.

The pike’s slogan, of course, will become everything Wart fights as King Arthur.

Wart quickly realises that pure physical might is not the only type of might — the power of the brain is greater. When he is transformed into a merlin in order to learn from the hawks, he escapes the clutches of the insane and violent Colonel Cully by tricking him.

But then Wart learns that the mind can be overcome, too, by the power of collectivism. His transformation into an ant teaches him the evils of totalitarianism, with its slogan, “EVERY- THING NOT FORBIDDEN IS COMPULSORY.” That slogan resonates in today’s politics when we consider the general argument made by many that only the government has the sufficiently sublime wisdom to control our lives for our own sake.

Among the ants, thought is obviated by the constant propaganda of song, the never-ending drumbeat of orders, the power of the hive-mind. Even the possibility of dissent has been foreclosed, thanks to the lack of language to describe fundamental ideas like freedom and dignity or right and wrong:

The extraordinary thing was that he could not ask these questions. In order to ask them, he would have had to put them into ant language through his antennae — and he now discovered, with a helpless feeling, that there were no words for the things he wanted to say. There were no words for happiness, for freedom, for liking, nor were there any words for their opposites. He felt like a dumb man trying to shout ‘Fire!’ The nearest he could get to Right or Wrong, even, was to say Done or Not Done.

War is the predominant mode of raising patriotic feeling: “It also explained that Ant the Father had ordained in his wisdom that Othernest pismires should always be the slaves of Thisnest ones.” The ants are motivated by a series of self-contradictory arguments all held in common:

“We are more numerous than they are, therefore we have a right to their mash …. They are more numerous than we are, therefore they are wickedly trying to steal our mash …”

Wart’s education continues. From Archimedes the owl, he learns that pigeons are the best bird, because they are “loving individualists surviving against the forces of massacre only by wisdom in escape.” And from the geese he learns that man is one of the only animals that hunts its own kind: “what creature could be so low as to go about in bands, to murder others of its own blood.” 

From the badger, he learns the final lesson: the nature of mankind. The badger tells a re-capitulated story of the creation of mankind, with this denouement, spoken by God to man:

Man, you will be a naked tool all your life, though a user of tools. You will look like an embryo thill they bury you, but all the others will be embryos before your might. Eternally undeveloped, you will always remain potential in Our image, able to see some of Our sorrows and to feel some of Our joys. We are partly sorry for you, Man, but partly hopeful. Run along then, and do your best. And listen, Man, before you go … Well, We were just going to say, God bless you.

Merlyn knows, because he lives time backwards, that his quest — to train a King to rectify the wrongs of the world — is doomed to failure. After all, Merlyn has lived the future already. But he still feels compelled to intervene in history, hoping that perhaps that tragic future can be changed anyway. 

Arthur is drawn into the same quest. Urged by all the animals, Wart draws the sword from the stone, and becomes King Arthur. It is a triumphant moment, but it is also a tragic one, because Wart has now embarked on the quest that will destroy him.

THE QUEEN OF AIR AND DARKNESS: BECOMING A KING

Arthur has become king. But he has not yet become a legend.

To become a legend, Arthur will have to apply the lessons of his youth to the task of ruling.

He must both use power and deny himself the aphrodisiac; he must both pursue the right and remain open to learning that he is wrong. These are the tasks of leadership, both in myth and in reality.

King Arthur begins his kingship with military victory. And he revels in it. For that, he is chided by Merlyn, who spits, “If there is one thing I can’t stand, it is stupidity. I always say that stupidity is the Sin against the Holy Ghost.” In Merlyn’s view, Arthur has forgotten that battles are the glory of the elite, but that the blood spilled is that of the peasants. Arthur learns the lessons — he later implements a rule for his knights that they ought to attack enemy nobles, to “press the war home to its real lords — until they themselves were ready to refrain from warfare, being confronted with its reality.”

Arthur also must learn, Merlyn says, that war can nearly always be justified by someone’s claims against someone else’s father. History, says Merlyn, is an age-old story of victimisation; men need little excuse to battle one another. Merlyn says, “if we go on living backward like that, we shall never come to the end of it … You simply go on and on, until you get to Cain and Abel …. The destiny of Man is to unite, not divide. If you keep on dividing you end up as a col-lection of monkeys throwing nuts at each other out of separate trees.”

These are lessons we ought to remember in our intersectional present, when an entire political class claims that the sins of the great-great-grandfathers ought to be visited on their progeny.

No, says Merlyn, there is only one good reason to fight: “that is, if the other man starts it. You see, wars are a wickedness, perhaps the greatest wickedness of a wicked species. They are so wicked that they must not be allowed. When you can be perfectly certain that the other

man started them, then is the time when you might have a sort of duty to stop him.” Arthur takes these lessons to heart. Finally, at long last, he formulates his theory of rulership, at least in its first stage:

Might is not Right. But there is a lot of Might knocking about in this world, and something has to be done about it …. Why can’t you harness Might so that it works for Right? I know it sounds nonsense, but, I mean, you can’t just say there is no such thing. The Might is there, in the bad half of people, and you can’t neglect it. You can’t cut it out, but you might be able to direct it, if you see what I mean, so that it was useful instead of bad …. My idea is that if we can win this battle in front of us, and get a firm hold of the country, then I will institute a sort of order of chivalry.

And so the Knights of the Round Table is born.

But there is still one more lesson about war that Arthur must understand, and must keep in mind, Merlyn warns: that too much moral certainty, too much belief that one is undoubtedly right, can also lead to the rule of might. When Kay tells him that there could be good reason for starting a war in forcing a good way on those “too wicked or too stupid to accept his way,” Merlyn responds with an anachronistic reference to Adolf Hitler:

Very interesting. There was just such a man when I was young — an Austrian who invented a new way of life and convinced himself that he was the chap to make it work. He tried to impose his reformation by the sword, and plunged the civilised world into misery and chaos. But the thing which they fellow had overlooked, my friend, was that he had had a predecessor in the reformation business, called Jesus Christ. Perhaps we may assume that Jesus knew as much as the Austrian did about saving people. But the odd thing is that Jesus did not turn the disciples into storm troopers, burn down the Temple at Jerusalem, and fix the blame on Pontius Pilate. On the contrary, he made it clear that the business of the phi-losopher was to make ideas available, and not to impose them on people.

Liberty surely requires regularity and rule of law. But it also requires humility in the application of force — or, as philosopher and economist F.A. Hayek once observed, “If we are to advance, we must leave room for a continuous revision of our present conceptions and ideals which will be necessitated by further experience.”

We cannot assume we know everything.

And so King Arthur becomes ready to assume his legend.

But there is only one problem: King Arthur is still a man. And because he is a man, he sows the seeds of his own downfall. He is seduced by his half-sister, Queen Morgause, and she conceives a child: Mordred. King Arthur’s creation and treatment of that child will lead, in the end, to the destruction of all of his dreams.

THE ILL-MADE KNIGHT: THE STORY OF MAN, GOD, AND SIN

King Arthur may be the best king, but he is not the best man — not the holiest or the most reverent, not the most powerful or the most magnetic. That man is Lancelot. Lancelot is, in White’s description, uniquely ugly, plagued by self-doubt (the song C’est Moi from Lerner and Loewe’s Camelot is the most inaptly conceived song in the show, and essentially destroys Lancelot’s character). In fact, we learn, “The boy thought there was something wrong with him. 

All through his life — even when he was a great man with the world at his feet — he was to feel this gap: something at the bottom of his heart of which he was aware, and ashamed, but which he did not understand.” Where Arthur grew up carefree, tutored by Merlyn, Lancelot grew up jousting and fighting; where Arthur’s fantasies were of transformation into fantastic beasts, Lancelot’s dreams are of his desires thwarted.

Lancelot is a man of honour. He has a “Word.” As White describes it, “He considered it, as the ignorant country people still consider it, to be the most valuable of possessions … His Word was valuable to him not only because he was good, but also because he was bad. It is the bad people who need to have principles to restrain them …. One reason why he fell in love with Guenever was because the first thing he had done was to hurt her.”

Lancelot struggles to escape his love for Guenever. He goes on quests. He fights battles. He attempts to maintain his honour, his Word. And in that struggle, he earns the title of hero. He battles the corrupt, the violent. He is more introspective than the usual knight — he is sorry in having to kill a criminal, violently ill after failing to execute a murderous husband. He is, in short, a man with a soul.

Guenever, by contrast, seems almost soulless. She struts and preens and complains. White is sympathetic to her, but not overly so — and this characterization of Guenever does seem to mar the narrative. His only explanation of Guenever’s behaviour is her age:

At twenty-two, the age of thirty seems to be the verge of senility. The marriage between her and Arthur had been what they call a ‘made’ marriage …. It had been a successful union, as ‘made’ marriages generally are, and before Lancelot came on the scene the young girl had adored her famous husband, even if he was so old …. you might say that she had felt everything except the passion of romance.

Nonetheless, the affair between Lancelot and Guenever, their coming together “with the click of two magnets coming together,” overwhelms them. And it is Guenever who over- whelms Lancelot, not truly the other way around. After all, Lancelot struggles, where Guenever does not seem to:

If it is difficult to explain about Guenever’s love for two men at the same time, it is almost impossible to explain about Lancelot. At least it would be impossible nowadays, when everybody is so free from superstitions, and prejudice that it is only necessary for all of us to do as we please …. One reason for his dilemma was that he was a Christian …. Another stumbling block to doing as he pleased was the very idea of chivalry or of civilization which Arthur had first invented and then introduced into his own young mind …. Finally, there was the impediment of his nature.

And Lancelot does resist. He continues to resist. But there is one aspect of Lancelot’s thinking that is completely lacking, and it is in this lack that his downfall is sown: Lancelot does not truly believe in forgiveness, at least not for himself. After he performs a miracle on Elaine and is falsely seduced by her through potions and enchantment, he weeps, believing that Elaine has “stolen his might” — might have derived from the rightness of his virginity. “When I was little,” he explained to Elaine, “I prayd to God that he would let me work a miracle. Only virgins can work miracles. I wanted to be the best knight in the world. I was ugly and lonely. The people of your village said that I was the best knight of the world, and I did work my Miracle when I got you out of the water. I did not know it would be my last as well as my first.”

And so, believing that his capacity for saintliness is gone, Lancelot goes to Guenever and begins his affair in earnest. Guenever, for her part, enthusiastically embraces the affair — she prays for it. And Lancelot gives up on himself forever — or so he thinks. He tells Guenever,

“These were my dreams, Jenny. I am only telling you what I used to day-dream about. They are what I mean by my miracles, which are lost now. I have given you my hopes, Jenny, as a present from my love.”

And what of Arthur? Arthur, of course, knows that Lancelot and Guenever are in love. We know little of Arthur’s relationship with Guenever — their marriage was political, but filled with affection — but we know that Guenever is far younger in spirit than Arthur, who is eight years her senior. And Arthur looks the other way because he is forgiving and kind. He retreats. “Arthur was strong and gentle enough to hope that, if he trusted Lancelot and Guenever, things would come right in the end. It seemed to him that this was better than trying to bring them right at once by such courses as, for instance, by cutting off the lovers’ heads for treason.”

Arthur is the only forgiving member of the triangle — and for this, he pays the price. Guenever is unforgiving about Lancelot’s entanglement with Elaine — she drives him to madness. And Lancelot cannot forgive himself for his sins. He returns to court, eventually, and seems to sink into a status quo.

But then, a change: Lancelot is offered the possibility of redemption. That possibility presents itself as the quest for the Holy Grail, a quest designed by Arthur in order to re-channel the ag- gression of the knights away from their self-destructive pursuits. Arthur explains:

While there were still giants and dragons and wicked knights of the old brigade, we could keep them occupied: we could keep them in order …. we have invented a moral sense, which is rotting now that we can’t give it employment. And when a moral sense begins to rot it is worse than when you had none. I suppose that all endeavours which are directed to a purely worldly end, as my famous Civilization was, contain within themselves the germs of their own corruption.

And Lancelot finds redemption. He discovers that his pride in his own abilities have fore- closed the possibility of something higher. He quests for the Holy Grail; his own son with Elaine, Sir Galahad, finds it. And he rediscovers God.

In rediscovering God, of course, he must cut off his relationship with Guenever. And he does so. But all is changed again when Guenever is accused of murder. Arthur can do nothing to forestall the action — he has sought to move beyond might as right, and instead sought rule of law and civil justice. And so Lancelot must step in and save Guenever. And then save her again, as it turns out, when she is accused of adultery by Sir Meliagrance. The result is once again a new sort of status quo:

It is a story of love in the old days, when adults loved faithfully – not a story of the present, in which adolescents pursue the ignoble spasms of the cinematograph … Lancelot had given his God to Guenever, and she had given him his freedom in exchange … [Arthur] was inventing Law as power. Nor had Arthur cause for private reproach. He had kept himself aloof.

But there is one final note, and one final miracle — and as it turns out, one final tragedy: Lancelot is granted another miracle. He heals a man with an eternally bleeding wound. “The miracle,” White says, “was that he had been allowed to do a miracle.”

But in God’s mercy, Lancelot’s fate is sealed. Had he been denied the miracle, perhaps he might have been humiliated and turned once again from Guenever to God; had he been denied the miracle, perhaps he would have abandoned God altogether and absconded with Guenever. Either possibility might have forestalled the tragedy of Camelot. Instead, God — like Arthur — treats Lancelot with mercy. And in the process, fate is sealed.

THE CANDLE IN THE WIND: THE TRAGEDY OF REALITY

The fourth part of The Once and Future King is the culmination of the tragedy. It is brought about by the simple fact that while individuals may be merciful, the law cannot be — and in the movement from barbarism to civilization, we can easily forget that civilization relies on the continuation of moral education. It is not sufficient unto itself.

Arthur’s journey has taken him from unlearned youth to national leader to founder of civil law. He has moved from might on behalf of right to might toward civil law and justice. As White describes, “It was the age of fullness, the age of wading into everything up to the neck … [Arthur] was the patron saint of chivalry … He was the badge of everything that was good in the Middle Ages, and he had made these things himself.”

Only a man born in barbarism could have taken on the task of civilising a nation. But the new system punishes the barbarism of old. Only a forgiving society, steeped in moral education, can understand that simple fact and allow for progress. But Mordred, driven by hatred, is incapable of forgiveness; Mordred, Arthur’s own son, can never forgive his father for abandoning him to drown, and instead sides with the original barbarism of his mother, channelled through the niceties of law and politics. It does not matter that Arthur regrets his deed, or that he refuses to use his power to kill Mordred. Mordred must have his revenge.

The Candle In The Wind begins with Mordred’s half-brother, Agravaine, recognizing that if the Orkneys are to have their revenge, they can only do so by raising popular resistance to the chivalric ideal:

You need a national grievance — something to do with politics which is waiting to burst out. You need to use the tools which are ready to hand …. We could say we were in favour of a national movement. For that matter, we could join them together and call it national communism. But it has to be something broad and popular, which everyone can feel. It must be against large numbers of people, like the Jews or the Normans or the Saxons, so that everybody can be angry.

Agravaine knows that in order for this movement to succeed, there must be a break in the power of Arthur’s administration. And that break can take place over Lancelot and Guenever.

“Then,” says Agravaine, “would be the time to take your famous revenge.” And Mordred takes advantage, because he had “found himself misshapen, intelligent, critical, in a civilization which was too straightforward for purely intellectual criticism.”

Mordred stands on the same moral high ground that those who destroy always stand on: the moral high ground of consistency. He argues to his brothers that to expose Lancelot and Guenever — and to subject Arthur to the trial — is necessary in order to fight hypocrisy.

“I may be a weak knight at jousting,” he tells Gawaine, “but I have the courage to stand for my family and rights. I am not a hypocrite.” But, of course, Mordred isn’t standing for the code of chivalry or the love of justice. He is seeking to destroy them, suggesting that it is better that a correct code filled with exceptions be levelled than that it exist in the first place. Only those who wish to uphold an institution have the moral wherewithal to challenge its hypocrisy. Those who wish to destroy that institution are merely looking for the most handy brickbat available.

Arthur, for his part, despises his own sin. And he vows that he will not be a party to such sin ever again, even if it means dispensing with mercy: “You must remember I am the King of England …. If I don’t stand for law, I won’t have law among my people …. I have to be absolutely just …. The only way I can keep clear of force is by justice. Far from being willing to execute his enemies, a real king must be willing to execute his friends.” He has not been put to the test, though. And Mordred puts him to the test, aided and abetted by the foolish complacency of Lancelot and Guenever, who though warned, insist on risking the fate of the kingdom for just another evening together. Arthur sees Mordred’s test as historic vengeance for his own sins:

When I was a young man I did something which was not just, and from it has sprung the misery of my life. Do you think you can stop the consequences of a bad action, by doing good ones afterwards? I don’t. I have been trying to stopper it down with good actions, ever since, but it goes on in widening circles. It will not be stoppered.

In the end, crisis is nearly averted; Guenever, though sentenced to death, is rescued by Lancelot. But in the process, Lancelot kills Gawaine’s brothers Gareth and Gaheris, neither of whom was involved in Mordred’s scheme. And Mordred quickly moves to motivate his brother, Gawaine, Arthur’s last true ally, in vengeance against Lancelot. Even after Guenever is returned to Arthur by order of the Pope, and Lancelot is exiled, Gawaine must follow him to pursue his vengeance. Mordred then declares Arthur dead and himself king; he at- tempts to marry Guenever himself. Justice, he boldly proclaims, has never been his aim. Only vengeance.

And so, in the end, Arthur must come to grips with his own sin — and recognizes that he either had to choose fulsome justice, which would have meant the deaths of Guenever and Lancelot, or fulsome power, which would have meant the killing of Mordred. He chose neither, and so ended with a split kingdom, unable to solve the riddle of human existence. He was unable to solve that riddle because so many of man’s schemes depend, in the end, on the possibility of human change — and for nearly everyone, such change is extraordinarily difficult. As Arthur notes:

He had been taught by Merlyn to believe that man was perfectible: that he was on the whole more decent than beastly: that good was worth trying: that there was no such thing as original sin. He had been forged as a weapon for the aid of man, on the assumption that men were good … Might — to have ended it — to have made men happier. But the whole structure depended on the first premise: that man was decent …. if there was such a thing as original sin, if man was on the whole a villain, if the bible was right in saying that the heart of men was deceitful above all things and desperately wicked, then the purpose of his life had been a vain one. Chivalry and justice became child’s illusions …

But, of course, the reality of original sin does not damn man to eternal failure. The quest is not in vain. The quest remains a quest, the call a call. Man’s flaws do not obviate the pursuit of the right. In the end, White — a man of the rational — puts his faith in reason: “If people could be persuaded to read and write, not just to eat and make love, there was still a chance that they might come to reason.”

T.H. White did write a fifth book, The Book of Merlyn. It was only published years after The Once and Future King. It is deeply flawed — much of it is just Merlyn lecturing Arthur about politics and power by transforming him again into animals. But the last chapter spells out the fates of the various characters. Arthur and Mordred divide England; their peace is broken by the presence of a snake, which prompts a soldier of Mordred’s to draw his sword, precipitating a battle in which Mordred is killed. Lancelot ends up in a monastery and Guenever in a nunnery. Arthur’s fate remains unknown. But if legend holds true, he will return again, and bring with him the glory of justice and the power of right.

Every month, we have a new book. I have the full list of books for the year here you can download for free. Sometimes I like to know what happens, but still go back and study such magnificent works nonetheless. These are behemoths that you can tear into over and over again and always learn something new.

STUDY QUESTIONS

1. Merlin’s method of raising Arthur is to allow him to experience the world. Is that the best way to educate him?
   
2. Is Lancelot’s faith the problem, or is it his inability to live up to that faith?
   
3. What is Guinever’s motivation?
   
4. Is Arthur a good king or a bad king?
   
5. Why does Mordred want to destroy Arthur?
   
6. Compare and contrast Gawaine and Mordred.
   
7. How does the story of the Holy Grail tie into the broader story?
   
8. How do the rules of justice prevent Arthur from preserving his kingdom?
   
9. What is the relationship between ancient wrongs and modern solutions?
   
10. What is the book’s view toward war, and when is it necessary?
    
11. Is White’s optimistic view of mankind justified?
    
12. Was the Round Table doomed to fail?
    

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