We Shall Not All Sleep: Legacy and Resurrection in “The Once and Future King”

I may have grown up on Disney’s The Sword in the Stone and Mary Pope Osborne’s Magic Tree House series, but that does not make me an expert in Arthurian legend. I seem to have always known the names of the primary characters—Arthur, Lancelot, Guenever, Gawaine, Galahad—but only because those names were “in the air,” not because I ever studied Arthurian literature seriously. I cannot remember a time when I didn’t know that Arthur pulled the sword out of the stone, or that Lancelot was the greatest knight of the Round Table, or that Sir Gawaine faced the Green Knight. I imagine that many, if not most, educated Americans have had a similar experience. King Arthur lives in our imaginations, even if we have never truly encountered him.

Earlier this year, I decided to remedy my lack of exposure to the Arthurian stories by reading T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, and I was truly surprised at what I found. White’s novel, a retelling of Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, is not only a glorious celebration of the mythology surrounding King Arthur, but also a beautiful meditation on the worth of a human life. T.H. White’s The Once and Future King leads the reader on a journey through a life well-lived—a life that is meaningful not because of its immediate impact, but because of the legacy that King Arthur leaves behind and the hope of his future resurrection.

The Once and Future King is a compilation of four fantasy novels that chronicle the major events of the life of King Arthur, the mythological king of England who, according to legend, founded Camelot and the famous Knights of the Round Table. Originally, White published each of these novels separately. In 1938, he first published The Sword in the Stone, the comparatively whimsical tale of Arthur’s youth and education by the wizard Merlyn. The second novel, The Queen of Air and Darkness, was published a year later, telling the story of Arthur’s early reign. The Ill-Made Knight was published soon after in 1940, setting Arthur as protagonist aside and telling the story of Lancelot, King Arthur’s most famous knight, and his tragic affair with Arthur’s wife, Guenever. White wrote these first three novels before World War II, but left King Arthur’s story unfinished until eighteen years later—several years after the end of the war. White published his last Arthurian novel, The Candle in the Wind, in 1958, as part of the completed saga, a composite work which he titled The Once and Future King.

This giant of a novel, which fantasy historian Lin Carter called “the single finest fantasy novel written in our time, or for that matter, ever written,” begins with the childhood of a young boy known only as the Wart. The Wart has been adopted into the family of Sir Ector, a kindly knight, and he grows up knowing that his fate is one day to become the squire of his adopted brother, Kay. But when he is lost in the woods one day, the Wart stumbles across Merlyn, an eccentric wizard who insists that he come to Sir Ector’s castle and educate the Wart. Much of Merlyn’s eccentricity stems from the fact that because he is aging backward, he has already seen everything that is to come in the future, including the horrors of World War II, although he often mixes up what is in the future and what is in the past.

Merlyn educates the Wart by using magic to turn him into various animals. In this way, the Wart learns about the culture and political struggles of the ants, the fish, the geese, and other animals. But the Wart’s childhood adventures come to an end when there is a proclamation throughout the land that the old king, Uther Pendragon, is dead, and that since he left behind no son, a trial will determine Pendragon’s successor. In an old churchyard, a sword lies lodged in a stone; whoever pulls the sword from the stone will be crowned the rightful king of England. Searching for an extra sword for his brother Kay, the Wart pulls the sword out of the stone without even realizing what he has done—and so the Wart, little more than a boy, is crowned King Arthur of England.

When England is immediately plunged into war, Arthur initially responds with amusement, calling battles “fun.” But when Merlyn persuades him to think more deeply about the realities of war, Arthur has the groundbreaking idea that perhaps Might does not make Right after all. Perhaps, Arthur muses, “right” is an objective good that must be protected. Based on this radical idea, Arthur decides that the might of warriors ought to be channeled into defending right, rather than exploiting the vulnerable. Upon these principles the Round Table is established, a group of knights who swear to use their might only in protection of the innocent and helpless.

While this idea initially works quite well, the events of Arthur’s life continually force him to reshape his vision of what the Round Table should look like. Once the giants and the evil spirits are expelled out of England, the knights (who were never all that civilized to begin with) get bored and start causing trouble. In response to this problem, Arthur decides that perhaps might cannot only be channeled as a force for good, but it must be put in service of God and the spiritual realm. The king sends his knights out on a quest for the Holy Grail—but those who fail the quest come back broken and disheartened, and those who succeed never come back at all; for as the narrator tells us, “if you achieve perfection, you die.” Meanwhile, the politics at Arthur’s court are beginning to fall apart. His best friend, Lancelot, falls in love with his wife, Guenever, and they maintain a decades-long affair. His knights grow restless and split into factions. His bastard son, Mordred—conceived by treachery through an incestuous union with Arthur’s half-sister, Morgause—is plotting against his king and father. Camelot is poised to fall into ruin—as it eventually does, leaving only the memory of King Arthur’s glorious ideal behind.

This is, of course, a fundamental element of the Arthurian myth: that every story told about King Arthur’s knights comes with a warning, a background tension that stems from the knowledge that Camelot is always doomed from the beginning to fall. This trait is what compelled one of my English professors to call the Arthurian legends “inter-apocalyptic.” In other words, the English world before King Arthur is one of chaos and disarray, and so is the world after. Camelot, beautiful as it may be, dwells in the magical realm between apocalypses. It is an oasis of civilization in an old and brutal world.

In fact, this tension is so fundamental to Arthurian mythology that one could say it lies at the heart of White’s retelling, which grapples primarily with one foundational question: Is the Round Table worth it? This question is not easy, especially when considered from the perspective of that very king who brings light and civilization to England—and then watches England fall into darkness again. In the words of Rudyard Kipling, King Arthur watches “the things [he] gave [his] life to broken,” and he never even has the chance to “stoop and build ‘em up with worn-out tools.”

In White’s imagination, the trouble with Camelot was never a flaw in Arthur. When Arthur is deceived by magic and compelled unwittingly to sleep with his half-sister, White is quick to point out the fact that although this fatal mistake plants the seeds of the end for Camelot, the deception is not Arthur’s fault. But “in tragedy,” White notes wisely, “innocence is not enough.” If it were, Camelot never would have fallen at all, because Arthur is nothing if not innocent. Indeed, that very innocence is what compels Merlyn to choose Arthur, educate him in the ways of nature, and encourage him to rely on his own compassion and desire for good. The King Arthur who brings peace and order to England is the same Arthur who, as a child, tells Merlyn wistfully that “if I were to be made a knight…I should pray to God to let me encounter all the evil in the world in my own person, so that if I conquered there would be none left, and, if I were defeated, I would be the one to suffer for it.” Merlyn replies, “Suppose they did not let you stand against all the evil in the world?” but with all the simplicity of a child, Arthur says, “I could ask.”

This prophetic moment lays the groundwork for the whole of Arthur’s life, because in a sense, Arthur does indeed encounter all the evil in the world in his own person. He establishes the best kingdom the world has ever seen, and in return his knights rebel, his best friend makes him a cuckold, and his own son betrays him and usurps the throne. But at the novel’s close, when the old man Arthur finds himself alone in his tent the night before his last battle, he is forced to grapple with the question of whether his youthful desire to bear the suffering of the whole world was nothing more than a naïve dream. Like Christ in Gethsemane, Arthur undergoes a night of torment and suffering as he thinks back on the work of his life and ponders whether or not it has been worthwhile. During this dark night of Arthur’s soul, he is tempted in two ways to denounce the good to which he has devoted his entire life.

Arthur’s first temptation is to believe that man is too corrupt to change. As he thinks through his life’s work on the night before his death, Arthur notes that if “that heart of men was deceitful above all things and desperately wicked,” then “chivalry and justice became a child’s illusions.” If Homo sapiens, Arthur muses, is really Homo ferox, then the entire purpose of his life—to establish a society of law and order, of peace, of rights instead of force—has been entirely in vain. Since society is comprised of nothing but humans, the humans must be capable of peace and order before society can achieve peace and order. In his last hours, Arthur is tempted to believe that men are so evil that they lie beyond all hope of salvation.

Arthur’s second temptation is to give up the concept of objective “good” entirely, adopting a philosophy of rigid, chemical materialism instead. “Perhaps man was neither good nor bad,” Arthur thinks, “[but] was only a machine in an insensate universe…. Perhaps there were no virtues…and humanity only a mechanical donkey led on by the iron carrot of love, through the pointless treadmill of reproduction.” This second temptation is more dangerous than the first. The first temptation at least acknowledges that even if mankind is entirely depraved, there is still something good and holy out there—something that can be admired, if not attained. But in his second temptation, Arthur wonders whether the structure of the universe itself does not allow for an ideal like the Round Table. Camelot was doomed to fail not because mankind is flawed, but because everything fails—because the cold heart of entropy devours everything in the end.

While Arthur’s temptations arrive at very different conclusions, they both grow out of the same sin: despair. King Arthur, however, is not alone in that despair. Like Arthur, we too are faced with the same temptation to cynicism. When we fail to achieve our plans and desires—or, worse, when we achieve them and then lose them again—we fear that perhaps our effort was always in vain. We blame ourselves, or we blame those around us, or we blame God. We sin in our despair when we think that mankind is beyond all hope or that the world is just a materialist machine, but it is difficult to blame us too much. It is hard to bear when you watch the things you gave your life to broken. When the world is inter-apocalyptic, when the best you can possibly do is create a little haven in the storm, knowing that the hurricane will eventually blow everything away, what comfort can we possibly find?

But as dawn grows near, King Arthur calls a little page boy named Tom into the tent. He asks Tom to run away tonight so that he will not die in the battle tomorrow along with the rest of the army. When Tom asks why, Arthur tells his own story: the story of a compassionate boy named the Wart who grew to be a compassionate king named Arthur, who had a beautiful idea that fell to pieces in the end, and who passed that idea along to a brave page boy named Tom so that the world would never forget about the idea. He knights the boy and sends him off to bear his candle in the wind—a tiny torch of hope to light the world again.

Out of all the material that White has borrowed from the traditional Arthurian legends, he has invented this particular scene, of course. The boy is Sir Thomas Malory, and White lets us imagine that Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur is Arthur’s candle in the wind, the story that continues to keep King Arthur’s memory alive even today. After Arthur delivers this message, White tells us that he “felt refreshed, clear-headed, almost ready to begin again.” Indeed, according to White: “There would be a day—there must be a day—when he would come back to Gramarye with a new Round Table which had no corners, just as the world had none—a table without boundaries between the nations who would sit to feast there.” But that time has not yet come, and in the morning, “the Majesty of England drew himself up to meet the future with a peaceful heart.” The king has conquered his temptations. He has fought for—and won—his hope back again.

But what is King Arthur’s hope? The existentialist might answer this question by pointing at the state of the world around us. Many of the ideals that Arthur invented and fought for, mythologically if not historically, today form the foundational structures of the entire developed world. The axioms that might does not make right, that the rule of law is the ultimate protector of justice, that just wars are fought in self-defense—these principles have come to comprise the backbone of modern political thought. Arthur plants a garden that he will not live to see, but he finds hope in the mere fact that the garden will bear fruit, even though he himself will never taste it. Arthur’s life is meaningful because of a future he will never live in—or so the existentialist argument goes.

But White’s novel points us in a different direction. At one point in King Arthur’s early reign, Merlyn tells Arthur that he will be going away soon, and that Arthur must learn to think and rule on his own. When Arthur expresses sorrow at the prospect of losing Merlyn forever, the wise old wizard makes another revelation:

I will tell you something else, King, which may be a surprise for you. It will not happen for hundreds of years, but both of us are to come back. Do you know what is going to be written on your tombstone? Hic jacet Arthurus Rex quondam Rexque futurus. Do you remember your Latin? It means, the once and future king.

King Arthur’s hope, then, is not merely that he has left a legacy behind. It is that Arthur himself will one day see the glory of his legacy—not in a dream, not as a disembodied spirit, but with his own eyes. The once and future king of England will touch the earth again, will feel the breeze again, will rule his people again. The king is coming back.

The Christological implications are so obvious as to be almost trite. King Arthur—the mythological king who suffers, dies, and will come again one day—is, of course, a Christological figure. But in the light of this conspicuous interpretation, it would be all too easy to overlook a subtler (and perhaps more interesting) observation: that Christians have always believed in the exact hope that Arthur carries to his death. “If there is no resurrection of the dead,” St. Paul writes, “then not even Christ has been raised…. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied.” This is the grand mystery of the Christian story, a hope so remarkable that countless martyrs took it to the grave: that “We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed…[and] the dead will be raised imperishable.” Humans, made of dust, will one day be formed of the same substance as Christ. “You are gods,” the psalmist sings, “sons of the Most High.”

So Arthur is Christ, yes, but he is also humanity. And humanity, in turn, is Christ. The great mythological prophecy that Arthur will rise again could be said of every Christian. Each and every Christian grave could rightfully be inscribed with the words attributed to the stone marking King Arthur’s resting place: Hic iacet rex quondam rexque futurus.

Here lies a once and future king.

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