The Sword in the Stone

Summary

The Sword in the Stone is T. H. White's comic and affectionate account of the boyhood of King Arthur, set in a merry, anachronistic Middle Ages. Arthur, called the Wart, is an orphan of unknown birth raised by the kindly Sir Ector at the Castle of the Forest Sauvage alongside Ector's son Kay, an older, proud and often unhappy boy who will one day be a knight while the Wart expects to be his squire. When Kay loses a goshawk in the forest, the Wart follows it, spends a night alone among the trees, meets the absent-minded King Pellinore, who has spent his life chasing the Questing Beast, and comes upon the cottage of Merlyn, an old magician who lives backward through time and keeps a sharp-tongued owl named Archimedes. Merlyn comes to the castle as the boys' tutor. His real lessons are transformations: he turns the Wart into a fish in the castle moat, where the great old pike who rules it teaches that power is the only thing that matters; into a merlin in the hawks' mews, where the trained hawks hold a stern night-time ceremony of courage; and into other creatures whose lives show him different ways of ruling and being ruled. The Wart also watches a slow, ridiculous joust between Pellinore and Sir Grummore Grummursum, is captured with Kay by the witch Madame Mim and rescued after a duel of shape-changing between her and Merlyn, joins the outlaw Robin Wood and Maid Marian to free captives from the enchanted castle of Morgan le Fay, where Kay kills a griffin, and follows a winter boar hunt in which the huntsman Twyti mourns his hound Beaumont. When Kay is to be knighted, the Wart grieves at the thought of being only a squire, and Merlyn tells him that learning is the cure for sadness. King Uther Pendragon dies without an heir, and a sword appears fixed in an anvil on a stone in a London churchyard, inscribed to say that whoever draws it is the rightful king. Sir Ector takes the boys to the New Year tournament; Kay forgets his sword, and the Wart, sent to fetch one, pulls the sword from the stone while the creatures he has known seem to urge him on. Kay at first claims the deed but confesses; Ector and Kay kneel to the Wart, he is crowned King Arthur, and his parentage as Uther's son is made known. Collins published the book in London in 1938, and a partly rewritten American edition followed from Putnam. White later revised it heavily as the first part of The Once and Future King (1958), dropping Madame Mim and the giant Galapas and adding episodes among ants and wild geese.

Top Lessons

• Learning as a remedy

  When the Wart is miserable at the thought of being Kay's squire, Merlyn tells him that the cure for sadness is to learn something. The book itself is a long schooling in which the boy who expects nothing becomes fit for the highest office by learning about every kind of life.

• Might is not right

  The pike in the moat tells the Wart that there is no power but power itself, and the boy is nearly eaten for listening. Merlyn's lessons set the Wart against that view, so that the future king learns early that strength alone is a bad rule for a kingdom.

• The humble one is chosen

  Kay is the knight and heir; the Wart is the foundling who fetches swords. Yet it is the Wart, sent on a squire's errand, who draws the sword from the stone. White shows that the boy who expected only to serve has the heart that makes a good ruler.

• Comedy and kindness

  White laughs at knights who joust for hours and at a king forever chasing a beast he never catches, but he never laughs cruelly. Pellinore, Sir Ector and the hunters are foolish and lovable at once, and the book teaches the reader to enjoy people's oddities with affection.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

The book is not about medicine, but White's knowledge of falconry gives it some animal psychology, and one episode turns on disease. In the hawks' mews the Wart, as a merlin, must keep a vigil within reach of the old goshawk Cully, whom the other hawks treat as dangerous and unbalanced; White, who trained a goshawk himself, knew the nervous temper of such birds at first hand. In the 1938 wizards' duel, Madame Mim changes into a dragon and Merlyn defeats her by turning into the germs of several infectious diseases, a joke that depends on the germ theory of disease being common knowledge by the 1930s. The huntsman Twyti's grief over his hound Beaumont, killed by the boar, is one of the book's quiet scenes of mourning. Any modern reading of these episodes is interpretive.

• The hawks' mews episode

  The Wart, changed into a merlin, keeps a night vigil beside the dangerous old goshawk Cully as an ordeal of courage set by the other hawks.

• The Madame Mim episode (1938 text only)

  In the shape-changing duel Merlyn becomes the microbes of a number of diseases and destroys the witch in her dragon form.

• The boar hunt

  Master Twyti weeps over his dead hound after the boar is killed.