The Once and Future King Themes

Richard Linklater, eat your heart out. The Sword in the Stone is the original Boyhood.  We don't even know just how important Wart is until the very end of the first book. He's only "Wart," or...

The Winchester bros would be right at home in the medieval world White creates. For one, there are demons. Merlyn's father is even said to be one. There are also all sorts of fantastic beasts: Ques...

The next time you're mid-eyeroll at a family Thanksgiving, think of The Once and Future King. You have it comparatively easy.Because there is a significant dark side to family in White's story. Fam...

Of course, no rendition of the Arthurian cycle would be worth the paper it's written on if it neglected affairs of the heart. After all, we're talking about medieval romance here, so let's see some...

This is one of the biggies in The Once and Future King, and considering the time period in which White wrote it, we really shouldn't be surprised. Arthur thinks the outlaw barons like Sir Turquine...

Education doesn't really play that big of a role in T.H. White's source material. In fact, Malory really doesn't mention it at all: Arthur goes from being Sir Ector's foster son to the illustrious...

The workings of fate versus free will are all over the place in The Once and Future King. From King Pellinore—who Arthur notes wouldn't even hurt a fly—accidentally killing King Lot, to Arthur...

White was an unflinching pacifist—in fact, his anti-war views are pretty in your face in The Once and Future King. And they get progressively darker, since he continued to write and revise his wo...

There's a place for everyone and everyone has a place in the medieval society of The Once and Future King. For the most part, the upper classes didn't mix with the lower (unless it was to use them...

It's not surprising that a book called The Once and Future King is concerned with time. Just the fact that something could be "once" (in the past) and at the same time "future" (so existing in the...