The Once and Future King (80 page)

THE ONCE AND FUTURE KING

Terence Hanbury White was born in 1906 in India, where his father was a member of the Indian Civil Service, and educated at Cheltenham and Cambridge.

The author of poems, books about hunting and other sports and some detective stories, he found fame and success with
The Sword in the Stone
(1939), the brilliantly imaginative retelling of King Arthur’s early life. He continued the story in
The Witch in the Wood
(1940) and
The Ill—Made Knight
(1941). In 1940, he wrote what was believed to be the final volume of his Arthurian saga,
The Candle in the Wind.
The four books were revised and published in 1958 as a single volume titled
The Once and Future King.

However, a further manuscript, concluding the story, was discovered among T. H. White’s papers at the University of Texas at Austin after the author’s death in 1964. This is
The Book of Merlyn
, written in 1941. Other papers at the University of Texas show that T. H. White intended all five books to make up the complete
The Once and Future King.
Here for the first time all five books appear as a whole. An afterword by White’s biographer Sylvia Townsend Warner reveals the story behind this greatest of English fantasy novels.

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This one—volume paperback edition 1996

FIFTEENTH EDITION

The Once and Future King
(comprising four books) first published in Great Britain by Collins 1958

The Book of Merlyn
first published in Great Britain by Collins 1977

The Once and Future King
Copyright © T. H. White 1939, 1940, 1958

The Book of Merlyn
Copyright © Shaftesbury Publishing Company 1977

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EPub Edition © JULY 2010 ISBN: 978-0-007-37556-1

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^*
Abbreviation for
suspendatur
, ‘let him be hanged.’

^†
‘Something comes of nothing.’ This is a parody or adaption of
ex nihilo nihil fit
, that is, ‘nothing comes of nothing,’ familiar (though not in that exact form) from both Lucretius and Persius.

^*
Literally, ‘now you send away’ or ‘now you let depart,’ from the Canticle of Simeon, Luke 2:29. This has come to be used in a general sense, signifying, ‘I’ve seen it all now; I can die happy.’

^*
‘The ant is an example of great industry.’

^*
‘Into Thy Hands.’ The entire phrase, from the death of Jesus (Luke 23:46), is ‘into Thy hands, I commend my spirit.’

^†
‘Here lies Arthur, the Once and Future King.’

^*
‘And Arthur too, stirring up wars beneath the earth.’