“Sword in the Stone”, Disney, 1963

The naturalist’s case for anarchy, according to Merlyn and the geese

A re-examination of political models, through the lens of T.H. White’s ‘Once and Future King: the Book of Merlyn’

marjorie steele
Published in
18 min readDec 8, 2019

--

It’s one of the single most influential works of literature of the 20th century, but hardly anyone knows its author — nor the frantically inspired political message he’d meant to be published as its capstone.

T.H. White’s “Once and Future King,” wasn’t always the five book compendium we know today. After the critical success of Sword in the Stone in 1939, The Witch in the Wood and The Ill-Made Knight were published the next two years. White wrote Candle In the Wind and The Book of Merlyn in 1942, intending them both to be published, along with the previous three, in a five book compendium. But WWII made paper scarce, and the anarchist, anti-war messaging of The Book of Merlyn was unpopular, and neither was published that decade.

Candle In the Wind was finally published in 1958, and presented as the final chapter in the saga. Disney made Sword in the Stone into a movie in 1963, and by 1967 books 2–4 had been made into a major Broadway musical production, and subsequent major Hollywood film: Camelot.

White watched these productions come out, and generally approved of them despite their deviance from the source material. But he never saw The Book of Merlyn — the philosophical capstone to his opus — published. Not until after his death in 1977, when the book was discovered among his papers, was the fifth and final book able to join the other four in official publication.

No major films or Broadway musicals have been made of The Book of Merlyn. Nothing whatsoever, really, has been made of them; even White’s biographer, Silvia Townsend Warner, says the book “clatters on like a factory with analysis, proof and counterproof, exhortation, demonstration, explanation, historical examples, parables from nature — even the hedgehog talks too much.”

Yet White was a visionary artist, whatever else he may have been, and The Book of Merlyn was his capstone: the philosophical opus of an internally conflicted conscientious war objector and naturalist, whose intelligence, hightened sensitivity to the world around him…

--

--

poet, educator, hillbilly gnostic pagan. teaching business to designers.