I love this book-I read it back when I was a senior in high school while on an Arthurian kick, and it’s one of my all time favorites.
Now I’m re-reading it. It’s got everything-Arthurian legends, yes. And funny social commentary, humor, morals, messages, etc.
Damn good book.
I’ve read it! It’s a favorite of mine, too.
I think T.H. White had issues, but it’s still a great book. 
Yes - I love this book and always recommend it to folks getting into King Arthur legends. To my mind it’s the best version.
I read it about 20 years ago and really enjoyed it. I should re-read it.
I got it for Christmas last year, but have yet to read it…I’ve tried, but it’s been difficult for me to get into. Is there a place where it really picks up?
I read it a long time ago and really enjoyed it. Have you read The Book of Merlin? It’s a conclusion to TOAFK from White also. I really enjoyed it too.
I’ve read the whole series about six times, including the Book of Merlyn. It’s worth reading again and again. I find
White’s treatment of Lancelot to be the one of themost compelling versions of any hero ever.
It starts getting pretty dark by the second part and then gets progressivly darker. So if you aren’t enjoying it now, maybe you’ll find the shift in tone after the first book more interesting.
I’ve read it and reread it many a time, and introduced my kids to it as well. I agree with Bucky about White’s portrayal of Lancelot.
I read this back in high school (or junior high?), and I remember I enjoyed it. A lot of the details are a bit fuzzy, though, and I really should read it again. Isn’t Lancelot described as really ugly in White’s telling of the story? I also read the Book of Merlyn.
I also read Tennyson’s “Idylls of the King” around the same time. I think that’s what turned me onto Victorian art and literature–especially Pre-Raphaelite paintings, which have since become a major focus of my own work.
But I digress.
Do you mean book in a Tolkien LOTR sense (ie more than one “book” to a publication) or in a serial sense (ie more than one book to a series in separate publications)?
We had to read TOAFK for our 9th grade English class. To tell you the truth, I didn’t appreciate it that much at the time, b/c we had to read it. I actually liked the Walt Disney cartoon version of it better, The Sword & the Stone. Very entertaining.
This is one of my favorite books of all time.
Just the other day I made use of an expletive in one of my favorite passages of the book:
“Castor and Pollux blow me to Bermuda!”
My son and I are almost done with the Neverending Story. I think we’ll start the Sword in the Stone next.
Correction: that’s The Sword in the Stone
In the Tolkien sense.
We had to read the “Sword in the Stone” section for 11th grade English, but the rest of it was not required. I was the big geek who kept going anyway. Fantastic book. One of my favorites.
I’ve never read The Book of Merlyn, though. I’ll have to look that one up.
Oh yeah, great book. I read the Book of Merlyn, too. I think I’ll put it on the re-reading again list…
The novel The Once and Future King consists of four sections (I think that they were called ‘books’ and they had different dates of publication so I didn’t know if I should call them ‘books’ or ‘sections’). The four sections are called 1) The Sword in the Stone 2) The Queen of Air and Darkness 3) The Ill-Made Knight 4) The Candle in the Wind.
“The Sword in the Stone” is fairly whimsical. “The Queen of Air and Darkness” has some weird Freudian under-tones. “The Ill-Made Knight” deals with Lancelot’s angst and the begining of the end of Camelot. “The Candle in the Wind” is a sort of 'Twilight of the gods" story. I personally prefered the last three parts to the first one, so if TOAFK seems hard to get into, maybe you’ll have more luck by skipping “The Sword in the Stone”, if you have even the slightest knowledge about the King Arthur mythos you won’t be missing much, at least plot-wise.
Just one question, ouisey. How do you even almost finish a neverending story?
There are several differences between “The Sword and the Stone” as part I of “The Once and Future King,” and as a stand-alone book.
As a stand-alone book, it has the wizard’s duel between Merlin and Madam Mim (which is wonderful), but doesn’t have the wild geese and ants. Instead, it has a sort of “evolution” session where Wart gets turned into a stone and watches the geological evolution of the earth, told poetically.
I remember reading The Once and Future King, but I read it ages and ages ago. The Once and Future King, along with The Crystal Cave, were my first introductions to the stories of King Arthur and his posse.