uberkeyzer posted:

Fabulous job of summarizing a very tangled history -- this is a great resource.

Not that it needs my help, but I want to throw some support behind anyone interested in Arthur, or just reading books in general, picking up The Once and Future King. I agree that the later books are a bit more "serious" if people are looking for something on the fluffier side, but I can't imagine anyone bouncing off of "The Sword and the Stone" -- it's wonderfully written and frequently hilarious.

Also, it may not have the same degree of factual historicity that later books have. But I think White, because of the way the book was written (in 4 chunks, one published in 1938, one in 1939, one in 1940, and the last in 1958) actually taps into the emotional heart of the story and most accurately depicts what it must have felt like to watch Arthur's kingdom fail. He watched the same thing happen to the world that he grew up in, and you really feel that as you slowly go from the optimism of the first book to the melancholy of the end -- but you never lose that hopeful spark.

Also, the whole geese/ant sequence. My god.