The Sword in the Stone by T. H. White tells the story of the boyhood of King Arthur. He has no idea he is descended from royal blood. He’s growing up in the family of Sir Ector in his castle near the Sauvage Forest in England. Arthur is known then as “The Wart” and knows he is not a “proper son,” but we’re not told yet where he came from and how he got there. Sir Ector’s son, Kay, is about the Wart’s age, and they take lessons together in everything from History to jousting and hawking. Kay’s destiny is to become a knight: the best that The Wart can hope for is to become Kay’s squire.

When Sir Ector decides the boys need a tutor, the Wart happens upon Merlin. Merlin is a magician who is moving through time backwards, which often confuses him as to whether something is about to happen or has already happened. He is an able tutor, but he gives more time to the Wart, telling him it’s best to learn from experience and therefore turning him into various creatures, like a fish, a snake, an ant, a bird, and a badger, and sending him into each creatures environment to interact with others.

The Wart feels bad that Kay doesn’t get any adventures and wants Merlin to turn him into something, but Merlin insists he can’t use that magic for Kay. But he does send them off on a trail in the forest which leads them to Robin Hood’s camp and an expedition to save prisoners from the fairy queen, Morgan la Fey.

The word that seems to stand out to me to describe the Wart as a boy is decent. It’s not that he’s brave because bravery is a good trait in itself, but in doing the right thing he has to exercise bravery, such as when he and Kay take their father’s prize hawk into the woods to hunt rabbits, and Kay mishandles the hawk, resulting in its flying into a tree and not coming back to them. Kay goes home, but the Wart stays all night alone in the forest to keep an eye on the hawk so they don’t lose it. He’s also thoughtful, merciful, humble, and kind.

The musical Camelot is based on White’s version of Arthur’s story, and once I saw an interview with Richard Harris, who played Arthur in the film version, in which he said that he played him as someone who has greatness thrust upon him, but Richard Burton, who played Arthur on stage, played him as someone born to greatness. I can see both elements here. He is born to greatness, but he doesn’t know it yet. But events like the climatic removing the sword from the stone are done, not with the desire to overcome the challenge and prove himself king, but to help someone. He discovers only later that the sword would only come out for the person destined to be king (having missed the conversation in which everyone else talks about it) and at first feels quite uncomfortable with Sir Ector and Kay treating him like a king.

The Wart’s various experiences with animals were not just to teach him about nature. According to various sources, they also served to teach him about various governments. The pike, for instance, who was the king of that particular body of water in which the Wart was learning to be a fish, had absolute power but was deceptive and cruel. A colony of ants, on the other hand, acted like mindless automatons working for the greater good, which some suggest is meant to portray Communism (oddly, the ants aren’t included in the version I listened to, but I saw them mentioned in other sources). Perhaps what he learns about governing from each of them is brought out in the later books, but in this one, the various lessons he learns from them come back to him as he tries to pull the sword out of the stone. For instance, when he was trying to learn to swim as a fish with fins instead of arms and a tail instead of legs, Merlin kept telling him to “put his back into it.” That as well as bits from his other experiences came back to him in that moment.

The Sword in the Stone by T. H. White was originally published in 1938 but eventually it was combined with other books about the legend of King Arthur in The Once and Future King in 1958. It underwent quite a bit of revision by the time the 1958 version was published, incorporating some material that White had wanted to include in a fifth book in the series. According to Wikipedia, stand-alone publications of the novel tend to use the first version while publications of all four books into The Once and Future King used the revised. According to the PDF accompanying the audiobook I listened to, this version uses elements of both.

This book reads like a fairy tale or a boy’s adventure story, but it’s not technically aimed at children. There are comic moments along with the adventures and lessons as well. It was the basis for the Disney movie by the same name, but, as usually happens, much was changed in the cartoon version. I understand that the rest of the legend gets darker as it progresses in the other books. I haven’t decided yet whether to read them.

As far as potential objectionable elements go, there’s the whole issue of Merlin being a wizard, the Wart being turned into other creatures, and a fight with a witch. If you allow fairy tales, these shouldn’t be a problem: when my kids were young, I avoided stories with witches, but at some point when they were older decided that fairy tale witches were different from the real thing and operated more as the antagonist in stories. But if you have a problem with that or think your children shouldn’t be exposed to that yet, then you’d want to avoid this book. There is also a good deal about evolution and a good bit of violence, though it’s not gratuitous nor overly descriptive. The one brief part I didn’t like was the flippant portrayal of God in one legend.

But when it comes to the adventures themselves and Arthur’s growth into the man and king he eventually became, I enjoyed the story quite a lot.This book ends not long after Arthur’s coronation, and I assume the next one picks up some time after that.

Phileas Fogg, the main character in Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne, is an English gentleman in the 1870s who runs his life by strict precision. He has the same habits and schedule every day and is extremely conscious of time. He’s so exacting that he fired his former valet for bringing his shaving water a few degrees off from the temperature he liked it. In one of the first chapters, he interviews Jean Passepartout, a Frenchman of about 30, who has lived in a variety of places with a variety of occupations and is looking to settle down working for a quiet English gentleman. Passepartout is hired, and Phileas leaves for the Reform Club, where he spends several hours a day, usually playing whist.

All the talk at the club concerns a seemingly polished robber of the Bank of England, who made away with 55,000 pounds. In speculating where he would likely go, someone remarks how small the world has gotten in that it could be traversed so much more easily, and someone like this robber with loads of money could easily get anywhere. Fogg answers that one could travel around the world in 80 days. The others challenge that theory, bringing up uncertainties in travel arrangements, delays, possible troubles encountered while traveling, etc. Fogg persists that even accounting for all those possibilities, the journey could still be accomplished in 80 days. The discussion eventually turns into a wager. They fix a date 80 days hence, and if Fogg can travel around the world, having his passport stamped in the various countries to prove he has been there, and be back at the Reform Club by 9 p.m. Dec. 21, they will pay him 20,000 pounds. If he is unsuccessful, he will pay them the same amount.

He sets off that very night, thus dismantling Passepartout’s plans for a tranquil life, at least for the next 80 days. They encounter a number of fortuitous legs of the trip that put them ahead of time, and several unfortuitous ones that put them behind. They pick up a couple of traveling companions along the way and engage various methods of travel (an elephant in India being the most exotic. Oddly, though the book is often associated with hot air balloons, the group never travels that way though they consider it once).

One of their first problems is that Fogg is mistaken for the recent gentleman bank robber: he matches the physical description and his sudden travel plans look suspicious to a Detective Fix. So Fix follows him, Javier-like, around the globe trying to get the arrest warrant to catch up to their location.

I won’t share any more of the adventure than that – I don’t want to give any of it away.

I’m thankful to the Back to the Classics challenge for expanding my horizons. This is not a book I would normally have been drawn to, but in looking for classics for the various categories for the challenge, I decided to try this one. I had never read Jules Verne before, and I was surprised by how much I enjoyed the book (I even enjoyed the chapter titles). I had originally chosen it for a classic that had been translated from its original language, but I might use it for the adventure classic instead. I listened to the audiobook narrated by Patrick Tull, who did a superb job with all the different accents and inflections. The text is available online at Project Gutenberg and there is a free Kindle edition.

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court by Mark Twain begins with a group of people touring a castle. The writer notices another man who is unusually knowledgeable about armor and seems from “some remote era and old forgotten country.” They begin talking and end up at the writer’s room, where the other man is persuaded to tell his story. He begins, but becoming sleepy, he shows the writer a manuscript he had compiled from his journals and invites him to read the rest there.

The manuscript tells of Hank Morgan, born of a blacksmith and raised in Hartford, Connecticut, who grew up to learn to make guns and “all sorts of labor-saving machinery” until he became head superintendent of an arms factory. In a fight with one of his men, he was hit on the head with a crowbar and passed out. When he woke up, he was in a meadow he didn’t remember and a man in armor on a horse was claiming him as a prisoner. At first he thought the man was from a circus, or perhaps an asylum, but deemed it safest to go with him for the moment.

He is taken to King Arthur’s court in Camelot where he is told the year is 513. A page tells him that his captor is Sir Kay, and that after dinner the knights will display their captures for the day, and afterward he, Hank, will be thrown in the dungeon until his friends could ransom him. Being newly arrived, of course Hank had no friends. In that case, he learned, he would be put to death along with the other prisoners.

Somehow he happened to remember that an eclipse was due the next day, so he told the king and his company that he was a magician, and if he was not released, he would blot out the sun. When the eclipse begins to happen, everyone is terrified, and Arthur begs him to restore the sun. Hank says he will if Arthur will “appoint me your perpetual minister and executive, and give me for my services one per cent of such actual increase of revenue over and above its present amount as I may succeed in creating for the state.” Arthur agrees and Hank becomes known by the title “The Boss.”

Hank reasons that, having been born 13 centuries later, he’s the most educated person in the kingdom. While he misses many conveniences (books, tobacco, candles, etc.) and it takes him a while to really settle into the fact of his circumstances, eventually he uses his position, the people’s superstitions, and “Yankee ingenuity” to create schools, factories, newspapers, and a whole host of other inventions and institutions. He wants to correct what he sees as social ills, but that must be done a little more carefully and stealthily. He doesn’t like the fact that someone of poor character who is a noble has advantages and rank and a person of good character but no nobility was basically a slave. He also doesn’t like knight errants and the control of the Catholic church and sets about to undercut their power..

The rest of the book tells of his experiences, discussions, adventures, inventions, battles, etc., until the ultimate end of it all.

I had gotten this book both because I am trying to familiarize myself with classic I’ve missed and also because I thought this would be humorous. It was, in some respects, but not as much as I would have thought. Maybe it was more so when it was published in 1889.

The ending was not at all what I was expecting: in fact, it was sad and discordant: one source said cynical. Perhaps Twain – and/or Hank – realized that technology wasn’t really the answer, or at least that it came with its own problems. I spent a lot of time looking at analyses in various places trying to determine whether this story was just meant as a humorous jab at idyllic medieval literature or whether it was trying to say something else, but the responses were mixed. The Wikipedia article says it is “a satire of romanticized ideas of chivalry, and of the idealization of the Middle Ages common in the novels of Sir Walter Scott and other 19th century literature. Twain had a particular dislike for Scott, blaming his kind of romanticism of battle for the southern states deciding to fight the American Civil War.”

Hank spends much of the book highly critical of the sixth century, particularly its customs and superstitions, yet at the end, he longs to be back in it (it’s no spoiler to say he does come back to his own time since the opening chapter has him talking to someone from his modern century). One source said this was inconsistent, but I think perhaps it shows he learned that the people he came to love were the most important part of his time there, not the inventions or improvements.

Some of my favorite humorous exchanges:

[A boy] arrived, looked me over with a smiling and impudent curiosity; said he had come for me, and informed me that he was a page.

“Go ‘long,” I said; “you ain’t more than a paragraph.”

“I was born modest. Not all over, but in spots.”

“His head was an hour-glass; it could stow an idea, but it had to do it a grain at a time, not the whole idea at once.”

“I allowed silence to accumulate while I got my impressiveness together.”

“We had a solemn stage-wait, now, for about twenty minutes—a thing I had counted on for effect; it is always good to let your audience have a chance to work up its expectancy.  At length, out of the silence a noble Latin chant—men’s voices—broke and swelled up and rolled away into the night, a majestic tide of melody.  I had put that up, too, and it was one of the best effects I ever invented. When it was finished I stood up on the platform and extended my hands abroad, for two minutes, with my face uplifted—that always produces a dead hush—”

But the parts I enjoyed most weren’t the humorous ones, maybe because the bravado is gone. They seemed the best written to me. My favorite section is when Hank and King Arthur go out disguised as commoners to see how the people really live. In one area they come upon a family dying of smallpox, and the humaneness of both of them is very touching.

Hank sounds quite arrogant in much of his narration, calling the people “ignorant” often (“The populace uncovered and fell back reverently to make a wide way for me, as if I had been some kind of a superior being—and I was”; “There was something very engaging about these great simple-hearted creatures, something attractive and lovable.  There did not seem to be brains enough in the entire nursery, so to speak, to bait a fish-hook with; but you didn’t seem to mind that, after a little, because you soon saw that brains were not needed in a society like that.”) But he owns up to the blunders he makes and learns from them, and, in the end, came to appreciate at least the people dearest to him. And though he thinks kings are “dangerous” and wants eventually to establish a republic, he saw value even in the king at times:

There was a slight noise from the direction of the dim corner where the ladder was.  It was the king descending.  I could see that he was bearing something in one arm, and assisting himself with the other.  He came forward into the light; upon his breast lay a slender girl of fifteen.  She was but half conscious; she was dying of smallpox.  Here was heroism at its last and loftiest possibility, its utmost summit; this was challenging death in the open field unarmed, with all the odds against the challenger, no reward set upon the contest, and no admiring world in silks and cloth of gold to gaze and applaud; and yet the king’s bearing was as serenely brave as it had always been in those cheaper contests where knight meets knight in equal fight and clothed in protecting steel.  He was great now; sublimely great.  The rude statues of his ancestors in his palace should have an addition—I would see to that; and it would not be a mailed king killing a giant or a dragon, like the rest, it would be a king in commoner’s garb bearing death in his arms that a peasant mother might look her last upon her child and be comforted.

Well, it was noble to see Launcelot and the boys swarm up onto that scaffold and heave sheriffs and such overboard.  And it was fine to see that astonished multitude go down on their knees and beg their lives of the king they had just been deriding and insulting. And as he stood apart there, receiving this homage in rags, I thought to myself, well, really there is something peculiarly grand about the gait and bearing of a king, after all.

(When Hank and the King were in disguise and taken as slaves): The king’s body was a sight to see—and to weep over; but his spirit?—why, it wasn’t even phased.  Even that dull clod of a slave-driver was able to see that there can be such a thing as a slave who will remain a man till he dies; whose bones you can break, but whose manhood you can’t.  This man found that from his first effort down to his latest, he couldn’t ever come within reach of the king, but the king was ready to plunge for him, and did it.  So he gave up at last, and left the king in possession of his style unimpaired. The fact is, the king was a good deal more than a king, he was a man; and when a man is a man, you can’t knock it out of him.

I’ve never been much of a Mark Twain fan, and this book didn’t really make me eager to pick up any of his others. And though this won’t go down as one of my favorite classics, there were parts among those I have quoted that I particularly enjoyed. I’m glad to have read it and to be familiar now with the story.

You can find this book online free at Project Gutenberg, and there is a free Kindle edition here. I went back and forth between the audiobook and Kindle versions.