The Once and Future King

Lancelot bears the weight of excellence, being (at least initially) the finest knight at Arthur’s court. In love with Arthur and his idealism since he was a boy, Lancelot spends his youth training to earn the king’s favor. At Camelot, Lancelot establishes himself as the premier warrior, never losing a joust or a swordfight, and his devotion to God nearly equals his devotion to Arthur and Guenever.

Lancelot thus epitomizes the ethic of chivalry and virtue, but he also epitomizes its contradictions. He confesses that he wants to work miracles, seeing himself as a latter-day Christ and not realizing until the Grail quest how prideful his desire is. Lancelot pays the price for this hubris: When he rescues Elaine from the boiling cauldron, his belief that he has worked a miracle binds him to her despite her duplicity. Then there is his love for Guenever, which torments him above all else but governs virtually his every action; nothing is more important. The tensions within Lancelot find symbolic expression in his appearance, which is “as ugly as a monster’s in the King’s menagerie” (317). For all his good qualities, Lancelot is inherently flawed in a way that never ceases to agonize him.

White doesn’t give Guenever much backstory—she simply appears in Book 3 as Arthur’s wife—but her presence immediately impacts the narrative. Lancelot is jealous of Arthur’s love for her, and he spurns her initially, but that rejection quickly turns to attraction and then love. In some ways, Guenever is simply the third leg of a love triangle—a narrative device to provide conflict. In other ways, however, she is a fully developed character. She is by turns moody, jealous, patient, generous, and loyal, and this complexity, makes her, in White’s words, “a real person” (472).

The novel’s depiction of her is thus part of its effort to humanize the figures behind the myths and, in doing so, to breathe new life into them. Guenever’s childlessness is a core feature of Arthurian legend, but the novel makes it central to her psychology, suggesting that her apparently excessive anger at Elaine stems from the fact that Guenever cannot bear a child with either of the men she loves. Regardless, she proves more able to temper her passions for the good of Camelot than for Lancelot. When he is warned about Mordred’s trap, she begs him to go, but he refuses. His lust clouds his judgment while she emerges the more lucid thinker. Her courage is also noteworthy. She is willing to sacrifice her life to save her lover’s, and in the end, it is her idea to seek papal reconciliation—a solution that saves both their lives.

In some ways, Merlyn is the quintessential fantasy wizard—weaving spells, wearing robes and a pointed hat, and proffering wisdom. His tutelage of Arthur shapes the boy into a just and compassionate king. His “lessons” consist of turning Arthur into various animals so he can observe a diversity of social interactions, which comes in handy as Arthur ponders his new code of chivalry. In other ways, however, Merlyn defies the stereotype. He is sloppy and disorganized, his robes often covered in bird excrement and his wild hair tangled with twigs. He forgets vital information. As the archetypal mentor, he both conforms to and subverts the trope. His foresight comes from traveling backward through time, a narrative device more typical of science fiction than fantasy. These oddities distinguish White’s Merlyn from other takes on the character and also cause him to remain a cypher. As in other versions of the tale, Merlyn disappears with Nimue, who imprisons him in a cave, but as the novel’s Nimue is barely a character, the event renders Merlyn all the more inscrutable. White gives him no backstory—aside from indicating he has been “sent”—and in that regard, he exists solely to shepherd Arthur to adulthood. Consequently, he disappears when his job is complete, leaving his charge to implement his life lessons and weather the storm of events as best he can.