T. H. White

Life

Terence Hanbury White was born in Bombay on 29 May 1906, the son of a police superintendent in British India. His parents' marriage was violent and unhappy, and they separated when he was fourteen; White later described his childhood as one of terror, and he carried loneliness and a sense of damage all his life. He was sent to Cheltenham College, which he hated, and then to Queens' College, Cambridge, where he took a first in English in 1928 despite a year off with tuberculosis.

He taught English at Stowe School in Buckinghamshire for four years, and in 1936 — after the success of his memoir England Have My Bones — he resigned and moved into a gamekeeper's cottage to write. There he threw himself into rural pursuits with obsessive intensity: fishing, hunting, flying, and, famously, trying to train a goshawk by the old methods, an ordeal he recorded in The Goshawk (1951). In 1939 he went to Ireland and stayed through the war as a conscientious objector in County Meath, then in 1946 settled on the Channel Island of Alderney. He never married; biographers have written of his struggles with his sexuality and with drink, and of his deep attachment to his dogs. He died of heart failure aboard a ship in the harbor of Piraeus, Greece, on 17 January 1964, on his way home from a lecture tour of the United States, and is buried in Athens.

Work

In 1937 White reread Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur and found it unexpectedly thrilling. The Sword in the Stone (1938) imagined Arthur's boyhood: the Wart, a foster child in the Forest Sauvage, is educated by the wizard Merlyn, who lives backward through time and turns the boy into a fish, a hawk, an ant and a goose so that he can learn from them about power and its abuses. It is comic, anachronistic, tender and full of the natural history White loved.

He went on to The Witch in the Wood (1939) and The Ill-Made Knight (1940), the tragedy of Lancelot, and to a final book about the war between Arthur and Mordred. Revised and darkened — the Wart's lessons now pointedly about the evils of might — the sequence was published in 1958 as The Once and Future King, in four parts: The Sword in the Stone, The Queen of Air and Darkness, The Ill-Made Knight and The Candle in the Wind. A fifth book, The Book of Merlyn, cut from the collection, appeared posthumously in 1977. White also wrote Mistress Masham's Repose (1946), about a girl who discovers Lilliputians living on her estate.

Legacy

White is the great twentieth-century interpreter of Malory and of Arthurian Fantasy. At the end of The Once and Future King Arthur knights a page named Tom of Warwick and sends him away to carry the story on — White's tribute to Malory himself. Lerner and Loewe's Broadway musical Camelot (1960) was adapted from the book, and Disney's animated The Sword in the Stone (1963) from its first part; both made his Wart and Merlyn familiar to millions. Later writers, J. K. Rowling among them, have acknowledged his influence, and it is easy to see the Wart's education in the schooling of young wizards in Harry Potter.

White is not on Gygax's Appendix N, and no game mechanic derives from him. His imprint on games is one of character and tone. The eccentric, absent-minded wizard-mentor who knows too much — part sage, part comedian — became a stock figure of fantasy and of the NPCs who send young heroes on their way. His Arthurian world, alongside Malory's, lies behind the Camelots of the tabletop, from Greg Stafford's King Arthur Pendragon to Arthurian heroes statted up in TSR's Deities & Demigods, and the screen Camelots of the 1960s through Excalibur. And White's central theme — that the point of power is to restrain force rather than to use it — is the question every good paladin in every campaign eventually has to answer.