Book Two- The Queen of Air and Darkness

The second book in "The Once and Future King" is entitled "The Queen of Air and Darkness". This book is different from the first in several ways. In this book we find that King Pellinore finds the love of his life and gets married. King Arthur continues to learn from Merlyn who seems very troubled because there seems to be something that he can not remember. King Arthur and his crew go to battle against the Gaels and come out victorious and with new plans of starting a proper code for chivalry. Something that was in this chapter that was not a part of the last was Arthurs half sister and her children. She is a neglective mother and throughout the story we see her children pay for it. At the end we find that King Arthur sleeps with his half sister and nine months later she has his son named Mordred.

This book was told fairly differently from the first. The plot in this book seemed to move at a fairly quicker pace than that of the first. In the book "The Sword In the Stone" the entire story was told through one point of view and from the same location. In this story we find that in addition to Arthur we follow his nephews for a time and even King Pellinore and Sir Grummore. I enjoyed this more because it gave a feel for some of the other parts of the world as opposed to just London.

There were a few words in this book that I was not able to understand. Some of these words were dirk, modicum, paynim, spavined, vivandieres, and mountebanks. I was able to locate a few of these in our modern day dictionary but several were not there.

In this book we learn the reason for the books name (The Once and Future King) and we learn why Arthur chooses to name his chivalry code the way that he does. As Merlyn is talking with King Arthur we learn that his tombstone will one day read "Hic jacet Arthurus Rex quandam Rexque futurus. In Latin this means the once and future king. As the king is talking one day with Sir Ector, Kay, and Merlyn we learn that the knights that will join his organization will be referred to as the Knights of the Round Table. They decided on this name because anyone in the organization will be a knight and they will all be seated around a round table. The table could not be a rectangular one because then the group would fight over who should be at the head of the table. So in making a round table Arthur will keep the playing field even amongst all of the knights.

"The Sword In the Stone"

The first book in "The Once and Future King" is entitled "The Sword In the Stone". This is pretty much a title that tells all for anyone that has ever heard the King Arthur legend. In this book we are brought to a castle that lies close beside the Forest Sauvage. There are two young boys that are being brought up in the castle and they have a tutor named Merlyn, who we find is a wizard that is cursed to live backwards in time. Merlyn appears to favor one of the boys over the other and he is nicknamed the Wart. This is because Merlyn has foreseen that Wart will become king when the current king meets his demise. The Wart encounters many adventures as different species of animals that Merlyn turns him into and learns several lessons that the wizard already knows will become useful when Wart becomes king. Eventually the boys grow up and Merlyn departs and Wart is left to be the squire of the other boy Kay whose destiny is to be a knight. One fateful day while in London Wart unknowingly pulls a sword from a stone (a task that many knights has not been able to accomplish) and is crowned King Arthur.
The language in this book was rather interesting. For the most part it was easy enough to understand but there was a few rocky areas. The worst of these was the poor blubbering porcupine that the Wart stumbles across in one of his many journeys as an animal. Another rather difficult character to understand was King Pellinore who consistently added "what" to the end of every sentence he spoke and would completely confuse himself and anyone listening. The third language piece that I found interesting is in the very beginning of the book in chapter one when Sir Ector and Sir Grummore are talking with one another they begin to speak like British aristocrats as opposed to the medieval knights that they really are.
In the very beginning of the book there was also several words that I could not understand. A few of these words being, villein, wattle and daub, scythes, jesses, and hoved. Several words were in our modern dictionary when I looked them up but many were not.
My favorite parts of this book are when Wart gets turned into the many different animals. Perhaps my favorite of these is when he is turned into the badger. He encounters a porcupine whose reaction is just ridiculous and humorous to the reader and then we learn several things from the badger. He gives us insight into how he feels the humans and animals were made and how man came to be a tyrant over all of the animals. From his meeting with the badger and and the porcupine we can learn that absolute power corrupts. He was not at all hungry until he came across the porcupine and decided to make him beg (and sing) for his life and man was a fairly humble creature in the badgers story until given dominion to rule over all other species.
All in all I find this story quite intriguing. It is quite amazing how historically it is portrayed and how truthful it comes off to be when it is swimming with so much fantasy. We are even provided with insight into how several species of animals and birds view the world and hear how they would speak if they could. It gives a certain twist to the world that leaves me up to my knees in the story with no real need to want to dig myself out.

The World is Flat post 1

Thomas Friedman is the author of the book entitled The World Is Flat. Friedman claims several times in this book that indeed "the world is flat". It is an eye catching title because our entire lives we have been taught that the world is actually round. Poor Christopher Columbus would be beside himself to hear such news. Friedman has been to many places around the globe and supports his claim with evidence that he has gathered from several foreign areas. When he says that the world is flat what he actually means is that the world has become a much more accessible place due to modern technology. Instead of waiting several days for your hand written letter to be delivered to a piece of your family in China you can send it through email in a matter of seconds, thus making the world, in theory, a flatter place.

Le Morte d'Arthur

This packet briefly walks its reader through the legend of King Arthur. It explains that it is indeed very likely that Arthur at one point in history actually existed. However, today we do not know exactly how the real King Arthur lived because we have been over come with many great tales of accomplishments that he may have been apart of. With each author that rewrote his story it seemed to distance its self further and further from it's ties with the non-fiction realm. Today we know him as a knight, a king, a man that had his own personal magician and the man that introduced a proper conduct for kinghthood. This packet was highly informative but I fear that it may have spoiled T.H. Whites version of the story for me. Very rarely did I stumble upon a passage while reading this packet, that I could not understand. It described several relevant words to the storys, such as legend, epic, medieval romance, and episodic. All in all it was a very informative packet that I almost enjoyed reading. I only wish that I had not read it before The Once and Future King.