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.