White introduces him with the description, 'He had fair hair and a stupid face, or at any rate there was a lack of cunning in it.' Even Merlyn has become restless and impatient with his pupil: When Arthur asks Merlyn if he has 'been doing something wrong,' the wizard replies, 'It is not so much what you are doing.

When the novel begins, Arthur is still very much like the Wart he was in The Sword in the Stone. As he learned of the horrors of war in the first volume, he puts his learning into practice in the second, attempting to actually eradicate war completely from his nation.Īrthur's revolutionary theory of entering and then winning a 'war to end all wars' does not occur to him instantly, early in his reign. Seen in this light, The Queen of Air and Darkness is, like The Sword in the Stone, a tale of Arthur's education. To 'put to sleep' the problems plaguing his country, Arthur revolutionizes his own (and other characters') thinking about wars, their origins, and who fights in them. The focus of the novel is war, but the war fought here is one that has origins in the distant past.

However, as White implies before the book even begins, the time when Arthur will be 'dead and rid' of the troubles engendered by his father's (and other Normans') tyranny may be slow in coming - or never arrive at all. Throughout The Queen of Air and Darkness, Arthur struggles to reform and 'civilize' the bloody nation (torn by racial strife) left to him by his father, Uther Pendragon. The pleading questions asked here are never directly posed by the Wart (now King Arthur) in the novel however, the sense of the 'sins of the fathers' affecting the son - and the past affecting the present - is a chief component of the Arthurian legend (and White's retelling of it). Like the other volumes in The Once and Future King, The Queen of Air and Darkness begins with an epigraph: 'When shall I be dead and rid / Of the wrong my father did? / How long, how long, till spade and hearse / Put to sleep my mother's curse?'

The once and future king book series