If you’d asked me as a small child who Merlin was, I would have been able to tell you. He was a wise but eccentric old wizard, and he looked like this:
I’d never seen Disney’s The Sword in the Stone - Disney films never came on TV in those days, just got re-released at the cinema from time to time. But clips cropped up fairly frequently on programmes like Screen Test and the Bank Holiday Disney Time specials, and I think we had a book with some of the pictures and presumably the story in. So, even without seeing it, it was still one of my first encounters with Arthurian legend, and that’s probably true for most people of my generation.
As Disney animations go, I don’t think it’s quite top tier - it’s not as good as Sleeping Beauty, or The Jungle Book - but that’s a high bar and it’s still pretty good. Based on the novel by TH White, and directed by Wolfgang Reitherman, it tells the story of the Wart (it rhymes with ‘Art’) who lives with his stepfather Sir Ector and loutish stepbrother Kay in a castle of the edge of a forest, at some time in the dimly defined Middle Ages.Venturing into the forest in search of a lost arrow, Wart meets Merlin, who becomes his tutor. Merlin’s idea of educating the boy is to turn him into a variety of different birds and animals, and after various adventures it turns out that Wart is destined to draw the sword from the Stone and reign as King Arthur.
In the hands of the Disney animators this becomes the springboard for a series of slapstick episodes, culminating in a spectacular magical duel between Merlin and the evil witch Madame Mim. There’s much fun with physics, and causes leading apparently logically to ludicrous effects (a bird can be arrested in mud-flight by grabbing its tail feathers, but naturally, when the feather pulls free, the bird shoots off like an arrow from a bow and buries its beak in a dartboard. And when Madam Mim in bird-form grabs one end of caterpillar-Merlin of course he stretches like an elastic band and pings into the air.) The hungry wolf who twice tracks the Wart is subjected to all sorts of disasters and indignities, like a Disney take on Wile. E. Coyote. But there is a bit of room for beauty too - the forest recedes in layer upon layer of spooky trees like a set from a toy theatre, and the snowbound London backgrounds at the end have the cosy charm of 1960s Christmas cards. The actual sword in the actual stone itself still sends a little shiver down the spine, even when it’s just a drawing.
The songs are surprisingly unmemorable, and the actor who does Kay puts on on one of those weird strangulated voices which Americans think sound British, but otherwise, what’s not to like? The Sword in the Stone is a solid bit of entertainment, and a good introduction to the idea of Arthur for the younger crowd.
And there I was planning to leave this piece. But as I was preparing to write it, I went to check a detail in my copy of the book, and ended up rereading the whole thing…
I was given T.H.White’s The Sword in the Stone as a Christmas present when I was eleven or twelve, but I didn’t fancy it for some reason (maybe I imagined it was too young for me?) and it sat unread on the bookcase beside my bed for a long time. Then, one night when I was ill and couldn’t sleep, I picked it up and ended up reading the whole thing in one go and wondering why on Earth I’d waited so long. Published in 1939, it’s one of the great English children’s books of the interwar period. Nostalgic, often comical, and riddled with deliberate anachronisms, White’s vision of the Middle Ages is a lot like Tolkien’s Shire (that bit in The Hobbit where one of Bilbo’s ancestors invents golf is very Sword in the Stone-ish). But he also writes passages that remind me of Winnie the Pooh, and The Wind in the Willows, and Kipling’s Just So Stories. At the same time, he belongs among the great nature writers of the era, such as Henry Williamson and BB, and his knowledge of the natural world pours out on the page as Wart experiences life as a perch, a hawk, an owl, or just as a boy, hunting and being hunted in the Forest Sauvage.
The anachronisms have the strange effect of both distancing us from the historical setting and making it more immediate. There are newspapers and charabancs, and ‘the Battle of Crecy was won on the playin’ fields of Eton’. The knights are comic Victorian squires, sceptical of the value of eddycation and more interested in gettin’ in a good day’s joustin’. Merlyn (sic) is a marvellous creation, who gains his foreknowledge of Wart’s future from the fact that he lives backwards in time - which also allows him to deploy quotations from writers yet unborn, and rue the lack of electricity and company water in his mediaeval lodgings. But amid all the comedy there’s a sense of loss and impending tragedy too. The book’s wistful, idealised vision of the Middle Ages also feels like an elegy for the long Edwardian summer which was brought to an end by the First World War, while the dangers that haunt the Forest Sauvage seem to foreshadow the Second. (The giant Galapas in particular is explicitly written as a kind of panto-villain dictator, who threatens his captives with rubber truncheons and concentration camps. In White’s drawing of him his clothes are stamped with both the swastika and the hammer and sickle.) The lessons Merlyn teaches Wart are, in the end, lessons about power, and the use and mis-use of power, and they are designed to turn him into a king who will understand that Might is not Right, and try to build a kingdom based on that principal.
And of all this great, wise, lovely, personal, profoundly English book the Disney version captures precisely nothing. It takes the barest outline of the story and a few details like Merlin’s self-washing crockery, and simply throws the rest away. The result is a film that bears about as much resemblance to TH White’s vision as an Ode to Joy ringtone would to a full orchestral performance of Beethoven’s 9th. Kay, a complex character in the book (his relationship with the Wart is beautifully drawn) becomes a simple bully on screen. The idea that the Wart’s adventures are preparing him for kingship is ignored. The six years that pass at the end of the book, with Kay and the Wart growing up and apart, aren’t mentioned here, so King Arthur ends up ascending to the throne as a child. And the lessons themselves, which in the book range from comedy, to high adventure, to strange mystic beauty, are all just excuses for clowning in the film.
So, if I were rating these Arthurian films (which I’m not planning to) The Sword in the Stone would present me with a bit of a headache. Considered as one of Disney’s run of classic animated features, it would score a solid seven or eight out of ten. But judged as an adaptation of the book, I’m afraid it gets a big, fat zero.
Cover art above is by Alan Lee, I think. I can’t find a picture of the edition I had, which had a photo of an elaborate clay model of Merlyn on the front. I wish I’d kept it, because I found years later it was early work by Brian Froud.
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