works, The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood (1883), and The Story of King Arthur and His
Knights (1903), reinvigorated traditional British legends. It was also during this time
that the educational system began to reach children at almost all socio-economic levels
and to teach them to read; simultaneously, the publishing industry developed faster and
cheaper printing techniques, ensuring that the enlarged reading public would have
books and magazines to read. Almost simultaneously, the next steps in the development
of high fantasy were taken by a re-teller, T.H.White, and a creator who made high
fantasy his own domain, J.R.R.Tolkien
White’s The Sword in the Stone (1939), the first section of what was to become The
Once and Future King, is a high fantasy novel written for young readers. In that book,
White tells the story of the child Arthur, covering those years between his birth and his
drawing the sword from the stone to become King of England. Unlike the Märchen
pattern or The Wood Beyond the World, there is no transition in White’s book from the
ordinary world to the secondary world; when the reader opens the book, the story begins
with the orphan, Arthur, in what is both the ordinary world, for him, and the secondary
world in which both he and the reader will discover the existence of the impossible.
Merlin is there in both his specific role, as Merlin the Magician, and in a generic role as
the avuncular guide and wisdom-giver who superintends the Hero’s growth. At the end
of The Sword in the Stone, Arthur emerges from his protective isolation, having
conquered the challenges of growing up, to become the High King.
White’s retelling of the Arthurian materials signalled important developments in high
fantasy. First, as there is very little of the youth of Arthur preserved in medieval
manuscripts, White tells the story of Arthur’s youth from his understanding of the
traditional tale; that is, White’s invention or rendition of Arthur’s early years is patterned
after the early years of all the heroes in all the tales known. Second, White makes the
Arthurian materials fantastic. Instead of merely retelling the stories in modern prose,
White augments descriptive passages and action as the novel framework allows, but also
adds a larger component of the impossible to make his telling ‘more fantastic’ (especially
to a modern audience) than the original. Third, White adds humour to the high fantasy
novel, but while he has fun with the magic, he never makes fun of the magic; the
characters who do make fun of the magic are the ‘dolts’ of the book, and White makes
fun of them. By rounding out the Arthurian materials in these ways, White transformed
them from medieval romances into high fantasy and made both the Arthurian materials
and high fantasy accessible to young readers.
As White was finishing the first steps in the reinvigoration of the Arthurian legends
begun by Pyle, J.R.R.Tolkien was beginning to map the boundaries of the secondary
world. Although not Arthurian, Tolkien’s The Hobbit, like White’s fantasy, is a large book
written for children which tells a fantastic tale full of gentle humour, genuine danger
and serious magic. It is also a book which displays a carefully crafted secondary world.
Bilbo Baggins’s front porch, where the action of The Hobbit begins, is in an even less-
familiar world than Arthur’s foster home in The Sword in the Stone (even if it
superficially resembles an idealised Merrie England) and Bilbo undertakes a Märchen-
like journey not through a fantastic and legendary Britain but into a Middle Earth of
wizards, dwarves, elves, trolls, giants, shape-changers and dragons in which even he
only half believed and understood very little of when the story opened. By the end of the
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