The Sword in the Stone (T. H. White) | Audiobook скачать в хорошем качестве

The Sword in the Stone (T. H. White) | Audiobook

Kay and his foster-brother (known as the Wart) are living in the glorious castle of Sir Ector amid the wild and beautiful Forest Sauvage. They are given a tutor - the magician Merlyn - and so begins one of the most inventive and charming retellings of the Arthurian legend, the first part of The Once and Future King. Unabridged audiobook read by Neville Jason The Arthurian legends are England's great epic, as full and embedded a part of the cultural heritage as the Greek myths, with the same imaginative hold as Biblical tales or Shakespeare's plays. The stories were originally collected and written by Sir Thomas Malory, and published in 21 books in 1485. These tales of chivalrous knights undertaking brave challenges, of a noble king bringing egalitarianism, honour and decency to a land governed by brutishness and violence, have served as political and personal metaphors ever since. They have inspired poets, playwrights, film-makers, composers, artists, social commentators, mystics and New Agers of every hue. The search for Arthur's final resting place, the possibility of his reappearance and his historical authenticity are argued with exactly the same passionate dedication by his followers as those of other faiths. Thomas Hanbury White (1906-1964) was by no means the first person to take the tales and turn them into something else; but few have had such a broad and thriving appeal. The Sword in the Stone in particular became a template for a new telling of the iconic tale of the young Arthur finding himself king by innocently pulling Excalibur from its lodging, with Disney turning it into a hugely successful animated film in 1963. But as with all retellings, White's books are as much about the author and his times as they are about their sources. He was born in India to mismatched parents, whose various personal traits combined to create a troubled son - his father was an alcoholic, and his mother seems to have imposed such affectionate strictures on him that he was unable to be comfortable with women thereafter. He was a profound naturalist, deeply involved with observing nature, as well as hunting, shooting and fishing it, who served as a teacher after completing his own education at Queen's College, Cambridge. He had already started writing while a student, and continued as a teacher, eventually dedicating himself to writing and naturalism from 1936. Often reclusive, he spent the Second World War in Ireland as a conscientious objector. He was also a medievalist, and this mixture of personal insecurity, love of nature, angry concern as war loomed over Europe and his feeling for the past were all brought together in The Once and Future King. Talking animals, endearing magicians, terrifying witches, broad slapstick, jousts, feasts and splendour are all certainly in place; but these works are by no means fantastical children's fiction. White was exorcising (perhaps just exercising) some of his personal demons - there is, for example, a deal of cruelty in the books; he was using a kind of reverse anthropomorphism to indicate how man should be more like the animal kingdom - or at least should look to it for examples; and he was giving the old stories a dark and pertinent edge as a global war approached and dictatorship threatened the world. As the story progresses, it moves from being a panegyric over the lost innocence and knowledge of an earlier age, to a reworking of Greek tragedy, and finally to a polemic against man's short-sighted belligerence and doomed political systems. White was not just offering a reworking of the Arthurian legend. He clearly had his own deeply personal, as well as broadly social and political, issues to place in the context of a lost world of grace and humanity. What gives these books such depth, however, is not just the plot or the underlying implications of the storylines (strong as they all are); nor is it their place in epic, fantasy or Arthurian legend. It is partly the characters - honest, steadfast Arthur; passionate, self-hating Lancelot; cold, driven Mordred; the outstanding Merlyn, absent-minded, humane and fallible, but always invaluably putting things into perspective. It is partly of course the imaginative strength of the author, bringing such worlds as medieval tournaments, ants' nests, court life, boar hunts or battlefields alive with vivid detail. It is partly, too, the unashamed brio with which White describes the food of the time, or the intimate features of feathers of a particular bird, or the slightest aspect of hunting, heraldry or armour; or his unapologetic use of terms that were obscure when he wrote them, and have all but disappeared now. White was not condescending to a childish audience, but taking every reader with him into Arthur's more-than-mythical kingdom to see what it stood for, how it failed and what we can still learn from it.