Any way you cut it, the legends of King Arthur are one of the earliest foundations of what we call the fantasy genre. There are scads of variations (collectively called the Matter of Britain), written over hundreds of years (which makes Greg Stafford’s accomplishment of reconciling many of them into a plausible timeline for the Pendragon RPG all the more impressive), but Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur (1485) is by far the most prominent and influential.

The Boy’s King Arthur is a reworking of Malory’s story by the American poet Sidney Lanier, first published in 1880. It is a watered down version that excises much (some?) of the sex and violence of the source material in order to make it more palatable to younger audiences – if you recall reading a sort of generic version of the stories of King Arthur and his knights as a kid, I bet there’s a 50/50 shot you read some version of this (if not Lanier’s then most likely illustrator Howard Pyle’s lovely embellishments). It is a solid, straightforward telling. I read this book easily a dozen times as a kid.

For me, it is N.C. Wyeth’s 1922 illustrations that make it all worth while. I love his romanticized, almost theatrical approach to costuming, the highly staged drama of his compositions and how his control of light makes it all breathe – you can practically feel the temperature of the air in the paintings. And jeeze, if his Merlin isn’t downright archetypal.