Book review: The Sword and the Circle by Rosemary Sutcliff

The eleventh book I read in 2017 was the first installment of Rosemary Sutcliff's retelling of the legends of King Arthur, The Sword and the Circle.  Until now, my only acquaintance with the Arthurian legends was via T. H. White's The Sword in the Stone, which comprises only the first two chapters of this book; all the stories of the knights of the Round Table were unfamiliar to me, except for knowing a handful of them by name.

Carelessly, I had always assumed that the sword Arthur drew from the stone was Excalibur, but, no, Excalibur is another sword gotten from the Lady in the Lake -- and the true magic of Excalibur is in its scabbard, anyway.  Arthur and his knights wander around and do dumb things and get tricked into fighting each other a lot because they're so used to just attacking anything in armor that doesn't offer to yield first thing because toxic masculinity + honor culture.  And most of the women are manipulative temptresses.

Sutcliff is good at retelling the tales in modern English, but the stories themselves are too much like a slasher movie when the whole audience is screaming, "Don't open the door listen to the damsel!" but you know they're going to anyway.