At the beginning of T. H. White's The Ill-Made Knight, published in 1941, the young Lancelot examines his reflection in the polished surface of a helmet:

Poised here between the state of being a boy and a ‘great man with the world at his feet’, Lancelot suffers a crisis of identity and selfhood. The helmet, symbol of the chivalric glory that awaits the young man in his career at Arthur's Round Table, serves simultaneously to predict and symbolise his identity and to call it into question, offering a distorted and continually shifting reflection. Its bulges mirror Lancelot's perceived flaws, throwing his self-doubt and shame into sharp relief. ‘There is no need for us to try to understand it’, the narrator declares, yet the rest of the book is concerned with probing, dabbling in, this ‘secret place’ that is for Lancelot the locus of his distortion, doubt and self-loathing. Through the title the ‘ill-made knight’, an epithet that both foregrounds the formative influence of youth and warns of its potentially detrimental effects in later life, White locates the site of this conflict in Lancelot's childhood. His adaptation of the Morte Darthur continues the trend set by Howard Pyle and Henry Gilbert, introducing Malory's knights in their youth and tracing their development from children to adults. The first book of White's tetralogy, The Sword in the Stone, is almost entirely original, focusing on the adventurous childhood of ‘the Wart’ (Arthur) and his joyful education in self-reliance under the watchful eye of Merlin and his magical powers.