Should "Once and Future King" be maybe regarded as historical fiction?

[MsAmerica]

I was just perusing White's The Once and Future King, thinking how it revels in all these small details of the time - clothing and food and such. And I was thinking that it's usually classified as fantasy, being Arthurian legend - in fact, my copy was published by Ace, which is a fantasy/scifi imprint. But, really, compared to other books on the subject ... why don't people ever mention it as historical fiction?

Because it isn’t historical. The details, such as they are, are inaccurate, and stuff from different historical periods is all mashed up together to create a generic sense of ‘long ago’.

Probably because it's based on a legend and not historical figures. It's even based on Le Morte d'Arthur which was written using many French as well as English stories and modified for around the15C when any possible Arthur figure could never have existed, if he had he would have been around between 400-600 AD as a Romano-British leader of a much smaller area than GB.

Even Sir Thomas Malory is hard to track down and he was just the author who complied the source White was using as inspiration.

Hence fantasy, nicely done but not historical.

What specific details of, for instance, food or clothing, do you think are inaccurate?

It's not historical fiction, it's fantasy. Anything about King Arthur, a legend probably based on an actual man of C5th but we do not know who, is unhistorical by its nature. Details will belong to other periods - and those in The Once and Future King are from a spread of 1000 years of the Middle Ages.
So, no.

Most of them. They are 'faux' medieval in the same sense as larping a medieval fantasy with dragons etc, which draw on clothing from across the middle ages. E.g. the sort of hat a man wore in the mid-fifteenth century, a chaperon, would not fit a character from the 8th century, who would more likely wear a coif (a sort of bonnet) with a pull on cap over it. White mixes all that stuff up.

Robin Hood crops up along with a version of the witch in the gingerbread house, so def fantasy set in an alternate ancient Britain.(sorry if I got that wrong, it’s ages since I read it.)Bloody loved it as a young teen, though the last book was a bit dark. It was one of my comfort books.

The Queen of Air and Darkness is also dark.

Yes, I agree. Definitely fantasy. Great book all the same.

Okay, okay, I give up.

Good idea!

I hope you're not implying that anyone saying something you disagree with should just shut up.

No, of course not. I mean that your givng up on the ideas that The Once and Future King is a historical novel is a good outcome from the discussion.