I feel so old. I remember when The Book of Merlyn came out (1977 - I think my mother bought it as a Christmas present, whether for me or a sibling I am not sure) and that was the first I heard of the ants and the geese. I think I had not read the full Once and Future King at that point. I loved The Sword and the Stone (and also Mistress Masham's Repose, for what that's worth), and had just assumed a lot of it would make more sense to me when I was older, and then realized no, it really didn't, in fact it rather fell apart in some ways. I was something of a Platonist at that age (too much C.S. Lewis) and felt there should be one ideal form of a book, and the patchy messed-about different versions rather appalled me, though as the daughter of a writer I knew something about different drafts. I would have been a freshman in high school that year and it was that year or the next that I would first have read Sylvia Townsend Warner's biography of White, which I was obsessed with for a few years.