If the way Dom Manuel turns chivalry inside‑out—balancing gallantry toward Niafer with opportunistic dalliances and that wry, mock‑chronicle narration—made you grin, you’ll love the cheerfully subversive antics in The Princess Bride. Westley’s improbable rescues, Inigo’s theatrical vendetta, and Prince Humperdinck’s hollow pageantry poke the same fun at storybook heroics that Cabell targets when Manuel becomes “Redeemer” of Poictesme by careful image‑making rather than spotless virtue.

Dom Manuel’s calculated rise—from rustic beginnings to lordship of Poictesme, with side trips to bargain with uncanny powers like Queen Freydis of Audela—pairs perfectly with Cugel the Clever’s misadventures. In The Eyes of the Overworld, Cugel plots, swindles, and smooth‑talks his way across a decadent world after crossing Iucounu the Laughing Magician. The charm, the guile, and the delightfully amoral problem‑solving echo Manuel’s own pragmatic “virtues.”

If Cabell’s luxuriant sentences and courtly cadences drew you in while Manuel wooed, schemed, and parleyed with the likes of Freydis, Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros offers a feast. The rolling, archaic style enshrines the clashes of Demonland and Witchland—Lord Juss, Lord Brandoch Daha, and King Gorice—much as Cabell’s elevated diction playfully ennobles Manuel’s decidedly worldly designs.

Cabell’s use of Freydis’s temptations, Manuel’s clay‑wrought ‘figures,’ and the ironic ‘Redeemer’ mantle works as sly allegory about reputation and desire. Mirrlees does something equally pointed in Lud‑in‑the‑Mist, where Master Nathaniel Chanticleer confronts smuggled fairy fruit and the respectable town’s willful blindness. As Manuel’s public virtue masks private barters, Dorimare’s propriety hides its own hungers—until the uncanny forces the truth into the open.

If you admired how Figures of Earth surveys Dom Manuel’s whole ascent—from obscurity to the throne of Poictesme—and then coolly questions what his ‘redemption’ was worth, The Once and Future King offers a kindred, sweeping look at Arthur. From the boyhood lessons with Merlyn to the unraveling of the Round Table, White blends wit and melancholy to interrogate the very ideals of knighthood that Manuel so cannily exploits.