The Sword in the Stone and Excalibur

The Matter of Britain, the body of medieval literature about King Arthur and his knights of the round table, is vast, and scholars spend their whole lives studying it. I am no expert; anything but. I am just a student of literature who loves a good story. Even better, a collection of stories that come together in a complex and imaginative way.

Sir Thomas Malory published the Morte d'Arthur in 1485. This book combines all the threads of the story that came before and becomes the source for our modern-day versions, including Howard Pyle's Story of King Arthur and his Knights (1903), T. H. White's Sword in the Stone (1938), and Marion Zimmer Bradley's Mists of Avalon (1983).

My question is, when did the sword in the stone come into the story? And is the sword in the stone Excalibur?

The sword Excalibur, or Caledfwlch in the original Welsh, is part of the earliest Welsh legends about King Arthur. Excalibur is a compound of two Welsh words, meaning hard and breach or cleft. By the time Malory publishes, he says that Excalibur means "cut steel," a nice take on the original etymology.

From the Old French prose cycle of Arthurian literature, the Lancelot-Grail (dating from 1210 to 1230 or so), Malory gets the element of the Lady of the Lake, who hands Excalibur to King Arthur. (The Lancelot-Grail material adds other elements we consider crucial as well, including Lancelot's adulterous love affair with Guinevere and his quest for the Holy Grail.)

And from Robert de Boron's Merlin, published around 1450, Malory gets the sword in the stone and the gist of its inscription, "Whoso pulleth out this sword of this stone and anvil is rightwise king born of all England." De Boron states that the sword in the stone is not Excaliber.

In the de Boron work, the fifteen-year-old Arthur, heir to the late king Uther Pendragon but in disguise as the foster son of a nobleman, pulls the sword as a stand-in for the blade his foster brother Sir Kay forgot at home. And, because he is a generous boy and humble to a fault, he lets Sir Kay take credit for the deed. Sir Kay's father calls him on the lie and Sir Kay has the opportunity to confess his sin, repent, and return to God's grace.

In later tellings, and maybe because Malory includes the sword in the stone and Excalibur without reconciling the two, as it were, the swords can be mixed up with each other.

The Saxons

Ptolemy (ca. 100-ca. 170 CE) was a Greco-Egyption citizen of the Roman Empire who lived and died in Alexandria. One of his most influential works was the Geographia, published, we think, around 150 CE. The book was written in Greek, lost during the Dark Ages, and translated into Arabic in the 9th century and into Latin in 1406.

Just to show you how influential Ptolemy's book was, let me mention in passing that Christopher Columbus was using revisions of Ptolemy's maps when he sailed to the New World, which he thought was India.

At any rate, the first mention we have of the group of Germanic tribes called "Saxons"--in Latin, saxones--is in Ptolemy. He places them as a group of Germanic tribes living near the North Sea coast of what is now Germany.

People who study etymology in depth surmise that the Saxons' name came from the Old English word for the kind of knife the Saxons used, the seax. The seax typically has a long, single-edged blade with a tang forged on the centerline of the blade and then enclosed in a handle of wood or horn.  Its name is thought to come from a Common Germanic root, *sah, *sag,"to cut."

And there is more!

The disparaging Scottish Gaelic word "sassenach," by which pet name Jamie often calls his wife Claire, in the Outlander series of books and now TV shows, means "outsider," literally Saxon or English.