So was it a European swallow or an African swallow that put it there. I don’t think a European swallow has the right weight ratio to put the sword in the stone but then again, an African swallow is not migratory.
What if there were two swallows . . .
I always assumed it was a reference to the Coronation Stone.
Mallory seems to have “borrowed” from Robert de Boron’s poem Merlin, within which it is also implied that the sword in an anvil appeared in the courtyard by God.
I found an excerpt http://www.jstor.org/pss/458530
Yeah, I always thought the lady of the lake had put it there to prove Arther’s character.
Nope. As I note above, The Lady of the Lake’s sword Excalibur is different from the Sword in the Stone in any but the most recent accounts. The Boorman film makes them identical, but whaddayuh expect from a film titled Excalibur?
Nice catch, there Sparky – I haven’t read Robert de Boron, and Mallory was the earliest source I knew of with the Sword in the Stone. I’ll have to look him up.
De Boron’s poem is probably the “French book” that Mallory is referring to in the excerpt I quoted.
I’m sorry. It was an accident… I didn’t mean to. I slipped and fell and it just kinda went in.
Please don’t tell anyone.
Pleased to see this. And in the second reply.
One in a million shot, doc. One in a million.
I recall a novel (by Peter Straub IIRC) where a character proposed the interesting idea that it was a metaphor, that Arthur was actually the man who brought the knowledge of how to extract and forge iron to Britain. So it wasn’t a singular sword that he pulled from a singular stone, but swords in general.
I recall an amusing short story based on this version that had Merlin horrified when the sword turned up missing from the stone, since he knew that Arthur hadn’t done it. It turned out that the person who’d secretly pulled the sword from the stone in the night - was Guinevere. “Men! I just melted some butter and let it run down the blade. It was easy!”
This was also mentioned in Prince Ombra by Roderick Macleish - and I thought it was brilliant when I first read it.
Aha! It was Prince Ombra and not anything by Straub. I think I was reading something by Straub at about the same time and mistook where it came from, but I remember the title now.
There is also a sword in a stone, in front of a castle in Anaheim, California.
for example see here
Because its awesome:
“My nurse told me,” said Viscount Skater, “that a true king could pull a sword from a stone.”
“Hah, yes, and cure dandruff,” said Lord Rust. “That’s just a legend. That’s not real. Anyway, I’ve always been a bit puzzle about that story. What’s so hard about pulling a sword out of a stone? The real work’s already been done. You ought to make yourself useful and find the man who put the sword in the stone in the first place, eh?”
Terry Pratchett: Men at Arms
My wife read an intriguing book that suggested that the “sword drawn from the stone” may have been a distant memory of a weapon forged from an iron meteorite. A iron weapon would have seemed magical if everyone else was armed with bronze swords.
Jack Whyte’s The Camulod Chronicles had this as a plot point.
Interesting! Link?
The “iron sword = magic sword” idea also cropped up in Peter Dickinson’s Flight of Dragons. That’s where I first encountered it.
Probably this.
Off-topic, but I once read a short story about a time traveler who ends up in medieval Britain, and decides to do some meddling in politics. He basically makes an electromagnet, and sticks a sword in it for all the locals to try pulling out, except he can turn it off when someone he likes takes a shot.