What DID happen to Excalibur?

Cafe Society
1

Reading the recent Cecil column about the Holy Grail http://www.straightdope.com/columns/030404.html he says that you might as well search for Excalibur or Frodo’s magic ring(1).

(Note that this is only tangentaly related to the column and thus I didn’t put it in the “Comment’s on Cecils’ column” board)

So, in the Arturian legends, what happened to Excalibur after Arthur’s death? was it sent with him to Avalon? Did it become a museum piece unusable by anyone? I read The Once and Future King, but it was a while ago and I don’t rememeber.
Brian
(1) It realy wasn’t Frodo’s ring, except in the possesion is 9/10 of the law sense. And of course it would be useless to search for it, because everyone knows it was destroyed in fires of Mount Doom.

2

It was returned to the Lady of the Lake, I believe

3

Yup. Arthur’s dying wish was that some-knight-or-other (forgot the name) fling the sword into the Lake of the Lady. Of course, it took the guy three tries or something, he kept trying to trick Arthur into thinking that he had thrown it although he hadn’t. However, eventually he threw it in and a hand caught it and drew it underwater. Then Arthur went to Avalon. The end.

4

“If I went around calling myself king just because some watery tart lobbed a scimitar at me…”

Must’ve been confiscated by the police at the end, when they were arresting Arthur and Lancelot.

5

Sir Bedeviere (sp) Threw Excalibur into the lake and an arm “clothed in white samite” rose from the water and brandished it three times.

6

John Boorman’s movie Excalibur has some excellent scenes at the end depicting Arthur’s passing and the return of Excalibur to the lake.

7

That film also has some of the most emotional classical music too.

‘Siegfrieds Death and Funeral Music’ by Wagner (part of the Ring Cycle I think).

Put the lights down low, sit nicely between the speakers, wack up the base some and crank it up.

8

Siegfried’s Funeral March is from Gotterdammerung, the last opera in the Ring. The movie also had Carmina Burana.

9

Best. Soundtrack. Ever.

The combination of the imagery (arm clothed in white samite, etc) and the Wagner–Siegfried’s Funeral–makes my hair stand on end.

10

Ah yes I forgot about the Orff stuff.

O Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi…or something like that !

Better known in the UK from the ‘Old Spice’ crashing waves adverts of the 80’s.

11

John Boorman’s “Excalibur” – isn’t that the one where Lancelot runs around naked for what seems to be the entire movie? I tried to watch it once before giving up. I think it’s best viewed while high.

.:Nichol:.

12

Watch out, you’re dissing my favorite movie!:eek:
Hey, the late Nicholas Clay was naked for two scenes, maybe five minutes out of a 143-minute-long movie. Besides, he looked damn good, clothed or naked! :slight_smile:

13

Listen to Boorman’s audio commentary on the DVD too; it’s great.

I’ve heard he originally wanted to film Lord of the Rings, but finally decided it was unfilmable, so chose the smaller Arthur story instead.

14

Excalibur somehow ended up in the major treasure room of the Skull Cave, along with Durandal, Alexanders drinking cup, the remains of Cleopatras asp, and I imagine the Maltese Falcon and the Ark of the Covenant as well. Over four hundred years, the Phantom`s amassed quite a bit of loot.

15

Liar, we all know it is in a wooden crate, in a government warehouse, next to the Arc of the Covenant.

StormBringer is two aisles over.

16

Sadly, in the 1980s many of the artifacts in that warehouse were covertly sold to third world leaders to raise money for rebel forces.

Objects like the Ark and the Black Bird never really can be kept in one place for too long, in any case.

I`m pretty sure I saw Stormbringer being used on stage at an Iron Maiden concert, but that might have just been good laser effects. That, or the `shrooms.
17

As I recall, the Maltese Falcon was melted in the early 19th century, possibly on Napoleon’s orders.

The gold in it ended up in Dashiell Hammett’s cane.

18

This is where I’ve always been confused in the Arthurian legend (and I read The Once and Future King when I was young, too):
Excalibur was the sword that was given to Arthur by the Lady of the Lake (Merlin was present at the giving, IIRC)…and had to be returned to her…

But what was the sword that was in the stone?

19

Depends on which version you’re reading. In most versions, the Sword in the Stone is a completely different sword, which is only there as a test for the one true king; doesn’t really matter what happens to it after that. Excalibur is given to Arthur by the Lady of the Lake, and is returned to her by Girflet, or Bedevere (or Perceval in the movie Excalibur).

John Boorman had one sword do the work of two; in his movie the Lady of the Lake gives Merlin the sword Excalibur, which subsequently becomes the Sword in the Stone, which Arthur keeps and which is eventually returned to the Lady of the Lake.

Over the centuries, various authors have rearranged and added to the Arthurian legends as they pleased, and now filmmakers do the same.

Incidentally, Richard I (Lionheart) gave King Tancred of Sicily a sword which he claimed was Excalibur. (His father, Henry II, had claimed that the grave of Arthur had been found, with Arthur’s bones in it, indicating that Arthur was dead as a doornail and sure as hell wasn’t coming back to help the Welsh kick the English out.)

20

Well, the problem is that there isn’t really any one Arthurian myth: it’s an amalgamation of about fifteen bazillion different folk tales (most of them from Wales.) People kept adding in connections with Arthur to keep people interested. So you have one folk tale about a guy being crowned king because he pulled a sword out of a rock, and you have another folk tale about a guy who got a sword from some bimbo at the bottom of a creek. And people have been hearing both of them for a couple of centuries and start losing interest, so all of a sudden it’s King Arthur who’s got an interest in martial masonry and rust-proof cutlery, because King Arthur is the hip new myth, and everyone is sick of King Fwylgth, or whoever it was that was originally associated with sword-pulling.

There’s also a lot of cross-overs in the Arthur stuff. Merlin, for example, was for a long time independent of Arthur. Then someone thought, “Hey: people love Merlin. People love Arthur. What if I write a poem where Merlin meets Arthur?” Sort of the medieval equivalent of those Star Destroyer v. the Enterprise debates.