A To Z Blogging Challenge 2020: X Is Sort of For... EXcalibur

Public Domain

Okay, X is not really for Excalibur, but I thought I’d cheat a bit, because very few words in the Arthurian universe actually do start with X, and if they do, I’m not familiar with them. Please tell me if you know of one and I’ll look it up. 

Strictly speaking, I could have put this into the C post, because it’s also called Caliburn. But I thought C and E were more interesting as they were - Culhwch and Elaine.

So... Excalibur! Arthur’s amazing sword. There are plenty of famous, named swords in legend and even, occasionally, history. Charlemagne’s sword Joyeuse, for example. Roland’s sword Durandal. The Grass-Cutting Sword of Japan. El Cid’s two swords  Colada and Tizona. Read about them and others here. https://www.storypick.com/sword-history/

What is not always picked up by readers is that Excalibur is not the sword from the stone. That unnamed sword got broken when the youthful Arthur got into a fight in his attempt to have a knightly “adventure”, the silly boy! 

Mind you, in the film Excalibur it was the sword. Arthur breaks it, yes, killing Lancelot early in the movie(unfortunately, Lancelot is brought back to life, but the film would have ended there if he hadn’t been). However, the broken bits are repaired instantly by the Lady of the Lake, who hands it back to him. In that film, Uther wields it first. He is about to die and thrusts it into the stone, in an unsuccessful attempt to break it, declaring that nobody shall have it but him. Whoops! 

Later in the film, Arthur finds his wife and Lancelot sleeping naked out in the woods and thrusts the sword between them so they will know he was there.

In Malory, Excalibur is the sword given to him, complete with scabbard, by the Lady of the Lake, to whom he returns it at the end. Merlin asks him whether he prefers the sword or the scabbard. “Oh, the sword, of course!” the boy says enthusiastically, and Merlin, who just can’t stop teaching, tells him that he’s a fool - the scabbard will protect the owner from bleeding to death. Well, how was he supposed to know? 

Public Domain

In any case, he does lose the scabbard when his sister Morgana steals it. She also steals Excalibur, which she hands over  to her lover Accolon, promising him the throne in exchange for killing Arthur in a duel to the death. Luckily, our girl Nimue gets involved, making Accolon drop the sword in time for Arthur to grab it back and win the fight. Arthur has unwittingly been using a copy. 

I wrote this episode into my novella A Matter Of Honour. If you want to read it, email me. It’s only available free until I find a home for it. It’s in PDF or ePub. 

In Rosemary Sutcliff’s Sword At Sunset, Artos’s(Arthur’s) sword is just a standard Roman cavalry blade; what makes it unique is the royal seal gem in it, given to him by his uncle, Ambrosius. But it is still too recognisable to allow it to fall into enemy hands. The dying Artos asks Bedwyr to throw it into the water so that the enemy won’t know he is dead. No Lady of the Lake. No hand in white samite. Just a good, logical reason for disposing of it. 

In Peter David’s Knight Life, Arthur and his reborn knights return. Arthur is in New York, not the UK. He knows the British royal family won’t be letting him take over, so he stays where he is and runs for Mayor of New York, before standing for President. (Merlin has forged US records for him) First he goes to the lake in Central Park, where he retrieves Excalibur from the Lady, who is covered in wrappers and other bits of pollution. “Never again!” she declares. 

The most unusual version of Excalibur I have read about was in Jack Whyte’s series beginning with The Skystone. It’s set in Roman, and post-Roman Britain. Two Roman army buddies start a colony called New Camulodunum, after the town where they come from. One of them is a skilled blacksmith and when they find a meteorite, the metal is used to forge a statue of the goddess Coventina, whom they call the Lady of the Lake. Later in the series, the statue is melted down and reforged into a very special blade...

Just one more reference, though. Has anyone reading this seen the SF show Babylon 5? There is an episode called “A Late Delivery From Avalon”.  In it, a man in ring mail armour(played by the wonderful Michael York) turns up on the titular space station. He is carrying a sword. He says he is King Arthur and immediately proceeds to do good, rescuing the poor and vulnerable from criminals, with the help of the Narn Ambassador G’Kar, whom he dubs with his sword as the Brown Knight. 

The thing is, he isn’t King Arthur. He is a man who did something for which he felt terribly guilty, and associated with the Arthurian legend; he believes he is Arthur. The only way he can be healed, the regular characters decide, is to finish the story, by returning his sword to the Lady of the Lake. So that part is played by the Minbari Ambassador, Delenn, who is appropriate for reasons you will need to see the show to understand. 

That is the only time I saw that sword in a science fiction show, though the spaceship in the spinoff series Crusade was called the Excalibur, and there was a nice touch in the opening credits when you hear the sound of a sword being drawn. 

Time to let you have your say! Tomorrow I will be talking about Ygerna, the mother of Arthur. See you then!