Sword in the Stone: Origins of Arthurian Legends

Who first imagined King Arthur pulling a shining blade from solid rock? What do extraordinary Bronze Age discoveries reveal about the legend's deeper roots? Matt Lewis is joined by Amy Jeffs to uncover the surprising origins of the sword in the stone (and other Arthurian legends), tracing them from ancient Welsh poetry and Celtic folklore to medieval romance and Christian symbolism. MORE: King Arthur Listen on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/king-arthur/id1564113746?i=1000728025325&uo=4&itscg=30200&ls=1&mttnsubad=6442463604&at=1000l3ctA&itsct=podfollow_podcasts&ct=gone-medieval-eplink Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/3akZUNMcF8RhS7zVfpxjy8 Prophecies of Merlin Listen on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/prophecies-of-merlin/id1564113746?i=1000727196144&uo=4&itscg=30200&ls=1&mttnsubad=6442463604&at=1000l3ctA&itsct=podfollow_podcasts&ct=gone-medieval-eplink Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/2U3sWIC38skORIW2wXm29M Gone Medieval is presented by Matt Lewis. Audio editor is Amy Haddow, the producer is Rob Weinberg. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. All music used is courtesy of Epidemic Sounds. Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast History Hit is part of Little Dot Studios, a Certified B Corp™ Want even more Gone Medieval? Watch Matt and Eleanor's new film Medieval Summer on History Hit. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Matt Lewis?

  From long-lost Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places, to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life only on History Hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.

• 0:42Speaker 01

  Scaling your business doesn't have to mean endless meetings or repetitive training. With Camtasia Pro, teams can easily transform their expertise into engaging video content. No professional editing experience required. By combining screen recording, editing, and AI-powered workflows into one simple solution, Camtasia Pro helps you train faster, onboard smarter, and easily document critical processes. Get over $100 off your first year at camtasiapro.com and start building a smarter way to educate customers, onboard employees, and ensure valuable expertise is shared across teams.

• 1:18Speaker 02

  I've got big news. I switched to Verizon and got the new iPhone 18 Pro. I can keep my old phone. And I also get the latest iPhone every year. Shh, anything else? Verizon let me choose Apple Watch Series 12 or iPad on them.

• 1:32Speaker 03

  Everybody, listen up.

• 1:33Speaker 02

  Switch to Verizon and get the new iPhone 18 Pro now. No trade-in needed. And the latest iPhone every year with Simplicity Plan. Plus, choose Apple Watch Series 12 or iPad on us. Simplicity Plan with Simplicity Pro required. Plan and device payment purchase are separate agreements with separate terms. Service plan for Watch or iPad required. Additional terms apply for all offers.

• 1:51Matt Lewis?

  Hello, I'm Matt Lewis. Welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We've got the most intriguing mysteries, the gobsmacking details, and latest groundbreaking research from the Vikings to the printing press, from kings to popes to the crusades. We cross centuries and continents to delve into rebellions, plots, and murders to find the stories, big and small, that tell us how we got here. Find out who we really were with Gone Medieval.

• 2:32Matt Lewis?

  Picture the scene. It's before dawn. An Archbishop is singing Mass. The candles are burning low, the congregation barely stirring. And then, as the offering is made and the very first grey light of morning creeps through the high windows of the church, something miraculously happens in the courtyard outside. A great square block of stone and an anvil appeared. And in the anvil was fixed a sword.

• 3:05Matt Lewis?

  That line was first written around the year 1200 by a poet called Robert de Baran. And that moment, that sword, that stone, that shaft of supernatural light at the break of day has never left us. It's been painted, dramatised, novelised, turned into a Disney animated film, argued over. If you have the strength to pull the sword free from the stone, you become the king. But here's the thing. That image you've known your whole life didn't appear until 1200. There are decades, maybe centuries, of Arthurian legends that predate it entirely.

• 3:45Matt Lewis?

  A whole world of swords and kings and prophecy and magic. And in none of it does any sword appear in any stone. So how and why did that story become perhaps the single most recognisable image in all of British mythology? But the sword in the stone is only one thread. There are so many stories of King Arthur, Merlin, Queen Guinevere, and the Knights of the Round Table. But how did they originate? Who told them first? And how did they evolve into the forms we know today? In this episode of Gone Medieval, I'm delighted to welcome back friend of the podcast, Amy Jeffs. Amy has spent years doing something remarkable.

• 4:29Matt Lewis?

  She's reached back past Thomas Mallory, past the great French romance cycles, past even Geoffrey of Monmouth, all the way into the oldest surviving scraps of Welsh poetry, Celtic saints' lives, Breton stone sculptures, Bronze Age bog finds. In her recently published book, Arthur: A New Life, she explores the evolution of the legends of King Arthur and what they meant to the people who first told and heard them before the centuries of sentiment and chivalric fantasy made them the stuff of Hollywood.

• 5:10Matt Lewis?

  Welcome back to Gone Medieval, Amy. We're going to have to get you something, whatever the podcast equivalent of frequent flyer miles are, I think.

• 5:15Speaker 04

  A badge, just a badge.

• 5:16Matt Lewis?

  I'll make you a badge for next time I see you.

• 5:17Speaker 04

  I appreciate it.

• 5:19Matt Lewis?

  And we're going to be talking about Arthurian myths and legends, which I think... Does anyone not love Arthurian myths and legends? I know I do, so. I wondered if you could talk to us a little bit to begin with about how are you tackling this? Because it must be so hard to go into something like the Arthurian stories that have been done before and find a new way to approach it, a new way to tackle it all.

• 5:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, thank you. That's a lovely question. It was a topic that... A potential book topic that my publishers suggested to me quite a few years ago. And when I was still very much a Green Horn, I think I'd had one book out or so. And my first reaction was, oh, I shouldn't... Yeah, I can't do that. Because I felt as though my relationship with the character of Arthur was quite different from what I knew was mainstream, modern Arthuriana. And I thought, I don't think I would feel myself trying to create that Arthur or recreate that Arthur. And my Arthur, obviously, is just... I think I'd had so many years of being a researcher

• 6:26Speaker 04

  and being in institutions where you feel as though the wider world... You just assume that the wider world thinks what you do is incredibly dull. And so I thought my impression of Arthur wouldn't meet the palate of the wider public. But I went away and I pondered this and thought, well, maybe that's... My experience of Arthur had, apart from the Disney sword in the stone, I hadn't read much modern Arthurian material. But while I was doing my PhD, I was working on a 14th century English manuscript made in England, as opposed to in English, actually. It is written in Anglo-Norman French. It's got many illustrations, very rough and ready illustrations on every double-page spread.

• 7:10Speaker 04

  For anyone who wants to look it up, it's British Library, Edgerton, MS 3028. And it contains the origin myth of Britain, the Brute de Rome en Europe by Wass. And it has been heavily abridged so that it's almost entirely about Arthur. What it should be is a big dynastic history, but it focuses intensely on Arthur. And then it finishes with an addition that is unique to the manuscript that praises for Edward III's victory in his wars against France. So it becomes very Edward III-y and Edward III's use of Arthur. And that was the Arthur I had come to know. I really loved a particular illustration of Arthur encountering the governor of Gaul. He's called Frollo.

• 7:54Speaker 04

  But he's in this illustration. Arthur is holding the royal arms of England, contemporary arms of England with three leopards. Frollo, the governor of Gaul, is kneeling on the ground, carrying fleur-de-lis on his shield, three fleur-de-lis in the same colour way as the contemporary royal arms of France. And Arthur is literally smashing his head in two with his sword. It's just like, chung, you know, straight down to the chin, like a walnut.

• 8:20Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, sometimes in medieval art, it can be hard to work out what they're trying to get at and what the message is, but that seems pretty clear.

• 8:26Speaker 04

  In the context of that prayer of Edward III, so politically relevant for that moment because it's no coincidence that Arthur's being shown carrying the royal leopards of England. No coincidence that Frollo's... It's fairly obvious, you know, Edward III is claiming the French throne within, let me think, two years or one year of this manuscript being made. And the rhetoric is already at large in the legendary literature and its illustration. And I loved that. I also loved the Arthur I'd encountered in early Welsh literature and saints' lives. And all of these predate Mallory and also Christian de Trois and some of the French romances. But Mallory is a 15th century writer. He brought us Le Mort d'Artur,

• 9:11Speaker 04

  and it is really the blueprint for most modern retellings. And it gives us that high medieval, pointy-shoed, wimples and high headdresses and knights in shining armour Arthur aesthetic that we're so familiar with. So I thought, well, what if I spun a life of Arthur, a fictional life of Arthur from pre-Mallory sources that reflected that world of Breton saints' lives and Anglo-Norman chronicles and Middle English Brute chronicles, early Welsh poetry? What if I did that and interspersed it with commentaries and just stuck with the world of Arthur that I so loved?

• 9:51Matt Lewis?

  Wonderful. And so did you find much that surprised you or that was new to you in researching this book? Or was this really about how do you package up what you see in Arthur to present to everybody else?

• 10:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, so once I had my broad idea for the book, there was lots that I knew I wanted, that I was familiar with and that I wanted to include, the Brute Chronicle being a massive part of it. But then I sort of cast my net for other things that kind of fitted within those parameters of...

• 10:19Speaker 04

  Not the core source material for Mallory's Mort d'Artur, not Mallory. I came across other texts that I was less familiar with, one of them being The Adventures of Arthur at Tarn Wadling, which is a now dried up kettle hole lake in Cumbria that the Victorians dried it up. This was a kettle hole lake in Cumbria, next to Inglewood Forest. And this is a story set on the banks of that lake. It's 14th century Middle English text and Guinevere is riding along beside the lake with Gawain. And suddenly there's darkness, an eclipse, they assume, which is obviously very relevant to us now.

• 11:00Speaker 04

  And lights over the lake and she encounters a figure comes out of the lake who is in the throes of purgatorial suffering. And this is, I don't want to, so it's a sort of content warning here, but at the same time, in kind of very Gothic, macabre 14th century sort of way, this is a type for a suffering souls. The figure that Guinevere sees is covered in toads and slow worms. There's a toad gnawing the base of her skull and her brains. And it's actually Guinevere encounters her mother from beyond the grave and they have a conversation at the side of the lake in the darkness. And the mother appeals to Guinevere to pray for her mother's soul, to pray for the poor

• 11:46Speaker 04

  and to cast aside all vanity and worldly pomp and glory and everything. And it's been, I mean, this is just such an incre- she says things like muse on my mirror. Such a wonderful line. You have this picture in your mind forming of, of a kind of gestalt two profiles looking at each other, you know, where Guinevere's mother would have looked, was basically Guinevere in life, you know, as beautiful, as wealthy, as loved, you know. But now she's beyond the grave and they're sort of nose to nose at the side of this lake. And it's, uh, it's been observed that this is a bit like a literary cadaver tomb.

• 12:25Matt Lewis?

  It's exactly what I was thinking, you know, given the time that this is around in the 14th century, you've got that prevalence of the, the cadaver tombs coming out, Memento Morris and all of that sort of stuff. It's playing into all of that, all of those contemporary tropes, I guess.

• 12:38Speaker 04

  And I think that although the, you know, the message behind the cadaver tomb was deeply felt by people, there's also, I think, a kind of pleasure in this, this contrast and this depiction of death. And, and it's as well as that, an important in the context of reform movements against, you know, sort of denial of purgatory and things that were happening in the church at the time. So it's sort of resisting that by really bigging up this, this world of purgatory. I loved it too. I loved the contrast and because I am illustrating this book with black and white lino cuts. It just, it was also like a lino cut, like a black and white lino cut, this, this text was so exciting.

• 13:17Speaker 04

  So I really enjoyed meeting things like that where I also invited discussion of art. So stone sculpture and those cadaver tombs. And so that then comes into the commentary. And there's many more I could describe, but I won't go on.

• 13:33Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, people can read the book, but people should read the book. We're going to focus today on the story of the sword in the stone and kind of how that fits into your Arthur and the things that you uncovered about the story, the myth, what we know about the sword in the stone. So I wonder if you could talk us through to begin with on this, when does that trope that Arthur has to remove an immovable sword from a hunk of stone in order to prove that he is king? When does that trope first appear?

• 14:02Speaker 04

  Now, we find it in a text from the early 13th century called the Histoire de Merlin, the history of Merlin. And it's in, it's thought to have been written by someone called Robert de Baron. And it's in continental French, old French. And the pattern of the texts attributed to Robert de Baron, the Arthurian texts, is that they are more sacred. They've got more of a intense religious pitch, which is, I think, important. And it says, a sword placed in an anvil, which is stuck into an anvil on a stone. The stone is four square, you know, a block of carved stone. And it's inscribed with, I will paraphrase, whoever removes the sword from the stone will be

• 14:45Speaker 04

  the King of Britain by Christ's decree. One of the most annoying things about the Disney sword in the stone is that it says King of England, which is a, just a complete-

• 14:55Matt Lewis?

  A downgrade. Why are you demoting them?

• 14:56Speaker 04

  Yeah. And it also, it completely subverts the point of Arthur in that he's supposed to drive out the Saxons. He's anti-English. He's not, so that's just hilarious and wrong. But yeah, king of, he will be King of Britain by Christ's decree. So it's a religious, it's divine election in Robert de Baron.

• 15:17Matt Lewis?

  So the idea that Arthur has to draw the sword is kind of absent from anything earlier than that. How does it become such a core feature? If you ask anyone what they know about Arthur, the sword in the stone is likely to come up. How has it become such a core part of the story?

• 15:31Speaker 04

  Well, Robert de Baron also gives us grail narratives. He's, because he's writing in continental French, along with Christian de Trois, he's very important to the Vulgate and post Vulgate cycles, which were written in the 13th century and were the primary source material for Mallory's Mort d'Artur. So with the grail, with the Fisher King and so on, they become canonical Arthuriana.

• 15:58Matt Lewis?

  Yeah. And what does the introduction of things like that tell us about how writers in the 13th century then are, are reshaping Arthurian stories to fit with their own modern world? They're investing these old stories with new kind of religious and political ideas, aren't they?

• 16:14Speaker 04

  If we were to find the grave of, you know, have a Richard III situation with Arthur, we found his grave, we found him in it, we knew it was him. We would still know nothing about him because the narratives that we've received about Arthur, the feelings we have about Arthur have been created centuries after his death, centuries after the late 6th century, if he lived, and are themselves many layered, dating across a swathe of several hundred years and being shaped, intensively shaped and reshaped by the political and religious climate at the time and social climate, changing tastes, changing fashions.

• 16:55Speaker 04

  And I think that's really interesting. I really like this. I want to know that, that story of, of change and reimagining and, you know, I think it's interesting, for instance, that so many of the early, the Latin saints' lives, the early saints' lives that, that are among the earliest sources that, that give of Arthurian stories often have him being humiliated by the saints. So in the 12th century, Life of Saint Gildas by Karadah of Glencarthen. And Guinevere is abducted by King Melwas of the Summer Country, taken to his fortress of reeds and willow near Glastonia. And Arthur can't get to her until Gildas the saint.

• 17:36Speaker 04

  And there's a strong implication, I think, that King Melwas of the Summer Country is an other world figure, that his reed, his reed fortress is some kind of thin place. Gildas as a spiritual leader is able to penetrate that fortress and negotiate with King Melwas so that Guinevere is released. And Arthur looks right silly because he can't do it with all of his strength and all of his armies. This presupposes the character of Arthur having a reputation as a great, strong warrior who can do anything. So as Christianity is coming in and these stories are being written, to humiliate him is a great way of, everyone knows how powerful Arthur is. So how powerful must Gildas have been to have been able to outwit him?

• 18:20Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, yeah. And I think it does, seeing how late some of these things come to the story is a bit of a reminder to us because I think we have this idea that the Arthurian story is settled. If someone was to tell it today, I think you can get people saying, well, that's wrong. That's not how it happened. That's not right. And we don't know how any of this happened. But to the medieval mind, all of this stuff can be molded and reformed and recast. And it can mean something different all of the time. And I think we, sometimes we need to shake off our idea that these things are now settled and go back to a world in which they, they are meant to be reinvented and retold. And every time they're told around a medieval fire, it's slightly different.

• 19:03Speaker 04

  Yes, I think that is because we are such slaves to text, you know, we really think that once something's fixed in text, then it's, then that's, well, maybe I'm, maybe I'm talking, this is my total certitude malfunction coming through, but there's, perhaps they had that in the Middle Ages too. But there's this idea. Geoffrey of Monmouth writes his history of the kings of Britain. In it, the character of Merlin, you know, he's supernatural. The son of a demon and a nun. And he can express prophecies and things. We don't find out how he dies. But his story, when he, when he appears in the text, it's in the rains preceding Arthur's reign and the beginning.

• 19:46Speaker 04

  Does he even appear in Arthur's reign? I don't think he does. And, um, but Geoffrey of Monmouth also is thought to have written The Life of Merlin. And in that, he's living in the Caledonian forests decades after Arthur's supposed death. And he is much more of the mirth and wilt character, tormented by the wars he's witnessed, desperate to be alone in the wild, desperate for-

• 20:18Speaker 04

  Psychic piece. He's really, I think, quite a sympathetic character. I really go, I'd go to The Life of Merlin for um, mental health guidance. And I actually, I say I would, I do. There's something about the way it expresses information overload, mental hyperactivity, uh, that even if you aren't a soothsayer, is quite resonant and, and relevant. And then it describes the finding of sanity by drinking pure water from a brook. And it's somehow, that symbol, that idea of the clarity of fresh water, and it crops up in the character of Merlin and other early Welsh sources. But what I'm trying to say is Geoffrey of

• 21:01Speaker 04

  Monmouth was, it seems, if he did write The Life of Merlin, comfortable with two quite contradictory versions of this character. One that was alive before Arthur's reign, one that's alive after. He's an old man, sure, but he's some, like, there's, there's ver, there's things that, that don't quite map onto each other.

• 21:18Matt Lewis?

  And that perhaps Geoffrey didn't feel the need to have that kind of settled canon, that continuity. You can just make changes.

• 21:25Speaker 04

  What I hope is that readers don't read my version of Arthur and think that I'm rejecting their, their Arthur that they've come to know over their lives. That it's just, that it's to celebrate this plurality of characters and character.

• 21:42Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, wonderful. Uh, if we go back to, to kind of your story of the, the sword in the stone, it's sort of reinvented as an act of political subversion by Merlin? That it's less about prophecy and almost more about prevention?

• 22:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, I um, I really like, as you may have picked up from the last five minutes of me chatting, that uh, I really like that the representation of Merlin in The Life of Merlin by Geoffrey of Monmouth, it's 12th century, but also in some of the early Welsh sources, there's a beautiful dialogue with his sister in a poem, which, a Welsh poem, which is called A Conversation Between Merlin and His Sister, which is now known as that. I wanted the Merlin in this book. So it was re, it's really important to me as a principle that I didn't do anything that, that I took my cue, always, if I made changes, I took my cue from medieval sources. Because I just wanted readers to feel that, that authority of these, these sources coming through, this kind of classic medieval notion

• 22:45Speaker 04

  of octoritas, and not sticking neck out too much, trying to stay humble and keep it fixed, like rooted in those, those, that material. Um, and so although in Robert de Boron, Merlin sets up the sword in the stone, it seems to enable Arthur to be elected as king in front of everyone. It's a kind of spectacle and it's a miracle and to show his, his divine right to the throne. That's an old French, continental French idea of Merlin as a kind of sidekick to the king, who seems pretty on site, pretty happy with the whole, the status quo. In the early Welsh poetry, he is not happy. He is so disappointed in kings.

• 23:27Matt Lewis?

  Oh no, I'm not, I'm not mad, I'm just disappointed. That's worse.

• 23:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, he's, he, he is so, he is deeply distressed by the mis, the repeated mistakes being made. He's not, he doesn't question the office of kingship. So, but he is saying, why, why over and over again, do, do we keep making these wars? Do we keep fighting? And in, in the conversation he has with his sister, there's a sort of, the, the only solace they find is in their, their relationship with each other. You know, they pray for each other. And he says something very beautiful along the lines of, you know, arise from prayer and ponder books of wonder without fear, and a maiden's tale and a dreamy sleep. You know, it's just perfect. That's the Merlin I wanted to include in the narrative. So

• 24:14Speaker 04

  when it came to the sword in the stone, justifying that was required a bit of acrobatics, I suppose. And so I thought, well, it would be consistent with Merlin's character that he's just sick now. He's sick of kingship. I, I go a step further, he's actually subversive, he's not just sick of it. And so he sets up the sword in the stone as something that will never be, it will, it's impossible. He's, he's made it so it's impossible for anyone to pull it free. So no one will ever believe in the divine right of kings anymore. That was, this is my sort of playing with it.

• 24:45Matt Lewis?

  So it's not a case of waiting for the right person to come? It's, it's a way of saying there will never be a right person?

• 24:51Speaker 04

  And I don't want to give away too much, but there was an incredible, there's a really fascinating moment in Lachamon's Middle English Brutes, which is a Middle English adaptation of Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain. And it's just a, a single word, is, but really that it hinges on, but as it, when Arthur's born, he gets taken charge of by fairies. But the word that's used, ewengan, could just as easily, so the couldn't, the main, the, the most famous translation or the best, best respected translation uses this term, took charge of. But I, I consulted with, or it's Middle English scholars, and it could just as well be translated as kidnapped, was kidnapped

• 25:34Speaker 04

  by fairies, taken by force, that the translators for whatever reason opted for the kind of the soft end of the spectrum, took charge of. And then he doesn't seem to come back to the land of the living, until he's 15, when his father dies, when Uther dies. And when he's told, he has to have everything explained to him, he doesn't know about his father. So he seems to have been in thrall to the fairies, in this kind of almost Bob Dylan-like absence. Um, or you know, how all these, so many of these semi legendary figures that we have in our modern canon, there's a kind of bit of their youth where they vanish. Arthur seems to have that too. And I thought, okay, if I'm going to include the sword in the stone, because let's face it, it's great, it's such a great symbol.

• 26:20Speaker 04

  The reason that Arthur can pull it free, when it's not meant to be pulled free, is that it says in Lachamon's Brutes, the fairies give him great gifts of strength and leadership. And so what if Merlin didn't reckon on, the fairy world is invisible to him, he's, he's half demon, half nun, you know, he's not, he's not got fairy in him. He doesn't reckon on this supercharged youth striding in and pulling the sword out of the carnival.

• 26:48Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 26:49Speaker 04

  So it goes wrong.

• 27:04Matt Lewis?

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• 28:18Speaker 02

  I've got big news. I switched to Verizon and got the new iPhone 18 Pro. Shh. I can keep my old phone and I also get the latest iPhone every year. Shh, anything else? Verizon let me choose Apple Watch Series 12 or iPad on them.

• 28:31Speaker 03

  Everybody listen up.

• 28:33Speaker 02

  Shh. Switch to Verizon and get the new iPhone 18 Pro now. No trade in needed. And the latest iPhone every year with Simplicity Plan. Plus, choose Apple Watch Series 12 or iPad on us. Simplicity Plan with Simplicity Pro required. Plan and device payment purchase are separate agreements with separate terms. Service plan for watch or iPad required. Additional terms apply for all offers.

• 28:48Speaker 01

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• 29:25Matt Lewis?

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• 30:19Matt Lewis?

  Because it feels a bit like then you've got a Merlin who is trying to avoid one all-powerful king and someone who might be the subject of hero worship in all of Britain. He's almost saying that that person just doesn't exist in the world, only to find out that that person does exist in the world. So even the best laid plans of someone like Merlin can fall apart.

• 30:42Speaker 04

  Yes, I think. And then the sad irony for me in that is what happens to somebody if they're

• 30:50Speaker 04

  taken from their mother at birth and this mother who might well have loved and cherished him and taught him how to love and be loved in return and is sent to Faery. And by all accounts, Faery is not the place you go for healthy relationships. You know, it's an intense place and it's polarised and it's heady and intoxicating. And, you know, I wonder, you know, he gets all of, it's almost like the worst kind of forced education of a child where they come out able to be a political leader but unable to love. So that's, this is the kind of scenario I played out in my head as if Arthur spends his 15 years

• 31:33Speaker 04

  of his life in Faery, first 15 years, without this mother who was going to love him. And he's getting that particular Faery version of what it means to be a warlord and a leader, which is highly toxic in my, my version of things. Then what would replacing that? And also a father, of course, that's what he would have had. Humans without humanity, fairies are kind of like androids, you know, it's like something else going on there and humans needing humans.

• 32:06Matt Lewis?

  There's sort of a message in there as well, just beneath the surface, that in order to be the great king that Arthur is going to become, you have to be something more than just an ordinary person. There is a very specific path that has to lead you there. There is a form of education that isn't what normal people go through that forges a king. There is something that sets them apart from the rest of the world.

• 32:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, but the irony is, of course, I won't go into too much detail about the end of the book and the end of the story, all of those things that make him such a successful warlord initially, also contain the seeds of his demise. And that's where the humanity, the, the story of, of the power of human relationships and that, the need that, the fact that, include animals in this, but you know, Faery education doesn't give him that empathy that a human relationships, a human upbringing would have given him. And so, yeah, although on the surface, he needs that crazy education to become the great king he's going to be, how does he hold on to that?

• 33:12Speaker 04

  And that's in Beowulf too, you know, that was good cooning.

• 33:15Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, yeah. How much humanity is lost. Yeah, yeah. And if we were to return to something a little bit more tangible, maybe, talk about a bit of archaeology. You talk a bit in the book about, you know, some Bronze Age ceremonial swords that have been discovered, buried in, in bogs and things like that, which seems to be an effort to preserve them. How much do, do the existence of those play into this, this idea of buried, secreted weapons that might have later emerged into Arthurian myth?

• 33:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, so I guess, you know, I don't, there are various theories around the sword in the stone. And, and I think there's a tendency sometimes with medieval material

• 34:01Speaker 04

  to see it as existing somehow in the mists of time and not being quite so easy to contextualise as it actually is and to account for. The early 13th century is actually not that long ago. There's quite a lot of information around, even though we can't categorically say Robert de Beaune was the first time we get the sword in the stone, it's consistent with his

• 34:26Speaker 04

  religious principles that are coming through in the other, the other texts by him, that he'd have this kind of miracle to elect the king. And that is something we see in many, many other medieval texts, natural materials acting contrary to their nature to indicate, to enable God to indicate that somebody should be in a particular role. And if that is ignored, then I guess you can, it would be tempting to look for kind of, especially that Arthur is so, he's got that lost city of Atlantis mystique.

• 35:07Speaker 04

  And there's this kind of desire to look into deep prehistory for this kind of Arthurian indigenous tradition, or to tap into and, and sort of feel what we belong to in some way. And so, you know, I think these Bronze Age dirks, these ceremonial daggers are so interesting because sometimes Arthurian sword in the stone is linked to kind of Bronze Age metalworking traditions. And even kind of glibly and, and in a tongue in cheek way, the curator at the British Museum sort of says there's something Arthurian in, in one of his articles, the British Museum magazine, about the, the way in which in, I think it was 1988, the Oxpro dirk

• 35:49Speaker 04

  was drawn from the ground out of a peat bog by a dog walker, who is not now a king. Which, but Neil Wilkin doesn't say that, but he, but he does say there's something Arthurian about it. And the story is so tenacious in our imaginations that we see those links. And I wanted to bring the Oxpro dirk in and the Rodham dirk and, and things because they are, they're such cool objects. There's six being found in the UK and on the continent. They were very recently all reunited, which Neil Wilkin observes as being quite Arthurian, bringing all these swords together, also quite.

• 36:26Matt Lewis?

  On a big round table?

• 36:27Speaker 04

  Uh, yeah, I don't know, no, but they also sound quite Narnier-y. Of course, C.S. Lewis was very steeped in this medieval literary stuff. And, um, and so that's, Neil's doing that in a completely tongue in cheek way. But also we need to be aware that, that it is, you know, we are just making that up. That is just a bit of fun. I don't think there's, these, these dirks are being put into the ground or they're, sometimes they're bent ahead of time. Also, just to say as an aside, they all seem to have been made in the same production context, possibly the same workshop, which is so cool with evidence that survives, and this isn't my interpretation, I'll defer to archaeologists of prehistory for this, but is that they are some kind of demonstration of peace.

• 37:10Speaker 04

  You know, that these beautiful blades are made, they've got no handle, they've never been sharpened, they're made in bronze and then they are thrust into the soil or buried in some other way. And surely that's a, an expression of an intention for peace between two communities also or more. That is totally the opposite meaning to Arthur drawing the sword from the stone and becoming a massive warlord against the Saxons. That is a, a moment of rebirth, of reignition, of intention of violence, of judgment. That's the, all the things that the sword expresses.

• 37:54Speaker 04

  And so I, what I do over the course of the book is try and distill it down to an equation. We need a symbol of office, sword being a symbol of office of kingship, for models for the sword in the stone, you know, we need a symbol of office be, being sort of

• 38:10Speaker 04

  released from a natural material in order to prove the legitimacy of a bearer. That's the equation we're looking for. We're not just looking for swords and being stuck into things that aren't humans or that's, so we've got to go beyond that. So that's what I was trying to do in the, in the book.

• 38:28Matt Lewis?

  And so it's interesting that these kind of Bronze Age blades are pointing us towards ways of making peace, not just war, in a time in prehistory that we tend to think is, is just people mowing around the countryside, randomly killing each other. Here are symbols of peace being buried in a way that, that is surely meant to commemorate peace and, and instill it, embed it in the earth forever and ever. And it, and it is interesting how those, those things, those bits of archaeology can speak to some of these mythologies that we encounter, you know, archaeology maybe can't prove the mythology, but it can tell us that there is something going on. There is something in, in the collective minds of people about swords being embedded into natural materials that means something.

• 39:12Speaker 04

  Yes. And I think, you know, there's imagination in the burying of the Oxpro and Rodham dirks and the others as well. There's a conceptualising of peace and a use of symbols that's so narrative and so sensitive. And there's something that I think that one of the themes I wanted to expand on over the course of the book, or have sought to expand on, is that of, of seeking resolution in humanities research. My experience of discoveries.

• 39:48Speaker 04

  Over the course of my research has been that they rarely come with a heady rush of excitement. They are almost always a settled feeling of, yeah, I thought that's where this was going. Now, I've had a few small discoveries in my time and they are the final little incremental addition to a long slog. And you go, oh, there it is.

• 40:11Matt Lewis?

  It's like cracking a safe, you know, you're quietly turning the things until you hear the right click and then you move to the next one and hope that clicks as well.

• 40:18Speaker 04

  Yes. And that if you were just in it for discoveries, you'd give up discoveries in those kinds of smoking gun, like we never knew this before, sorts of ways, that actually the learning about other people's discoveries, learning about what is already known, exploring, seeing the world in different ways, self-knowledge, you know, those things that kind of lack resolution as well. There often there's lots of questions and more mysteries open up. And that's, that's so fundamental to the Arthurian legend is mystery and contradiction and, and unknowns that, that you can't, it's a waste if you go into it looking for that final thing that's going to solve it all. And, and the sword in the stone is one of, I think, the ultimate symbol of that in a way. And so, you know, bringing in the, these

• 41:03Speaker 04

  ceremonial dirks isn't strictly relevant to the sword in the stone. There's, there's something to say about, about how we understand that symbol, how we might, might look for models for it. But at the same time, it's an opportunity to talk about these awesome dirks that sticking out the ground in a peat bog in my lord's wood in Norfolk and, and that may have been, you know, these six objects from across northwestern Europe that may have been made in the same workshop that symbolized peace. That is, that's just a chance for that, that foray. And yeah, that's very interests me.

• 41:54Speaker 05

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• 42:33Speaker 06

  I'm Connor Tomlinson from Love on the Spectrum. History is my thing and I've been waiting my whole life for a show like this one.

• 42:40Speaker 03

  And I'm Carter Roy and this is What the Fact. Three facts a week, each with the whole story behind it. The history class you actually wished you had in school. New episodes every Wednesday. Follow What the Fact wherever you listen or subscribe on YouTube at What the Fact Pod.

• 43:15Matt Lewis?

  Yeah. And there is another kind of physical connection to the mythology that you talk about in Italy, you know, that is almost contemporary to the creation of lots of these myths, where we've literally got an Italian knight who goes and shoves his sword into a stone and it's like, that's it, I'm done with fighting there.

• 43:29Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah. Galgano, it's said that in 1170 or so, he, so sort of contemporary with the death of Thomas Becket, he ascended a hill near his birth town of Kirstino in Tuscany. He'd had a vision of the archangel Michael. And, and he, yeah, Galgano thrusts his sword into a stone and then builds a hermitage around it. And I went to visit the hermitage as part of the research for this book and saw the sword in the stone. The metal has been tested and is thought, is thought to be a 12th century sword. In the early 20th century, I think lead was poured around where it, it sits in the rock and it was fixed in place. It was actually very easy just to pull it out. Nearby on

• 44:12Speaker 04

  display are, is a little glass fronted cabinet with two desiccated human forearms in it, which are also 12th century and are said to have belonged to a thief that tried to, to steal, steal the sword and to lay a pious wolf ripped his forearms off and stopped him. And that, you know, is sometimes, you know, the question quite rightly raised, you know, is it influenced by the Arthurian legend, by an earlier version of the sword in the stone that hasn't survived? Is it the model for it? And this is, is done with some skepticism. Just because there's no other indication in the hagiography around Galgano that he was, there was any connection to Arthur. But also it doesn't work in terms of that

• 44:55Speaker 04

  formula. You know, he's again, he's renouncing the world. It's not an expression of violence and it's an expression of, or intention of, of kingship and violence. It's, it's stepping away. It's going, and it's not about election to anything. So again, it was just a, another opportunity to think about how we interpret these motifs and to find out about something really interesting, which is this, this story of Galgano and, and the sword in the stone in Tuscany.

• 45:23Matt Lewis?

  Yeah. But it feels like for centuries, even beyond the Arthurian myth, the idea of swords being put into or taken out of the earth is, is a symbolic end or beginning of something. It's the end of war or it's the beginning of a new war.

• 45:37Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yes. And it goes beyond swords too as well. I mean, swords are so particularly associated with leadership and secular leadership. And you can even, and then things like pipes that only play if the king, the rightful king plays them, stones that cry out if the rightful king touches them. There's, there's lots of other divine election, natural materials or natural processes that can be cited.

• 46:05Matt Lewis?

  Yeah. Yeah. And I guess just thinking about the sword itself as well, is the sword in the stone, the same sword as Excalibur?

• 46:12Speaker 04

  I don't know. I don't know. He has a sword in, in, I just sort of, why wouldn't it be? But in, no, it isn't because Caliburn is named in Geoffrey of Monmouth and in the later Brute adaptations, he, at the Battle of Baden, he, he's carrying a sword with the name that is the kind of, the germ of the word Excalibur, along with some other weapons. His spear has a Welsh name that's sometimes shortened to Ron.

• 46:48Matt Lewis?

  Spear called Ron. I like it.

• 46:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's lovely, isn't it? And Ron Gomiant is his, the Welsh name for his sword. And

• 46:58Speaker 04

  that predates at the earliest surviving instance of the sword in the stone motif in a text by many decades. So maybe, but I don't think Robert de Beauvoir is explicitly states that the sword is that one that has been known from earlier sources.

• 47:16Matt Lewis?

  Yeah. Yeah. How different do you think our understanding of the Arthurian mythology might be if we had stuck with that kind of fairy origin? Because he kind of gets co-opted as this Christian figure so that it's God giving him his strength and his ability to draw the sword and therefore to rule all of England or preferably Britain. Would we have a different connection to Arthur if he, if he had kept that kind of fairy background? Or does it not really matter how he's achieved what he does?

• 47:45Speaker 04

  Yeah. Well, you see a kind of

• 47:48Speaker 04

  increasing demonization of the fairy characters over the course of the Arthurian legends story. It's a story of change and development, was a better word. And so that's, it is consistent with that. And I really like the earlier sources that allow fairy to be a place of moral ambiguity, not somewhere that's just bad, but somewhere that's.

• 48:20Speaker 04

  I mean, it's not, it's not, I don't want to overstate it, you know, it can, it's not always bad in the later sources. And maybe as a medievalist who doesn't want to patronise medieval Christians, I don't want to always side with a story that says Christianity came in and all imagination was suppressed and anything good that comes out must be a fossil of a pre-Christian culture, or anything interesting or kind of spicy. But, you know, you're saying that, it's just different versions of Christianity, the 12th century life of Gildas where Guinevere is abducted by this king of the summer country who seems to be a kind of other world king. That allows

• 49:01Speaker 04

  that to happen and the saint to go in and negotiate. And the other world king isn't through and through bad because he lets, he's like, okay, yeah, have a back now, good chap. So yeah, it's a really difficult question.

• 49:12Matt Lewis?

  I think the medieval mind is quite often better at navigating these things than we allow for, that they, they were perfectly well aware that two things could be true at the same time, that things could coexist, that one wasn't exclusive necessarily to the other.

• 49:27Speaker 04

  Yeah. And that different literary traditions could coexist. And so there are some textual settings where it would be inappropriate for Arthur to be raised by fairies and other where it's all right, because, you know, we're in the land of romance or we're in the land of, you know, so, or that mode, that generic mode. So yeah, but I, I just, I'm particularly imaginatively excited by the Arthur raised by fairies moment. And I would be very, would love to see the parallel universe where that, where medieval writers took that up and developed it. Because there's a sense, because it's so just a throw, like almost a throwaway moment in La Chamon,

• 50:08Speaker 04

  there's a few instances that he goes a little bit more out there than Geoffrey of Monmouth or Warrs, whereas maybe he is in touch with some sort of Breton traditions or, or something that, that allow for this, the supernatural to have an even bigger role in the text than it's, it has in the earlier ones. So he's maybe tapping into something that hasn't survived in writing in the same way. And it would have been so lovely to have seen what had happened if it had carried on beyond him and been developed. But other things happened, which are interesting too, so.

• 50:41Matt Lewis?

  Absolutely. So we've talked quite a bit about Arthur and Merlin. Before we finish, have you got a favourite character from the book that isn't Arthur or Merlin?

• 50:49Speaker 04

  I'm interested, I like Ritho, the giant of Ereri. I would, I thought I should name a female character, but then I'm going to say that because that is what I thought I should do. But then I'm actually going to say, because there are really good female characters like Anna, Arthur's sister, which I find interesting too, and Merlin's sister, Geneda. But I'm going to say Ritho because it's pithy and he, he's referred to, again, a little, little side note in Geoffrey of Monmouth's history of the kings of Britain, Arthur has just defeated the giant of Mont Saint Michel and his men say, oh, that was such an amazing victory. Oh, well done. That

• 51:27Speaker 04

  was even better than when you, you went up against Ritho, the giant of Ereri or Snowdonia, who was sewing a cloak made of the beards of all the chiefs of Britain and had left a space at the top for the greatest beard in the land, which was Arthur's beard, and sent a message to you saying, rip off your beard and send it to me. I want to put it on my cloak. And you said no. And then you met him and had a big fight and killed him. And that was great. And then you took the, you took it home. I think it's to take the beard cloak home. And I really, when it came to illustrating that, I realised the thing that I most liked about that story was

• 52:09Speaker 04

  the giant with his incredibly macabre craft project, sitting in the mountains, sewing together all these beards that he'd been carefully collecting and making decisions about colour, because I imagine he was working across a spectrum from black to silver with kind of auburn and blonde in between and chestnut and hazel and all these lovely colours. And, and some of them might have been curly and some of them straight and some of them with plaits and with ponytails or little ornaments in them. And how would he have arranged them? And, and it was so adorable. And I imagined him kind of sitting on the side of a mountain, just working his way along with a needle made of a bit of pine and, and having the most lovely

• 52:54Speaker 04

  time and getting so absorbed in this process that it doesn't occur to him how offended Arthur's going to be when he's like, I have your beard too. So yeah, that he's my favourite character.

• 53:04Matt Lewis?

  That is a cool story. I do like that. Do you, do you think we should be frustrated by the idea that later additions to these legends often become so much better known than the original stories, that we can become consumed and think that there was always a sword in the stone in Arthur's story when it actually comes relatively late on? Is that annoying? Is that frustrating? Or is that just a symptom of the fact that these things were and maybe should be always evolving?

• 53:28Speaker 04

  What I personally like, because I don't want to judge anyone, anyone else's relationship with stories or that kind of thing. But I like to feel, when I'm reading something that presents itself as legend or myth, I like to feel that it's, it's authoritative. And I like the idea of embracing that complexity and of, of explaining where things are coming from and, and going, not always assuming that the stuff we're coming up with now is better than what was coming, we were coming up with 800 years ago or 1,000 years ago. I, one of the great discoveries for me of

• 54:08Speaker 04

  this project was the strength of, like how much I just genuinely enjoyed the stories I was reading and I was laughing out loud and squirming with horror and, and what I hoped to do and how I presented them was, was not impose too much of my own desire to be original or creative upon them, present them as, with a super narrative so that you could run through them in a, in a hopefully quite compelling way, but feel that, that reassurance that this is genuinely old, traditional, steeped in whatever to stuff, you know, it's, and it's got that, the source,

• 54:51Speaker 04

  many of the sources that I've chosen are quite a keen awareness of landscape and different topographical features that still exist. And that's amazing. And so I suppose it's something that, that I, yeah, it's not so much about assumptions, because there was, I remember as a teenager and beyond feeling like, oh, Arthur, the Arthurian legends is one of those overwhelmingly weirdly complicated things. And, you know, unless you have, you do a university course in it or something, it's quite hard to have that, you know, that unpacked and explain, and explained to you. So I wouldn't judge anyone for wanting it to be simple and sword in the

• 55:33Speaker 04

  stone always to have been there in the stories, because why would you assume otherwise? But I'm very excited about the opportunity to hopefully expand on the Arthurian legend to, to be a sort of spokesperson for it in its many iterations, among others. You know, I'm not the only one, obviously. But yeah, I hope that's not too rambling and answer to your question.

• 55:56Matt Lewis?

  No, no, perfect. And this has been such an interesting chat about kind of one aspect of the Arthurian stories that are in your book. We focused on the sword in the stone. So I clearly encourage people to go and read the rest of the book and find out everything else that Amy is, is unpacking and the fantastic stories that she's got to tell you. So thank you so much for joining us again, Amy.

• 56:16Speaker 04

  Thank you. And, and listeners, I've got a tour. I'm going, because of domestic obligations, I'm not unfortunately getting up north this autumn. I wish I was, or into Wales, I wish I was. But I am doing a lot of events around the south. And if anyone can make it, it's always, it's like the thing that makes this job, other than sitting alone and writing, the other thing that makes this job so wonderful is having conversations with readers and hearing your perspectives. So I hope to see you at something in the autumn.

• 56:45Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, wonderful. Thank you very much.

• 56:47Speaker 04

  Thank you, Matt.

• 56:50Matt Lewis?

  If you've enjoyed this episode, you can catch Amy's previous visits to talk about her book Storyland, as well as about the saints' lives that would have been familiar to medieval people. We also have other episodes on King Arthur, including a recent one on the life of Guinevere. There are new instalments of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday, so please come back to join Eleanor and I for more from the greatest millennium in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts and tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval. You can also sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a new release every week at historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Anyway, I better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just gone medieval with History Hit.

• 57:56Speaker 06

  I'm Connor Tomlinson from Love on the Spectrum. History is my thing and I've been waiting my whole life for a show like this one.

• 58:03Speaker 03

  And I'm Carter Roy and this is What the Fact. Three facts a week, each with the whole story behind it. The history class you actually wished you had in school. New episodes every Wednesday. Follow What the Fact wherever you listen or subscribe on YouTube at What the Fact Pod.