Sword in the Stone: Origins of Arthurian Legends

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1:00We 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. 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 as sword. That line was first written around the year 1200 by a poet called Robert de Baron. And that moment, that sword, that stone that shaft of supernatural light at the break of

2:05day has never left us. It's been painted, dramatized, novelized, 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. 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 Gwynnevere and the Knights of the Round Table. But how did they originate? Who told them first?

3:06And 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. She's reached back past Thomas Mallory, past the great French romance cycles, past even Jeffrey of Monmouth, all the way into the oldest surviving scraps of Welsh poetry, Celtic St. Slives, Breton Stone sculptures, Bronze Age Bogphines. In her recently published book Arthur and You Life, she explores the evolution of the legends of King Arthur and what they meant to the people who first told and heard them. All the centuries of sentiment and chivalric fantasy made them the stuff of Hollywood. 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. A badge. Just a badge.

4:06I'll make you a badge for the next time I see you. I appreciate it. 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. I wondered if you could talk to us a little bit to begin with about, kind of, 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. 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 was so. And my first reaction was, no, I shouldn't, 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 Arthurianna. And I thought, I don't think I would feel myself trying to create that Arthur or recreate

5:08that Arthur. And my Arthur obviously is just, I think I'd had so many years of being a, a researcher 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 pallet of the wider public. But I kind of, I went away and I pondered this and thought, well, maybe that my experience of Arthur had, apart from the Disney sword and the stone, I hadn't read much modern Arthurian material. And while I was doing my PhD, I was working on a 14th century English manuscripts, it made an England as opposed to in English actually. It was, is written in Anglo-Norman French. It's got many illustrations, very rough and ready illustrations on every double page spread. For anyone who wants to look it up, it's British Library, Edgerton MS3028. And it contains the origin myth of Britain, the Brute, the home want to vote by Was.

6:11And it has been heavily abridged so that it's almost entirely about Arthur. What it should be is a big, dynastic history, but it's, it focuses intensely on Arthur. And then it, it finishes with an addition that is unique to the manuscript that prays for Edward III's victory in his wars against France. So it becomes very Edward III and Edward III's review of Arthur. And that was the, the Arthur I had come to know. I really loved a particular illustration of Arthur encountering the governor of Gaulle. He's called Frollo. 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 Gaulle, is kneeling on the ground, carrying flurderly on his shield, three flurderly in the same color way as the contemporary Royal Arms of France. And Arthur is literally smashing his head into with his sword. It's just like, you know, straight down to the chin, like a walnut. Yeah, sometimes in medieval art, it can be hard to work out what they're trying to get

7:12at and what the message is, but that seems pretty clear. In the context of that prayer, Edward III is so politically relevant for that moment, because there's no coincidence that Arthur's being shown carrying the Royal leopards of England, no coincidence that Frollo's came here. It's fairly obvious, you know, Edward III is claiming the French throne within, let me think two years, one year of this manuscript being made. And the rhetoric is already at large in the legendary literature and its illustration. And I love that. I also loved the Arthur I'd encountered in early Welsh literature and and St Slives. And the all of these predate Mallory. And also Cretian de Toins, from the French romances. But Mallory is a 15th century writer. He brought us Le Mordatier. And it is really the blueprint for most modern retellings. And it gives us that high medieval, pointy, choued, wimples and high headdresses and nights in Shining Armor Arthur, that aesthetic that we're familiar with.

8:15So I thought, well, what if I spun a life of Arthur, a fictional life of Arthur, from the supreme Mallory sources that reflected that world of Breton, St Slives 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 loved? Yeah, wonderful. And so did you find much that surprised you or that was new to you in researching this book? Was this really about how do you package up what you see in Arthur to present to everybody else? 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 not the core source material for Mallory's, Mordatier, not Mallory. I came across other texts, so I was less familiar with one of them being the adventures

9:20of Arthur at Tarn Wadling, which is a now dried up, a Kettlehole Lake in Cumbria, the Victorians dried it up. This was a Kettlehole 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 Gwynnevere is riding along beside the lake with Gwynne and suddenly there's darkness and eclipse, they assume, which is obviously very relevant to us now, and lights over the lake and she encounters a figure comes out of the lake who is in the throes of purgatoryal 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 soul. The figure that Gwynnevere 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 Gwynnevere encounters her

10:24mother from beyond the grave and they have a conversation at the side of the lake in the darkness and the mother appeals to Gwynnevere to pray for her mother's soul, to pray for the poor and to cast aside all vanity and worldly pomp and glory and everything. And it's been, I mean, this is just such, 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 gushed out to profiles looking at each other, you know, where Gwynnevere's mother would have looked, was basically Gwynnevere in life, you know, as beautiful, as wealthy, as loved, you know, but now she's beyond the grave and there's sort of nose to nose at the side of this lake and it's been observed that this is a bit like a literary cadaver tomb. 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 cadaver tomb's coming out, menta moris and all of that sort of stuff, it's playing into all of those contemporary tropes, I

11:27think that, although the message behind the cadaver tomb was deeply felt by people, there's also I think a kind of pleasure in this contrast and this depiction of death and it's as well as that and important in the context of reform movement, so 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 world of purgatory. I loved it too. I loved the contrast and because I'm illustrating this book with black and white line of cuts, it was also like a line of cuts, like a black and white line of cut, this text, we're so exciting. So I really enjoyed meeting things like that where I also invited a discussion of art, so stone sculpture and those cadaver tombs and say that then comes into the commentary and there's many more I could describe, but I won't go on. 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

12:30fits into your author 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 author 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? We find it in a text from the early 13th century called the Astuach de Mirlin, the history of Mirlin, and it's thought to have been written by someone who would rob at de Behran in its incontinental French, old French, and the pattern of the texts attributed to Albert de Behran, the authorian texts, is that they are more sacred, they've got more of a intense religious pitch, which I think important. It says a sword placed in an anvil, which is stuck into an anvil on a stone. The stone is four square, a block of carved stone, and it's inscribed with a paraphrase

13:31who removes the sword from the stone will be the king of Britain by Christ 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... The downgrade. What were you demoting? And it also completely subverts the point of Arthur, and he's supposed to drive out the Saxons. He's anti-English. So that's just hilarious and wrong. But he'll be king of Britain by Christ decree. So it's a religious, it's divine election in Robert de Behran. 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 feat you? 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? Well, Robert de Behran also gives us grail narratives because he's writing in continental French, long ago, Coutien de Tois, he's very important to the volgate and post-volgate cycles, which were written in the 13th century, and were the primary source material for

14:38Malarys Mautatier. So with the grail, with the Fisher King and so on, they become canonical Arthurianna. Yeah. And what does the introduction of things like that tell us about how writers in the 13th century then 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? If we were to find the grave of, you know, have a rich at the third 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 swath of several hundred years, and being shaped intensively, shaped and reshaped by the political and religious

15:39climate at the time and social climate, changing tastes, changing fashions. And I think that's really interesting. I really like this. I want to know that that story 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 are among the earliest sources that give Arthurian stories often have him being humiliated by the saints. So in the 12th century, life of Saint Gildas by Caradahue Flancas and Guinevere is abducted by King Malwass of the summer country, taken to his fortress of Reeds and Willow in Niglastonia and Arthur can't get to her until Gildas the Saint. And there's a strong implication, I think, that King Malwass of the summer country is an other world figure that his read fortress is some kind of thin place. Gildas as a spiritual leader is able to penetrate that fortress and negotiate with King Malwass

16:41so 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? 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. 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

17:44and go back to a world in which they are meant to be reinvented and re-told and every time they're told around a medieval fire, it's slightly different. Yes, I think that is because we are such slaves to text. You know, we really think that wants something's fixed in text. Then it's, then that's, well, 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, Jeffrey of Monmouth writes his history of the Kings of Britain in it, the character of Merlin. 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 appears in the text, it's in the reigns preceding Arthur's reign and the beginning. Does he even appear in Arthur's reign? I don't think he does. But Jeffrey of Monmouth also is thought to have written the life of Merlin.

18:46And in that, he's living in the Caledonian forests, decades after Arthur's supposed death. And he is much more of the Murth and Wilt character tormented by the wars he's witnessed, desperate to be alone in the wild, desperate for psychic peace. He's really, I think, quite sympathetic character. I really go to the life of Merlin for mental health guidance. And I actually say I would, I do. There's something about the way it expresses information overload, mental hyperactivity that even if you want a Suissea is quite resonant 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.

19:48But what I'm trying to say is, Jeffrey of 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 somehow like there's, there's work, there's things that don't quite map onto each other. Perhaps Jeffrey didn't feel the need to have that kind of settled canon, that continuity. You can just make changes. 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. Yeah, wonderful. If we go back to, to kind of your story of 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.

20:50Yeah, well, I am, I really like, as you may have picked up from the last five minutes of me chatting, that I really like that, the representation of Merlin in the life of Merlin by Jeffrey 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 really, it's really important to me as a principal, that I didn't do anything that, that I took my, 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 of Okta Ritas, and not sticking your neck out too much, trying to stay humble and keep it fixed, like, rooted in those, those, that material. So, although in Robert de Bohreau, Merlin sets up the sword in the stone, it seems to

21:50enable 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 onsite, pretty happy with the whole, the status quo. In the early Welsh poetry, he is not happy, he is so disappointed in kings. Oh no, I'm not mad, I'm just disappointed, that's worse. Yeah, he is, he is so, he is deeply distressed by 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 we keep making these wars, do we keep fighting? And in the conversation he has with his sister, there's a sort of, they only solace they find as in their relationship with each other, they pray for each other. And he says something very beautiful along the lines of, you know, rise from prayer and

22:52ponder 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 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, sick of kingship. 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's impossible, 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. So it's not a case of waiting for the right person to come. It's a way of saying there will never be a right person. And I don't want to give away too much that there was an incredible, there's a really fascinating moment in Lachemon's Middle English Brutes, which is a Middle English adaptation of Geoffrey of Monmouth's history of the kings of Britain.

23:53And it's just a single word, but really that it hinges on. But when Arthur's born, he gets taken charge of by fairies. But the word that's used in Wengen could just as easily. So the main, the most famous translation or the best respected translation uses a term took charge of. But I consulted with her as Middle English scholars. And it could just as well be translated as kidnapped, it was kidnapped by fairies, taken by force, that the translators for ever reason opted for the kind of a 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 he's the 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, through all to the fairies, in this kind of almost Bob Dylan like absence, or you know, how all these so many of these semi-legendary figures that

24:55we 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 this order in the stone, because let's face it, it's great, it's such a great symbol. The reason that Arthur can pull it free when it's not meant to be pulled free is that it says in Lachemon's brute to 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 half demon, half none, 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 animal. Yeah, yeah. So it goes wrong. If you love a good story, why aren't you listening to Dan Snow's History Hip Podcast?

26:01It's a show where we tell you every amazing, crazy, and important thing that's ever happened in human history, from the perilous voyages of the first Polynesians, the discoveries of Captain Cook, the deadly Viking raids on Britain and Ireland, the rise and fall of the great English kings and queens. I'll tell you how Waterloo was won, the Alamo was lost, and all the history in the Tweet. So make sure you check it out, Dan Snow's History Hip, for the best true stories ever told, wherever you get your podcasts. 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.

27:02He'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. Yes, I think. And the sad irony for me in that is what happens to somebody if they're 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 ferry. And by all accounts, ferry is not the place you go for healthy relationships. It's an intense place and it's polarized and it's heady and intoxicating. And I wonder, he gets 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 this is the kind of scenario I played out in my head as if Arthur spends 15 years

28:04of his life in ferry, first 15 years without this mother who was going to love him. And he's getting that particular ferry version of what it means to be a warlord and a leader, which is highly toxic in my version of things, then what would replace that? And also father, of course, that said what he would have had humans without humanity. He's a kind of like Android, you know, it's like something else going on there and humans needing humans. 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. Yeah, but the irony is, of course, I won't go into too much detail about the end of the book

29:04and 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 story of the power of human relationships and the need that the fact that included animals in this, but you know, ferry education doesn't give him that empathy, that 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? And that's in bear wolf too, you know, that was good cooning. Yeah, yeah, how much humanity has 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 bogs and things like that, which seems to

30:05be an effort to preserve them. How much do the existence of those play into this idea of buried, secreted weapons that might have later emerged into our thorium? Yeah, so I guess, you know, there are various theories around the sword in the stone. And I think there's a tendency sometimes with medieval material to see it as existing somehow in the mists of time and not being quite so easy to contextualize as it actually is and to account for. The early 30th century is actually not that long ago. There's quite a lot of information around, you know, even though we can't categorically say Robert de Bohant was the first time we get this order in the stone, it's consistent with his religious principles that are coming through in the other text by him that he had had this kind of miracle to elect the king. And that is something we see in many other medieval texts, many natural materials acting

31:12contrary 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 their author is so he's got that lost city of Atlantis mystique and there's this kind of desire to look into deep prehistory for this kind of Arthurian indigenous tradition to tap into and sort of feel what we belong to in some way. And so, you know, I think these bronze age ducks, these ceremonial daggers are so interesting because sometimes Arthurians or the stone is linked to kind of bronze age metalworking traditions and even kind of glibly and in a tongue in cheekway the curator that British museum sort of says there's something Arthurian in one of his articles at the British Museum

32:13magazine about the way in which I think it was 1988 with the Oxbra Dirk was drawn from the ground out of a peat bog by a dog walker who is not now king, which but Neil Wilker doesn't say that 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 Oxbra Dirk in and the Rudham Dirk and things because they are there's such cool objects. There's six being found in the UK and on the continent. They were very recently all reunited which Neil Wilken observed has been quite Arthurian bringing all these doors together also quite on a big round table. Yeah, I don't know, no, but there also don't quite non-Uri. Of course, CS Lewis was very steeped in this medieval literary stuff. And so that's Neil's doing that in a completely tongue in cheekway, but also we need to be aware that it is, you know, we are just making that out.

33:14That is just a bit of fun. I don't think there's these durks are being put into the ground or they're sometimes they're bent ahead of time. I just say as an aside, they all seem to have been made in the same production context, particularly the same workshop which is so cool with evidence that survives. And this isn't my interpretation on Deferta archaeologists of prehistory for this, but is that they are some kind of demonstration of peace, 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 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 moment of rebirth, of reignition, of intention, of violence, you know, of judgment.

34:21All the things that the sword expresses. And so what I do over the course of the book is try and distill it down to an equation. We need a symbol of office, a sword being a symbol of office of kingship for models for the sword in the stone. We need a symbol of office being sort of 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 said, we've got to go beyond that. So that's what I was trying to do in the book. 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 and prehistory that we tend to think is just people mowing around the countryside, randomly killing each other. Here are symbols of peace being buried in a way that surely meant to commemorate peace and instill it embedded in the earth forever and ever. And it is interesting how those things, those bits of archaeology can speak to some of

35:26these mythologies that we in county, you know, archaeology maybe can't prove the mythology, but it can tell us that there is something going on. There is something in the collective minds of people about swords being embedded into natural materials that means something. Yes. I think there's imagination in the burying of the Oxbrune and Rudum Ducks and the others as well. There's a conceptualizing of peace and 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 I've sought to expand on is that of seeking resolution and humanity's research. My experience of discoveries over the course of my research has been that they rarely come with a head-y rush of excitement. They are almost always a settled feeling of, yeah, I thought that's where this was going.

36:29Now, 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. It's like cracking your 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. 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 sort 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, they're often there's lots of questions and more mysteries open up. And that's so fundamental to the Arthurian legend is mystery and contradiction and unknowns 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 the sword in the stone is one of, I think, the ultimate symbol of that in a way.

37:31And so, you know, bringing in these ceremonial ducks isn't strictly relevant to these sword in the stone. There's something to say about how we understand that symbol, how we might look for models for it. But at the same time, it's an opportunity to talk about these awesome ducks that sticking out the ground in a peat bog in my Lord's wood, in Norfolk, and there may have been you know, these six objects from across Northwestern Europe that may have been made in the same workshop that symbolised peace. That's just a chance for that foray. And yeah, that's very interesting to me. If you love a good story, why aren't you listening to Dan Snow's History Hip Podcast? It's a show where we tell you every amazing, crazy and important thing that's ever happened

38:34in human history from the perilous voyages of the first Polynesians, the discoveries of Captain Cook, the deadly Viking raids on Britain and Ireland, the rise and fall of the great English kings and queens. They'll tell you how Waterloo was won, the Alamo was lost and all the history in the tweed. So make sure you check it out, Dan Snow's History Hip, for the best true stories ever told, wherever you get your podcasts. 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 literally got an Italian knight who goes and shoves his sword into a stone and it's like that's it undone with fighting there. Yeah, Galgarno said then 1170, also he's sort of contemporary with the death of Thomas

39:39Beckett. He ascended a hill near his birth town of Kirstino in Tuscany. He'd had a vision of the Archangel Michael and he, yeah, Galgarno thrust his sword into a stone and then builds a hermitage around it and I went to visit the hermitage as part of the research of this book and saw the sword in the stone. The metal has been tested and is thought to be a 12th century sword. In the early 20th century, I think lead was poured around where it sits in the rock and it was fixed in place. It was actually very easy just to pull it out. Nearby on display is a little glass-fronted cabinet with two desiccated human forearms in it, which are also 12th century and is said to have belonged to a thief that tried to steal the steel sword and to lay a pious wolf ripped his forearms off and stopped him. And that is sometimes the question quite rightly raised, is it influenced by the authorian

40:41legend by an earlier version of the sword in the stone that hasn't survived? Is it the model for it? And this is done with some skepticism just because there's no other indication in the Hagiography around Galgarno that there was any connection to Arthur, but also it doesn't work in terms of that formula. He's again, he's renouncing the world. It's not an expression of violence. It's an intention of kingship and violence. It's stepping away. It's going. It's not about election to anything. So at the end it was just another opportunity to think about how we interpret these motifs and to find out about something really interesting, which is this story of Galgarno and the sword in the stone and tuskety. 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 a symbolic end or beginning of something. It's the end of war or it's the beginning of a new war. Yeah, yes, and it goes beyond swords too, as well.

41:43I 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 lots of other divine election, natural materials or natural processes that can be cited. Yeah, yeah. I guess just thinking about the sword itself as well, is the sword in the stone the same sword as Excalibur? I don't know. I don't know. He has a sword in, I just sort of, why wouldn't it be? But in, no, it isn't because Caliburne is named in Jeffrey of Monmouth and in the later group adaptations, he, at the Battle of Baden, he's carrying a sword with the name that is the kind of, the germ of the word Excalibur.

42:45Along with some other weapons, his spear has a Welsh name that's sometimes shortened to Ron. Spear called Ron, I like it. Yeah, it's lovely, isn't it? And Ron Gomiant is the Welsh name for his sword. And that predates at the earliest surviving instance of the sword in the stone motif in text by many decades. So maybe, but I don't think Robert De Bois explicitly states that the sword is that one that has been known from earlier sources. 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. And would we have a different connection to Arthur if he had kept that kind of fairy background or does it not really matter how he's achieved what he does?

43:47Yeah, well, you see a kind of increasing demonization of the fairy characters over the course of the Arthurian legends story, sort of story of change and development with a better word. So that's, it is consistent with that. And I really like the earlier sources that allow fairy to be a place of moral and ambiguity, not somewhere that's just bad, but somewhere that's, I mean, 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 is, look, as a medievalist who doesn't want to patronize medieval Christians, I don't want to always side with a story that says, Christianity came in and everything good that comes out must be a fossil of a pre-Christian culture or anything interesting or kind of

44:51spicy. But you know, you're saying that it's just different versions of Christianity, the 12th century life of Gildars where Winnevere is abducted by this king of the summer country, who seems to be a kind of other world king. That allows 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, you have a back now, good chap. So, yeah, it's a really difficult question. 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. 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 just, I'm particularly imaginatively excited by the Arthur raised by fairies moment.

45:58And I would be very, we'd 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 throw away moment in La Chaman. There's a few instances that he goes a little bit more out there than Jeffrey of Monmouth or Was, whereas maybe he is in touch with some sort of Breton traditions or something 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. Absolutely. So we've talked quite a bit about Arthur and Merlin. Before we finish, have you got a favorite character from the book that isn't Arthur or Merlin? I'm interested. I like Riesel, the giant of Eureli. I would, I thought I should name my female character, but then I'm going to say that,

47:00because 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, where I find interesting too. And Merlin's sister, Gnado. But I'm going to say Riesel, because it's pithy. And he's referred to, again, a little, a little side note in Geoffrey of Monmouth's history of the Kings of Britain. Arthur has just defeated the giant of Monsign Mischel and his men say, oh, that was such an amazing victory. Oh, well done. That was even better than when you went up against Riesel, the giant of Eureli or Snowdonia, who was sowing 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 a beard cloak home.

48:04And I really, when it came to illustrating that, I realised the thing that I most liked about that story was the giant with his incredibly macabre craft project sitting in the mountains sowing together all these beards that he'd been carefully collecting and making decisions about colour, because I imagine he was working across the spectrum from black to silver with kind of organ and blonde in between and chestnut and hazel and all these lovely colours. And some of them might have been curly and some of them straight and some of them with plats and with ponytails or little ornaments in them. And how would he have arranged them? And it was so adorable. And so 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 having the most lovely 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.

49:04So yeah, that he's my favourite character. That is a cool story. I do like that. 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 sort of in the stone in Arthur's story when it actually comes relatively late on? Is that annoying? Is that frustrating? Was that just a symptom of the fact that these things were and maybe should be always evolving? Well, 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 authoritative. And I like the idea of embracing that complexity and of explaining where things are coming from and not always assuming that the stuff we're coming up with now is better than what

50:04was coming up. We were coming up with 800 years ago or a thousand years ago. I, one of the great discoveries for me of 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 what I hoped to do and how I presented them 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 hopefully quite compelling way. But feel that reassurance that this is genuinely old, traditional, steeped in whatever to stuff. And it's got that, 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 there's something that I, it's not so much about assumptions because

51:09there was, I remember as a teenager and beyond feeling like, oh, there are theory and legends, it's one of those overwhelmingly weirdly complicated things. And unless you have used to a university course in it or something, it's quite hard to have that unpacked and explained to you. So I wouldn't judge anyone for wanting it to be simple and so on and to always have been there in the stories, which why would you assume otherwise. But I'm very excited about the opportunity to hopefully expand on the Arthurian legend to be a sort of spokesperson for it and it's many iterations among others, you know, not the only one obviously. But yeah, I hope that's a not too rambling and answer to your question. 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 and the stone to I could only encourage people to go and read

52:10the rest of the book and find out everything else that Amy is unpacking in the fantastic stories that she's got to tell you. Thank you. So thank you so much for joining us again, Amy. Thank you. 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 until 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 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. Yeah, wonderful. Thank you very much. Thank you, Matt. If you've enjoyed this episode, you can catch Amy's previous visits to talk about her book story land 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 Gwynnevere. There are new installments of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday, so please come back to join Enner and I for more from the greatest millennium in human history.

53:14Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts until 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 the 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.