Gone Medieval - Sword in the Stone: Origins of Arthurian Legends

Episode Date: September 11, 2026

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 ArthurListen on AppleListen on SpotifyProphecies of MerlinListen on AppleListen on SpotifyGone 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 podcastHistory 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 for more information.

From long-loss 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 forward slash subscribe. 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. We've 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 Barron. 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, dramatized, 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 1,200.

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 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. 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. 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. I'll make you a badge for 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 so. I wonder 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 had one book out or so. And my first reaction was, oh, 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 Arthuriana. And I thought, I don't think I would feel myself trying to create that Arthur or recreate that Arthur. and my author obviously is just, I think I'd had so many years of being 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 palette 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. 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. For anyone who wants to look it up, it's British Library, Edgerton, MS 3028. And it contains the origin myth of Britain, the Brut, the Hermontau-Bruit by WAS. 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 praise for Edward III's victory in his wars against France. So it becomes very Edward III and Edward III's use of Arthur. And that was that the Arthur I had come to know. loved a particular illustration of Arthur encountering the governor of Gaul, 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 Gaul, is kneeling on the ground, carrying Fleur de Lee on his shield, three Fleur de Lee, 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, 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 at and what the message is, but that seems pretty clear. 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 follows. 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 love 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 Mord d'Arte d'Arte d'Ure. 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 and shining armour, Arthur, that 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's 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 stuck with the world of Arthur that I so loved? 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? 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,

Mord d'Artier, 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, a kettlehole lake in Cumbria, 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 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 purgatorial suffering. And this is, I don't want to, so there'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 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 mother 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 such an incredible, she says things like muse on my mirror, such a wonderful line. You have this picture in your mind forming of a kind of gestalt two profiles looking at each other, you know, where Gwynnevia'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 they're sort of nose to nose at the side of this lake. And it's, 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 tombs coming out, momentum moorries and all of that sort of stuff. It's playing into all of that, all of that. of those contemporary tropes, I guess.

And I think 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 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 world of purgatory. I loved it too. I loved the contrast. And because I'm illustrating this book with black and white lino cuts, it just, it was also like a linocut, like a black and white lino cut. This text was so exciting. 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. 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? We find it in a text from the early 13th century called the Estuart de Merlin,

and it's thought to have been written by someone called Robert de Boron. It's in continental French, old French. And the pattern of the texts attributed to Robert de Boron, 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 anvil on a stone. The stone is four square, you know, a block of carved stone. And it's inscribed with, I will paraphrase, you know, whoever removes the sword from this stone will be 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. It's a downgrade. Why are you demoting them? Yeah. 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 yeah, he'll be king of Britain by Christ's decree. So it's a religious, it's divine election in Robert de Bohol. 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 feet you? If you ask anyone what they know about Arthur, that the sword in the stone is likely to come up.

How has it become such a core part of the story? Well, Robert de Boron also gives us grail narratives. He's, because he's writing in continental French, Longo Cretien de Troyes, he's very important to the Vulgate and post-volgate cycles, which were written in the 13th century and were the primary source material for Mallory's mort d'Auteur. So with the grail, with the Fisher King and so on, they become canonical Arthuriana.

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 Richard 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 climate 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 of Arthurian stories often have him being humiliated by the saints So in the 12th century, life of St. Gildas by Karadar of Clankarfan. And Gwynnevere is abducted by King Malwass 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. And there's a strong implication, I think, that King Melwas of the summer country is an other world figure, that his reed fortress is some kind of thin place.

Gildas, as a spiritual leader, is able to penetrate that fortuitary. and negotiate with King Melwas so that Gwynnevere 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 have been able to. 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. I mean, we don't know how any of this happened. But to the medieval mind, all of the 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. 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, well, maybe I'm talking, and this is my total certitude malfunction coming through. But there's, perhaps they had that in the middle ages too. this idea

Geoffrey 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 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 Mervyn Wilts 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 a sympathetic character I really go to the life of Merlin for mental health guidance and actually I say I would I do there's something about the way it expresses

information overload mental hyperactivity that even if you want a soothsayer 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

and 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 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 there's some like there's things that don't quite map onto each other And that perhaps Geoffrey 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 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 kind of your story of the story of the story. 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. Yeah, well, 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 Geoffrey of Monmouth, the 12th century, but also in some of the early Welsh sources, there's a beautiful dialogue with his sister in a poem, 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's really important to me as a principle that I didn't do anything that I took my key, always, if I made changes, I took my cue from medieval sources, because I just wanted readers to feel that, that authority of these sources coming through, this kind of classic medieval notion of octoritas. And, not sticking your neck out too much, trying to stay humble and keep it fixed, like, rooted in that material. 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 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.

sight, really 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 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 do we keep making these wars? Do we keep fighting? And in the conversation he has with his sister, there's a sort of, the only solace they find is in 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 when it came to the sword and 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. It goes a step further. He's actually subversive.

He's not just sick of it. And so he sets up the sword and 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. 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. 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 single word, really that it hinges on. But when Arthur's born, he gets taken. charge of by fairies. But the word that's used Iwengen could just as easily, so the most famous translation or the best respected translation uses as a term took charge of. But I consulted with, or it's Middle English scholars, and it could just as well be translated as kidnapped,

was kidnapped by fairies, taken by force, that the translators for whatever reason opted for the kind of a soft end of the spectrum took charge of. And then he doesn't seem to come back. 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 or, you know, how all these, so many of these semi-legentary 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 and 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 Lachamon's brute

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 half demon half none you know he's not he's not got fairer

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. 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 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 then 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 Fairy. And by all accounts, fairy is not the place you go for healthy relationships. You know, it's, it's an intense place and it's, 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 of his life in Ferry, first 15 years, without this. who was going to love him. And he's getting that particular

fairy version of what it means to be a warlord and a leader, which is highly toxic in my version of things. Then what would replacing that... And also a father, of course, so 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. 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 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 story of the power of human relationships and the need, the fact that include animals in this, but, you know, fairy 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? And that's in Beowulf too. That was good, cooning. 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 some bronze age ceremonial swords that have been discovered buried in bogs and things like that, which seems to be 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 Arthurian myth? 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 midst 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 Beaunt was the first time we get the sword in the stone,

it's consistent with his religious principles that are coming through in 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 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, 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 that we belong to in some way. And so, you know, I think these bronze age durks, 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 in a tongue-in-cheek way,

the curator at the British Museum says there's something Arthurian in one of his articles for the British Museum magazine about the way in which, I think it was 1988, the Oxford, Dirk was drawn from the ground out of a peat bog by a dog walker

who is not now king. 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 Oxford Dirk in and the Rudham Dirk 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, has been quite authoritarian, bringing all these swords together. On a big round table? Yeah, I don't know, no. But they also don't quite non-ury. Of course, C.S. Lewis was very steep. in this medieval literary stuff. And so that's, you know, Neil's doing that in a completely tongue-in-cheek way.

But also we need to be aware that that is, you know, we are just making that up. That is just a bit of fun. I don't think there's, these dirks are being put into the ground. Or sometimes they're bent ahead of time. Also, I'd just 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. my interpretation, I'll defer to 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 or so or more. That is totally the opposite. it 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, of judgment. That's all 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, sword being a symbol of of office of kingship.

For models for the sword and 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. So we've got to go beyond that.

So that's what I was trying to do in the book. 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 just people mowing around the countryside, randomly killing each other. Here are symbols of peace being buried in a way that is surely meant to commemorate peace and instill it, embed it in the earth forever and ever. And it is interesting how 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 the collective minds of people

about swords being embedded into natural materials that mean something. Yes, and I think there's imagination in the burying of the Oxford and Rudham-Durks 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

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 in humanities research. My experience of discoveries 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. 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 you 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, those things that kind of lack resolution as well. 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 and the stone is one of, I think, the ultimate symbol of that in a way. And so, you know, bringing in these ceremonial dirks isn't strictly relevant to these sword and 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 dirks that sticking out the ground in a peat bog in My Lords Wood in Norfolk. and that may have been, you know, these six objects from across northwestern Europe

that may have been made in the same workshop that symbolise peace. That is, you know, that's just a chance for that foray. And, yeah, that's very interesting to me. 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 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. Yeah.

Yeah, Galganu. It said then 1170 or so he, is a sort of contemporary with the death of Thomas Beckett, he ascended a hill near his birth town of Kirstino in Tuscany. He'd had a vision of the archangel Michael. And he, yeah, Gargano, 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 for this book

and saw the sword in the stone. The metal has been tested and his thought, 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 sword until a pious wolf ripped his forearms off and stopped him. and that is sometimes the question quite rightly raised is it influenced by the Arthurian legend by an earlier version of the sword and the stone

that hasn't survived is it the model for it and this is done with some scepticism just because there's no other indication in the hagiography around Gargano that there was any connection to Arthur but also it doesn't work in terms of that formula you know he's again he's renouncing the world

It's not an expression of violence It's an expression or intention of kingship and violence It's stepping away It's going and it's not about election to anything So again 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 Galgano

And the sword in the stone in Tuscany Yeah but it feels like for centuries Even beyond the Arthurian myth The idea of swords being put in to 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. I mean, swords are so particularly associated with leadership and secular leadership. 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. You know, there's lots of other divine election, natural materials or natural processes that can be cited. Yeah, yeah. And 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 no, it isn't because Caliburn is named in Geoffrey of Monmouth and in the later Brute adaptations. At the Battle of Baden, 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. Spear called Ron. I like it. Yeah, it's lovely, isn't it?

And Ron Gamiant is the Welsh name for his sword. And that predates at the earliest surviving instance of the sword and the stone motif in text by many decades. So maybe, but I don't think Robert de Beauvoir 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. 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? Yeah, well you see a kind of increasing demonisation of the fairy characters over the course of the Arthurian legends story.

It's a story of change and development, which is a better word. So 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... I mean, it's not...

I don't want to overstate it. You know, 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

at 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 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 chat. 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 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 in my mind. imaginatively excited by the Arthur raised by Ferry's moment. And I would be very, would love to see the parallel universe 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 Lachemann. There's a few instances that he goes a little bit more out there than Geoffrey of Monmouth or Wass, 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 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 being developed. But other things happened, which are interesting too, so. 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? I'm interested. I like Ritho, the giant of Ereari. 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, where I find interesting too, and Merlin's sister, Gnader. But I'm going to say Ritho because it's pithy. And he's referred to, again, a little side note in Geoffrey of Monaster's history of the Kings of Britain. has just defeated the giant of Mont Saint-Michel and his men say, oh, that was such an amazing victory. Oh, well done. That was even better than when you went up against

Ritho, the giants of Ariri 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 it home. I think they 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 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 the spectrum from black to silver with kind of Auburn 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 plaits and with ponytails or little ornaments in them and how would he have arranged them and it was so adorable and I imagined him kind of sitting and 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,

can I have your beard too? So, 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 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? 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 authoritative. And I like the idea of embracing that complexity and of explaining where things are coming from and going, not always assuming that the stuff we're coming up with now

is better than what we were coming up with 800 years ago or 1,000 years ago. 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 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 with a super narrative so that you could run through them in a hopefully quite compelling way but feel that that real, assurance that this is genuinely old, traditional, steeped in whatever to stuff, you know, 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 it's something that I, yeah, it's not so much about assumptions because there was, I remember as a teenager and beyond feeling like, oh, Arthur, that Arthurian legends is one of those

overwhelmingly weirdly complicated things. And, you know, unless you have, you used to do a university course in it or something, it's quite hard to have that, you know, that unpacked and explain to you. So I wouldn't judge anyone for wanting it to be simple and sword and the stone always to 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 spokesperson for it and its many iterations, among others. You know, I'm not the only one, obviously. But yeah, I hope that's not too

rambling an 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've focused on the sword in the stone. So I can only encourage people to go and read the rest of the book and find out everything else that Amy is unpacking and the fantastic stories that she's got to tell you. Thank you. 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 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 like the thing that makes this job, other than sitting alone in writing, the other thing that makes this job so wonderful is having conversations with readers and hearing your perspective.

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 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 Gwynnevere.

There are new installments have 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.