Excalibur, between myth and history

A mysterious object stuck in a rock is extracted by a man awaited by an extraordinary destiny. Immediately our thoughts turn to the famous episode of Arthur who parades Excalibur and shows the world that he is the one predestined to become king.

For all of us, in fact, the sword in the stone is the symbol par excellence of the Arthurian saga. So we have been told in books, comics, in the cinema. And yet, we do not find the story of the prodigy who consecrates the British leader king "by the grace of God" in the first documentary sources that narrate the exploits of the mythical sovereign and his knights. It appears for the first time in a thirteenth-century text, the Merlin of the French poet Robert de Boron. Where did this obscure author draw inspiration from?

Francesco Marzella , researcher at the University of Cambridge, helps us to solve the riddle in his recent “Excalibur” (Salerno Editrice 2022, pp. 176), dedicated to the myth and history of the sword in the stone .

Marzella's investigation starts from a comparison between the famous episode of the cycle of King Arthur and an older story, centered on a bishop's crosier fixed in a tombstone, which appears in the Vitae (a hagiography written in the 12th century) of Edward the Confessor, king of England and saint who lived shortly after the year 1000. It is only the first of many analogies: from the courtly novels to the Nordic sagas emerge, in fact, numerous stories that have as protagonists young people (and also women) of royal lineage in search of legitimacy, ready to challenge the otherworldly forces to conquer invincible swords and complete their heroic initiation.

Like a true detective used to moving among centuries-old sources, Marzella thus reconstructs a dense web of hidden references and surprising occurrences, which return a scenario that is all the more reliable the more intricate, useful to illuminate the genesis of one of the most famous episodes of all medieval literature, the myth of royalty par excellence: that of Arthur and his sword, Excalibur .

A myth that is not only universally known, but that maintains its charm even centuries after its elaboration, managing to fascinate us moderns, for reasons that Marzella well explains and that make his book even more interesting to read: "Sign of legitimacy , miraculous prodigy, symbol of redemption: the sword in the stone can be observed from different perspectives and always rethought with new nuances. Persistence of the myth and power of an image, of course. Yet the grandeur of Arthur's gesture goes far beyond that. The young man who releases the sword and succeeds in the test not thanks to some particular skill or strength, but rather by making himself discoverer and revealer of his own identity, is destined to remain a timeless archetype ". And for this he speaks to human beings of every age and that ancient gesture still finds an echo in our hearts and minds.