Excalibur: The Sword Malory Named Twice

Two swords, one name

There are two popular answers to where Excalibur came from. Either Arthur pulled it from a stone, or a hand rose out of a lake and gave it to him. Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur tells both stories and calls both swords Excalibur. They are not the same blade.

The split goes back to Malory's French sources. Robert de Boron's Merlin, written around 1200, is the first known tale of the sword in the stone. The Vulgate Prose Merlin then names that stone sword Excalibur. The Post-Vulgate rewrite, written soon afterwards, leaves the stone sword unnamed. In that version the young Arthur breaks it fighting King Pellinore, and Merlin takes him to a lake for a new one. Malory took this episode from the Post-Vulgate but kept the Vulgate's name for the first sword too. So in his book Excalibur breaks, and then Excalibur is given.

The arm in white samite

When the excerpt opens, Arthur is coming out of three days with a hermit who "was a good man and a great leech". His wounds have healed enough to ride. On the road he tells Merlin, "I have no sword." Merlin says there is a sword nearby that will be his.

They come to a broad, fair lake. In the middle, Arthur sees "an arm clothed in white samite, that held a fair sword in that hand." A damsel walks on the water. Merlin says she is the Lady of the Lake, and that there is a rock inside the lake with a palace in it as fine as any on earth. The Lady makes a deal. The sword is hers, and Arthur can have it if he will give her a gift when she asks for one. Arthur agrees without asking what the gift will be. He rows out in a barge and takes the sword by the handles, and the arm sinks back under the water.

Merlin has a test ready on the ride home. He asks which Arthur likes better, the sword or the scabbard. Arthur says the sword. Merlin's answer, in Malory's words: "Ye are more unwise, said Merlin, for the scabbard is worth ten of the swords." As long as Arthur wears the scabbard he will never lose blood, however badly he is wounded. Later, in Book II, Merlin repeats the warning. The rest of Excalibur's story in these books is about the scabbard.

The price of the gift

The Lady comes to collect in Book II. Before she arrives, a damsel shows up at Camelot wearing a sword sent by "the great lady Lile of Avelion". Only a knight without villainy or treachery can draw it from its sheath. Arthur tries and fails, and so does every baron. Then a poor knight named Balin, born in Northumberland and just out of half a year in Arthur's prison, draws it easily. He refuses to give it back. The damsel warns him that he will kill the man he loves most with it, and that "the sword shall be your destruction."

Then the Lady of the Lake rides in and asks for her gift. The exchange shows how little the famous sword meant to its owner at this point: "I have forgotten the name of my sword that ye gave me." She tells him the name, Excalibur, "that is as much to say as Cut-steel." Then she asks for Balin's head or the damsel's, and says she would be happy with both. Balin, she says, killed her brother.

Arthur refuses. Balin has his own grievance. He says this Lady caused his mother to be burnt, and that he has hunted her for three years. He walks up to her and strikes off her head in front of the king. Arthur, ashamed because she came under his safe-conduct, buries her richly and banishes Balin from the court.

This is where the popular version and the text part ways. Modern retellings usually make the Lady who gives Excalibur the same woman as Nimue or Viviane. In Malory she has no name, and she dies early in Book II. Nimue arrives later, at Arthur's wedding, as a damsel King Pellinore brings to court. She is the one who seals Merlin under a stone, and she is the one who later saves Arthur's life. Malory has at least two Ladies of the Lake, and the one who gave the sword was killed by a man carrying a different sword.

The other sword in a stone

Balin's sword gets its own long story. His brother Balan gives him his title: "ye may call him the Knight with the Two Swords." Merlin predicts that Balin will strike "a stroke most dolorous that ever man struck, except the stroke of our Lord." At King Pellam's castle Balin's sword bursts apart. He grabs a spear from a golden table, and Malory says it was the spear Longius used to pierce Christ. With it he wounds Pellam, the castle falls, and three countries are laid waste. Then, carrying a borrowed shield that hides who he is, Balin fights a knight in red until both of them have seven great wounds. The red knight is Balan. The brothers are buried in one tomb.

Merlin puts a new pommel on Balin's sword and sets it in a marble stone that floats on the water. It drifts down to Camelot, "that is in English Winchester," where Galahad draws it. So Malory has a second sword in a stone, and it belonged to the man who killed the Lady of the Lake. Merlin also prophesies that Lancelot will use it to kill Gawaine.

Morgan and the scabbard

Arthur trusts the scabbard to his sister Morgan le Fay. She has a copy made by enchantment and gives the real one, with Excalibur, to her lover Accolon of Gaul. She arranges a fight between them. Arthur, fighting for a cowardly knight named Damas, is handed a sword "counterfeit, and brittle, and false." His blood soaks the ground while Accolon does not bleed at all. Arthur's blade snaps at the cross-guard, and he refuses to yield: "though I lack weapon, I shall lack no worship." The Damosel of the Lake, the same woman who buried Merlin, uses enchantment to knock Excalibur out of Accolon's hand. Accolon dies of blood loss four days later.

Morgan comes for the scabbard again while Arthur sleeps with Excalibur naked in his right hand. She takes only the scabbard. With Arthur chasing her, she throws it "in the deepest of the water so it sank, for it was heavy of gold and precious stones," and turns herself, her horse and her men into stones. In Malory the scabbard is never found, and losing it leaves Arthur unprotected in his last battle. The Post-Vulgate disagrees: there a fay named Marsique recovers the scabbard and lends it to Gawain.

What the name means

The Lady's "Cut-steel" comes from a made-up etymology. The Vulgate Merlin calls Escalibor a Hebrew name meaning "cuts iron, steel, and wood," and Malory took his gloss from that. The real root is Welsh. Caledfwlch combines caled, "hard," with bwlch, "breach, cleft," and it appears in Culhwch and Olwen. Geoffrey of Monmouth turned it into Latin as Caliburnus around 1136 and said the sword was forged in Avalon. Wace wrote Caliburn and Escalibor. In Chrétien de Troyes's Perceval, Gawain carries it.

Which sword went back to the water

The return of the sword has its own version problem. In the Vulgate Mort Artu, Griflet throws the sword into the lake, and in that cycle it is the sword from the stone. In the Post-Vulgate, Griflet throws the lake sword. In Malory it is Bedivere, a hand rises to catch it, and Nimue is among the queens in the black boat that takes Arthur away.

Put together, the story runs like this: one sword broke and was given the same name as the next, a woman paid for her gift with her head, a second sword ended up in a stone, and the scabbard Merlin valued at ten swords lies at the bottom of a lake where it was never found.

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