Two Swords, or One Story Told Twice

Malory's Le Morte Darthur is unusual among Arthurian tellings for keeping two separate origin stories for Arthur's sword rather than choosing between them. The first is the sword in the stone, an anvil set atop a stone outside a London church, inscribed with a promise that whoever draws it out is rightwise king of all England; the young Arthur draws it seemingly by accident, sent to fetch a sword for his foster brother Kay, and proves his claim to the throne by repeating the feat before witnesses when his first success is doubted. This sword serves Arthur through the early part of his reign until it breaks in single combat against King Pellinore, and it is only afterward, guided by Merlin to a lake, that Arthur receives a second sword, the one properly called Excalibur, handed to him by an arm rising from the water in the grip of the Lady of the Lake. Robert de Boron's earlier French poem, written around 1200, is the first surviving text to tell the sword-in-the-stone story at all, and it is Malory, writing some two and a half centuries later, who fixes the now-familiar sequence of stone sword first, lake sword second, rather than treating the two traditions as rival versions of a single event.