Drew a sword from a stone and anvil at a London churchyard on New Year's Day
The test of rightful kingship, from the French Vulgate and Malory.
Myth · Celtic & Arthurian
King Arthur
Arthurian legend — legendary king of the Britons
The legendary British king who beat back the Saxons, gathered the finest knights in Christendom at a table with no head, and fell at last in a battle against his own kin. He may have a dim historical original in a post-Roman war leader, but the king everyone knows was largely invented by Geoffrey of Monmouth in the 1130s and completed by French romance, Malory and Tennyson.
How to spot them
- ▸Presides over a table deliberately made round so that no knight sits above another
- ▸Wields a named sword and holds court at a castle first named by a French poet
- ▸Wounded at his last battle and carried off to an island to be healed
- ▸Quiz clue: 'Camlann', 'Avalon', 'the once and future king', 'Caxton, 1485'
Stories & episodes
Received a second sword from a hand that rose out of a lake
Excalibur, whose scabbard was worth more than the blade.
Seated his knights at a table with no head, so that none outranked another
The Round Table, introduced by the Norman poet Wace in 1155.
His queen's love for his greatest knight broke up the fellowship
Guinevere and Lancelot, a French addition by Chretien de Troyes.
Fell at Camlann fighting his own nephew, who was in some versions also his son
Mordred; each mortally wounds the other.
Carried to an island of apples to be healed, and expected back in Britain's hour of need
Avalon, and the inscription 'rex quondam rexque futurus'.
Malory's prose compilation of the legend was printed by Caxton in 1485
The Winchester Manuscript, rediscovered in 1934, gives an earlier text.
Monks at Glastonbury claimed in 1191 to have dug up his grave and his wife's
Widely regarded as a medieval publicity stunt after a fire.
Quick-fire facts
- •The earliest mentions are in the Welsh Historia Brittonum, which lists twelve battles including Badon, and the Annales Cambriae
- •Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae (c. 1136) created the king of legend, with the sword Caliburn
- •Wace's Roman de Brut (1155) first mentions the Round Table; Chretien de Troyes added Lancelot, Camelot and the Grail quest
- •Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur was printed by William Caxton in 1485
- •Tennyson's Idylls of the King (1859-85) is the great Victorian retelling
- •His father is Uther Pendragon and his mother Igraine; he is conceived at Tintagel
- •The painted Round Table at Winchester Great Hall is a thirteenth-century fake, repainted under Henry VIII
- •The nine Worthies place him among the three Christian heroes, with Charlemagne and Godfrey of Bouillon
- •T. H. White's The Once and Future King became the basis for the musical Camelot and Disney's The Sword in the Stone
Drill it — 10 cards
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Sources
- Sir Thomas Malory — Le Morte d'Arthur
- Geoffrey of Monmouth — The History of the Kings of Britain
- Thomas Charles-Edwards — The Arthur of History (in The Arthur of the Welsh)