Excalibur

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.

Excalibur's name has traveled through several languages on its way into English. Geoffrey of Monmouth, writing in Latin around 1136, calls the sword Caliburnus, itself apparently drawn from an earlier Welsh or Brittonic form; Welsh tradition independently names Arthur's sword Caledfwlch, a compound built from words for hard and breach or gap, suggesting a blade that cuts through what stands in its way. Caledfwlch in turn closely resembles Caladbolg, hard lightning or hard gap, the name of a ferocious sword wielded by the hero Fergus mac Roich in the Irish Ulster Cycle, a body of heroic legend that took shape independently of the Arthurian material and predates Geoffrey's history by centuries in its oral and early written forms. The resemblance between the Welsh and Irish sword names is close enough that most scholars treat them as descending from a shared Insular Celtic story pattern, an unbreakable or supremely destructive named sword, rather than as a coincidence, which would place the germ of Excalibur's story in a Celtic storytelling tradition considerably older than the developed Arthurian legend that eventually gave the sword its own French-derived English name.