Forget the castle, where is the lake & the Lady?? We want the sword, even though: "...strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony..."
Hmm... I thought it was one and the same... But you could be right... Drawing the sword from the marked him as the true King, but I recall Excalibur was handed to him by the lady in the lake later... I might have to consult Malory's tome again...
Pretty sure he cast Excalibur into the lake and the Lady of the Lake cared for it before returning it to him later. (making the stone sword Excalibur).
I do recall Sir Bedevere(?) throwing it back in the lake in the end after Arthur is mortally wounded, but I can't recall the bit where Arthur first throws it to the 'watery bint' before that. Having trouble locating my Arthurian books to research that bit...
Well, according to the wikipedia page on Excalibur, depending on the story, sometimes the Sword in the Stone and Excalibur are one and the same, and sometimes they aren't.
There exist 2 versions of the legend you're right. Depending on the version, Excalibur and the Sword in the Stone were the same, in another, they are different swords.
If I recall correctly the movie Excalibur used the one where they are different. The Sword in the Stone was Uther Pendragon's that he buried in the rock just before dying from battle wounds. Arthur received Excalibur later from the Lady in the Lake as mentioned in other comments.
Admittedly I was young and deeply in love with all things Swords and Sorcery but I really liked that movie.
Ah well that's pretty much true of all old myths and stories. I know what you're saying but personally I think the variation we get on these stories in modern media is pretty incredible.
From the cheesy to the epic a lot of the books, movies, games etc. we enjoy today are just modern variations of ancient stories.
There's also a lot to be said for telling the same story—obviously the same story—with your own touch. Personal storytelling is a dying art—arguably already effectively dead. The most obvious version of this would be telling ghost stories, but who is even good at those anymore?
No, the in the movie Excalibur, Merlin recieves Excalibur from the Lady of the Lake, and he then gives it to Uther Pendragon, who on his death embeds it in the stone, leaving it for Arthur to draw it from the stone.
I like it, but it’s certainly not a normal movie by any means. It’s very much stylized – more like an opera or a music video than a normal motion picture, more epic mythic story than documentary-lets-pretend-this-really-happened. And I mean this storytelling-wise, not in terms of camera angles or colours or anything like that. Therefore, I suspect it’s not to everyone’s liking.
“I was not born to live a man’s life, but to be the stuff of future memory.” This quote by Arthur in the movie also applies, in a way, to the movie as a whole. The movie does not try to portray Arthur as a realistic medieval/fantasy king, but the idea of King Artur, the legend.
It depends entirely on the version. The version I learned insinuated the lady in the lake did something to the sword in the stone after Arthur threw it in.
As depicted, no, but if take a squinty-eyed view of a "king" uniting squabbling nobles into one land (where "land" == "bigger territory than was normally allied"), and perhaps throw in some level of violent?/sexual?/usurping? family dysfunction, well....you get a lot of "king arthur"s.
Much like Count Dracula (the evidence saying he was inspired by Vlad the Impaler is awfully thin and largely rests on everyone assuming an initial theory was correct and then laughing at anyone that wanted to say otherwise because "everyone" knows). If you go looking for nobles in that area that fought the Turks and were notorious...well, take your pick. You can filter by "son of the dragon/devil" (Dracula), but I've heard that "Dracul" was sort of an honorary title that wasn't shy among, you know, nobles that fought Turks, so that filter isn't likely to help much.
I'm Romanian and incidentally I vacationed several times in the close vicinity of the Bran castle. Vlad the Impaler (Vlad Tepes or Vlad Draculea) was very much a real person (and the Bran area is pretty nice, I definitely recommend visiting). While the vampire connotations are indeed mostly fabricated, he was known for more mundane gruesome acts, like affectionately poking people with a stick (see pic).
> While the vampire connotations are indeed mostly fabricated,
I was specifically talking about the connection to Bram Stoker's Dracula - Vlad was a real person, (with a bloody history) just as whoever built this English wall they found was/were (presumably minus a few gory tales), but that doesn't mean Stoker knew anything about him.
Vlad is definitely real. There's a legend that Count Dracula (you know, the vampire) was based on Vlad, but there's not much evidence Stoker took anything but the "Dracole" name (though I think that's the German spelling).
The idea of a historical King Arthur is a silly quixotic quest, at least with current evidence. The point of the story is not historiographical. It's even more hopeless than discerning a historical Moses, where we actually have texts attributed. Solid evidence (that I'd argue is easily debunked just by writing style alone). This means people just project romantic shit without the pain of objectivity.
Yes, sadly, there are not an awful lot of surviving credible written historical records from Anglo-Saxon England. The ones that have survived often have been written hundreds of years later and generally not considered 100% reliable. This means that we have to go by archeological evidence. Hence the joke that we should bury our deceased pets in elaborate military uniforms, in order to confuse future historians.
There are quite a few contemporary Anglo Saxon chronicles, especially from the time of Alfred the Great onwards. Arthur is a legend from way before all that stuff, though.
Then they found actual evidence. I'm happy to change my mind if there is something convincing beyond "hey this fits our expected timeline"; there are extremely convincing textual clues matching the location of Troy. We don't even have that with King Arthur.
The excavation of Troy also destroyed a lot of evidence in the dude's eagerness to find the "original" Troy, so if anything it's a good argument against eagerly digging around looking for myths.
To be fair, The Bosporus isn't short of possible archaeological digs. I would hate being a developer anywhere around there.
>so if anything it's a good argument against eagerly digging around looking for myths.
I wouldn't read to far into the article, I don't think they are digging around looking for myths so much as excavating a undocumented, historic site and using the King Arthur story for media coverage or interest.
Note how everything related to King Arthur is simply added by the author of the article and all the quotes from the individuals involved in the project don't mention a thing about Arthur, but limited to: items located, potential origins of the items recovered, possible dates etc...
There is no archaeological evidence, but he is mentioned in a number of books. [0]
This is not unlike the Hittites, a great civilization that until recently was believed by scholars to be a Biblical myth (either not existing at all, or a tiny tribe inflated in importance for propaganda reasons) because no physical evidence existed.
It was not until 1830 that Hittite ruins were first discovered [1]. We now know they were a great civilization with an Empire which lasted for 500 years (and successor states that lasted a few more centuries) and spanned most of modern Turkey.
If an entire civilization can be lost, so can evidence of a minor Romano-British Chief.
Arthur is just a name, and there's not much direct evidence the legend was a "Romano-British Chief" except via hand-wavy reasoning about themes. In the same vein, we could call the idea of Atlantis plausible just by being referenced by Aristotle. I mean the evidence could exist, but there's really not much rational reason to look for it. I much prefer explanations built on evidence, not in search of it.
There are a lot of things to learn from myths, legends, and folktales. Finding a historical character has got to be one of the more boring things considering the value is in the considerable time the story was orally preserved--it meant enough to the people who told it we can learn about them.
Edit: I mean this is a pretty cool archaeological dig, I'm not trying to diminish the work here. I'm excited from an archaeological perspective because we don't know much about the period. But the eagerness in drawing conclusions is baffling--there is literally no evidence worth reporting wrt King Arthur beyond the age.
What I most love about it though is that they've found a bunch of buried walls, which lets face it, Britain isn't exactly short of, what with half of the Roman empire being buried... or still visible... across most of the country; and they immediately know it was King Arthur's palace and the piece of clay pot they found was for distributing food at banquets. What if this was the bar from that other famous myth, the one in separate but adjoining buildings in the town that disappeared one night ne'er to be seen again, where Steve the Blacksmith got drunk that night he caught his wife making out with John the Lesser (who she said was much more than his name suggested) and threw that pot across the room smashing it on the wall in a jealous fit of rage before he got wrestled to the ground by the sweaty un-credited barbarian who was staying across the road with Jeff the Cobbler and was thrown out in the torrential downpour that caused the landslide which buried the town... I mean, shit happens.
What I fail to understand is how they reach their conclusions without any real evidence and the media jumps all over it with language proclaiming certainty that this was King Arthur's birth place... a king that while we'd all love to believe in him because he is as much a part of our British heritage as Robin Hood and James Bond largely appears to be a fabrication of our own yearning for a more noble ancestry than we have evidence to support.
What's up with that?
*This story is entirely fictional and any similarity to the Steve at the top of this thread is purely coincidental
The Arthur part is possibly some wishful projection, but the rich people living there part is backed up by the expensive and exotic things found there.
> Arthur is just a name, and there's not much direct evidence the legend was a "Romano-British Chief" except via hand-wavy reasoning about themes.
Well, the earliest source we have that talks about Arthur (Historia Brittonum) is talking about a British leader. And the Battle of Badon has more/earlier sources that mention it. Was one of the leaders at the Battle of Badon actually named Arthur? We don't really know, but it does seem more plausible than the story of Atlantis.
Well, adding a bit to this, it's also a huge boom for the town and surrounding area. I've been there, and it's quite overrun by tourism, so anything flying around royal-arthur-castle and adding to the local folklore will be milked appropriately.
I'm not saying that disparagingly regarding archaeology: is is way cool, but the Disneyland grade treatment this particular find will get will be a bit nauseating.
It is still controversial that the Biblical Hittites are the same as the Anatolian Hittites [1]. I have my doubts that anything in Book of Genesis has any historical basis.
On the topic of the Old Testament I do find Leviticus 13 rather amusing [2].
You wouldn't have been able to understand what they were saying if it had been 100% authentic. And if you translate the language why not translate the units?
