Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s ‘The Damsel of Sanct Grael’ (1857)
Mention cloaks that can make you invisible, dishes that fill themselves with any food you could wish for, magic cauldrons or chess pieces that move by themselves, and most 21st century listeners would think of the Harry Potter books and films.
If, however, you spoke of these objects in medieval Wales, listeners would instead think of Tri Thlws ar Ddeg Ynys Brydain, literally ‘the Three Treasures and Ten of the Island of Britain’. And instead of Harry Potter you might recall the names of Rhydderch Hael, Gwyddno Garanhir and … Arthur.
What were these magical treasures, who owned them and what stories did they conjure up?¹
The Mass of Saint Gregory (1511) by Albrecht Dürer.
At the beginning of the 1500s a London grocer called Richard Hill busied himself in compiling a Commonplace Book in which he noted down a number of tales and ballads, possibly for the moral education of his young sons.
Among these “tales and balattis” was the lullaby that we have come to know as The Corpus Christi Carol (though we have no idea of the tune it was sung to). This includes such strange, haunting images that after the text was first published in print in the early 20th century debate arose as to their meaning.
And, because of the image of the bleeding knight, scholars and others began to recall the equally strange and haunting image of the Fisher King in the Grail legends.
Tintagel Castle, Cornwall, engraved by G. Cooke (1818) after J M W Turner (1775-1851), Tate Gallery
We were almost bent double getting to the front doors; for safety the car had been parked with its wheel right up to the kerb.
Having inveigled a stay at the Camelot Castle Hotel at Tintagel (King Arthur’s Castle Hotel as was), we had forgotten how unremitting the winter weather was in North Cornwall. From our four-poster bed we might have had views of Tintagel Castle, if the squalls had allowed, but they didn’t and so we didn’t.
It brought home to me the perennial question, why would anyone have wanted to stay at Tintagel Castle in its heyday? Surely Arthur, king or otherwise, if he ever had residence there, must have asked himself the selfsame question?
A good litmus test for popular conceptions of King Arthur comes with the newspaper cartoon. Along with the Round Table and the hand in the lake grasping the sword, the image of the sword in the stone is pre-eminent in Arthurian reference. CartoonStock.com includes typical examples, though for copyright reasons we can only describe a selection, not show them.
In a cartoon by Dave Carpenter, a medieval official remarks to a peasant clutching a résumé in front of a sword in a stone, “Actually there’s no interview necessary. Just pull out the sword and the job’s yours.” In another US cartoon (by ‘Kes’) an exhausted office employee, obviously unsuccessful in his attempts to remove the sword, is being addressed by a boss behind a desk: “Well, Foster. It doesn’t look like you’ll be getting that promotion after all.” A third cartoon reveals a knight who has removed the sword, only to retrieve the written message, “Congratulations! You may already be King!”
One cartoon minimises its impact by weak draftsmanship, though to be sure the caption is weak enough. Merlin is examining a giant safety razor in a stone, which we are told represents The Wilkinson Sword and the Stone. Another memorable image I’ve seen is of a boy, watched by his parents, struggling to remove a knife from his birthday cake.
Leaving aside the question of whether fans of Arthuriana will find these examples funny, we see that they aim to achieve their effect through sudden incongruity, synchronously juxtaposing two anachronistic but commonplace ideas. The now familiar image of a sword in a stone is so strongly associated with the young Arthur that it may then come as a shock to find that it is not exclusive to this legendary figure, and that in fact its origins may equally lie elsewhere.
A look at other possessors of wonderful swords and how they acquired them may help to put the young Arthur’s deed into context and explain why the story had (and still has) such resonances.
Pendragonry 