ABSTRACT
The Sword in the Stone episode, wherein the young Arthur, not yet a king, pulled a naked sword from a stone, and thereby demonstrated his right to the British throne, is among the most famous episodes in medieval European romance (see plate 12). Although absent in the early Welsh literature about Arthur, such as Culhwch and Olwen and The Spoils of Annwn, as well as in Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae and in the closely related accounts of Wace and Layamon, 1 the story of the Sword in the Stone is to be found in almost every other medieval Arthurian text, from Robert de Boron's Merlin (ca. 1191-1202) and the Didot-Perceval (ca. 1200) and the Queste del Saint Graal to Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur. 2 The image of a sword embedded in a stone has long since become a concise metaphor for the Arthurian tradition as a whole, as evidenced by the title of T.H. White's well-known novel The Sword in the Stone. 3
