How did King Arthur, the medieval ruler of British legend, acquire his magical sword Excalibur and its priceless sheath that protected its bearer from injury? Two versions exist.

In one account, described in the Alfred Lord Tennyson poem Idylls of the King, Arthur rowed to the middle of a magic lake to receive the jeweled sword from the mysterious Lady of the Lake; dressed in white, she wished to protect him from his enemies and help him “beat his foemen down.” According to this version, as Arthur lay dying after his final battle, he ordered his faithful knight, Sir Bedivere, to throw Excalibur into the lake. After Bedivere complied, an arm, dressed in white, rose to catch the sword “and brandish’d him three times, and drew him under in the mere.”

The other account, popularized by the Disney film The Sword in the Stone, suggests that the sword had been firmly embedded in a miraculous stone, to be removed only by the future king. After every man who tried had failed to extract Excalibur, Arthur, though still a boy, pulled the sword out from the stone and proved himself the rightful heir to the throne.

Sir Thomas Malory’s fifteenth-century work Le Morte Darthur contains both versions. According to Malory, the name “Excalibur” means “cut-steel.”

PostScript: Although the existence of a real-life Arthur cannot be proven, historians cite evidence supporting a belief that he indeed probably lived in the sixth century. In life, Arthur was not a king, but a British warrior who battled invading Germans.