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Much in the past has
been made of the fact that the early Welsh name for
Arthur's sword, Caledfwlch, appears to be cognate with
that of the famous sword of the Irish hero Fergus mac
Roich, Caladbolg. Various etymologies have been proposed
for both swords, but given the qualities ascribed to them,
the most reasonable derives the name from calad/caled,
"hard", and -bolg, "lightning",
cognate with L. fulg-. Derivations which take -bolg to
mean "gap/cleft" (cf. W. bwlch) create a sword
name that is nonsensical, i.e. a gap or cleft cannot be
hard, nor can a sword be a gap or cleft. A later form of
the name, Caladcholg or "Hard-sword" (Early
Irish cholg = "sword"), is thought to be a
clerical alteration of the original name. As a mythological lightning
weapon, Caladbolg/Caledbwlch, "Hard-lightning (?)",
performed marvels in Fergus's hands. To quote from
the Celt Electronic Text Edition of the Tain Bo
Cualnge (http://www.ucc.ie/celt/published/T301035/text040.html): “Then said Medb to Fergus:
‘It were indeed fitting for you to give us your aid
unstintingly in fighting today, for you were banished
from your territory and your land and with us you got
territory and land and estate and much kindness was shown
to you’. ‘If I had my sword today’ said
Fergus, ‘I would cut them down so that the trunks of
men would be piled high on the trunks of men and arms of
men piled high on arms of men and the crowns of men's
heads piled on the crowns of men's heads and men's heads
piled on the edges of shields, and all the limbs of the
Ulstermen scattered by me to the east and to the west
would be as numerous as hailstones between two dry fields
(?) along which a king's horses drive, if only I had my
sword’. Then said Ailill to his own charioteer, Fer
Loga: ‘Bring me quickly the sword that wounds men's
flesh, O fellow. I pledge my word that if its condition
and preservation be worse with you today than on the day
when I gave it to you on the hillside at Crúachna Aí,
even if the men of Ireland and of Alba are protecting you
against me today, not all of them will save you’.
Fer Loga came forward and brought the sword in all the
beauty of its fair preservation, shining bright as a
torch, and the sword was given into Ailill's hand. And
Ailill gave the sword to Fergus and Fergus welcomed the
sword: ‘Welcome to you, O Caladbolg, the sword of
Leite’ said he. ‘Weary are the champions of the
war-goddess. On whom shall I ply this sword?’ asked
Fergus. ‘On the hosts that surround you on all
sides’ said Medb. ‘Let none receive mercy or
quarter from you today except a true friend’. And Fergus grasped the
Caladbolg in both hands and swung it back behind him so
that its point touched the ground, and his intent was to
strike three terrible and warlike blows on the Ulstermen
so that their dead might outnumber their living. Cormac
Cond Longas, the son of Conchobor, saw him and he rushed
towards Fergus and clasped his two arms about him.‘Ready;
yet not ready (?), my master Fergus. Hostile and not
friendly is that, my master Fergus. Ungentle but not
heedful (?) is that, my master Fergus. Do not slay and
destroy the Ulsterman with your mighty blows, but take
thought for their honour on this day of battle
today’. ‘Begone from me, lad’ said Fregus
‘for I shall not live if I strike not my three
mighty, warlike blows upon the Ulstermen today so that
their living outnumber their dead’. ‘Turn your hand
level’ said Cormac Cond Longas, ‘and strike off
the tops of the hills over the heads of the hosts and
that will appease your anger’. ‘Tell Conchobor
to come then into his battle-position’. Conchobor
came to his place in the battle. Now that sword, the
sword of Fergus, was the sword of Leite from the elf-mounds
[sidib]. When one wished to strike with it, it was as big
as a rainbow in the air.—Then Fergus turned his hand
level above the heads of the hosts and cut off the tops
of the three hills which are still there in the marshy
plain as evidence. Those are the three Máela of Meath. Now as for Cú Chulainn,
when he heard the Óchaín Conchobuir being struck by
Fergus mac Róig, he said: ‘Come now, my friend
Láeg, who will dare thus to smite the Óchain of
Conchobor my master while I am alive?’ ‘This
huge sword, as big as a rainbow, sheds blood, increase of
slaughter’ said Láeg. ‘It is the hero Fergus
mac Róig. The chariot sword was hidden in the fairy
mounds [assidib]. The horsemen (?) of my master Conchobor
have reached the battlefield’.” Cruachan is the diminuative of
cruach, a rick, i.e. a stack or pile, as of turf, but is
also applied to hills or mountains (see Deirdre and
Laurence Flanagan’s Irish Place-Names). This
is to be related (according to Rivet and Smith in their The
Place-Names of Roman Britain) to British *croucio-,
later *croco-, “mount, tumulus”, cf. Welsh crug,
Irish cruach – hill, hillock, mound, heap, stack,
tumulus, barrow, cairn. The Cruachan Ai or Little Tumulus
of Ai was on Mag Ai, the great plain in County Roscommon
that extends from Ballymore to Elphin, and from
Bellanagare to Strokestown. The most important tumulus at
Cruachan is now called Rathcroghan Mound, a site now
firmly established as a ceremonial center associated with
pre-Christian ritual. According to the Cruachan Ai
Visitor Centre (http://www.cruachanai.com/frameset.html),
Rathcroghan Mound “is 88m in diameter on average
at its base, and is about 4m in height on its northern
side. There has been much speculation over the years as
to its function, but recent research by NUI Galway
indicates that it was used for ceremonial purposes, and
possibly contains a passage tomb. Through techniques such
as ground probing radar and magnetic susceptibility, the
Archaeogeophysics Imaging Project of NUI Galway, under
Professor John Waddell have discovered a massive
enclosure surrounding the mound, approx. 380m in diameter,
the largest of its type in the country. It also encloses
a number of other archaeological features near the mound.” Uamh Cruachan or the “Cave
of the Little Tumulus” was an Otherworld entrance in
this same location. This is now called Oweynagat,
“Cave of the Cats”, and is an ancient
souterrain. It is interesting that
the Welsh “Spoils of Annwn” poem has the god
Lugh (Llwch) raise Arthur’s sword to a magical
cauldron in Caer Siddi, the ‘Fairy Fort’, while
Caladbolg in Irish tradition is said to come from the elf
or fairy mounds. Caer Siddi is also called Caer
Wydr or ‘Glass Fort’, a name later connected
with Glastonbury. For this reason, Glastonbury came
to be identified with Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Avalon,
where the sword Caliburn or Caledbwlch had been forged. While Geoffrey’s Caliburnus
is usually said to derive from Latin chalybs,
“steel”, this sword-name’s connection with
Caledbwlch has not been satisfactorily explained. W. caled means, as we have seen
above, “hard”. In Latin, the word for hard is
“durus”. Welsh has a cognate of durus, i.e. dur,
but the latter means “steel”. It is possible
that Geoffrey of Monmouth or his source wrongly
interpreted caled as dur, “steel”, rather than
durus, “hard”. This could have come about in a
number of ways, perhaps most easily by the
misinterpretation of a gloss on caled. Faced with a Welsh
word thought to mean steel, L. chalybs was substituted
and the sword-name Caliburnus created. Or, if this seems
implausible, there is Arthur and his "brave men"
in the Geraint son of Erbin poem (see Chapter
Eleven below) who "used to hew with steel",
steel being dur in the Welsh text. If Geoffrey did
not know of Caledfwlch, he could have converted the Welsh
dur of a source like Geraint son of Erbin straight
over into Latin Chalybs/Caliburnus.] Anyone reading these
Irish and Welsh accounts cannot possibly see Caladbolg/Caledbwlch
as a mere mortal sword. Rather, it is a divine lightning
weapon, used by a sacred hero. So how is it that such a
weapon came to be in Arthur's hands? We might attempt to
trace this development with am aim to solving some
Arthurian mysteries. In the Welsh poem "The
Spoils of Annwm", and again in "Culhwch and
Olwen", Arthur's sword is wielded in Ireland by the
god Lugh/Llwch, again proving that this sword is no
mortal weapon, but is symbolic of the divine lightning.
We do, therefore, have a precedent for looking to Ireland
for Arthur's original procurement of Caledbwlch. Going now to the LL text
of the Tain Bo Cuailnge, headed "Do fhallsigud Tana
Bo Cualnge" ("How the Tain Bo Cuailnge was
Found Again"), we have the following interesting
episode: "Emine, Ninene's
grandson, set out for the east with Senchan's son Muirgen.
It happened that the grave of Fergus mac Roich was on
their way. They came upon the gravestone at Enloch ['liic
oc Enloch', see Oir leac, "gravestone") in
Connacht. Muirgen sat down at Fergus's gravestone, and
the others left him for a while and went looking for a
house for the night. Muirgen chanted a poem
to the gravestone as though it were Fergus himself. He
said to it: If this your royal rock Were your own self mac
Roich Halted here with sages Searching for a roof 'Cuailnge' we'd recover Plain and perfect Fergus. A great mist suddenly
formed around him - for the space of three days and
nights he could not be found. And the figure of Fergus
approached him in fierce majesty, with a head of brown
hair, in a green cloak and a red-embroidered hooded tunic,
WITH A GOLD-HILTED SWORD [emphasis mine] and bronze blunt
sandals. Fergus recited him the whole Tain, how
everything happened, from start to finish." What seemed remarkable
about this account is that a sword bearing the same name
as that of King Arthur's is placed at a stone or rock at
a lake. But even more startling, we find at this stone a
personage bearing the name Muirgen, a name cognate with
the Welsh Morgen or Morgan, as in Morgan le Fay. Morgan
le Fay later turns up to be one of the Ladies of the Lake.
Also, while he is not present when Fergus appears, Emine
is the son of one Ninene. Ninene bears a striking
resemblance to the name given to the Lady of the Lake, i.e.
Niviene/Eviene/Viviane/Nimue. In a previous study, I
demonstrated that the Lady of the Lake sites were
situated in Scotland near the western end of
Hadrian’s Wall. There we find Aballava/Avallana/”Avalon”
with its surrounding Burgh Marsh, and both the stone of
the god Mabon (Clochmabenstane) and the same god’s
lake (Lochmaben). According to Professor O'Riain of University College, Cork, "The feeling here is that Enloch is a disguised version of Loch (na) nEn, which is now represented by Loughnaneane tl., p./b. Roscommon." Dr. Betty O'Brien adds that Loch na nEn means "Lake of the Birds" and that this lake is "" According to Professor
John Waddell of the Department of Archaeology at the
National University of Ireland, Galway: John Bradley adds: The name Enloch could
itself have become confused with the name Afallach. The
latter is the name given to a legendary son of Beli Mawr
in Welsh tradition. His name also appears as Ynys
Afallach in Welsh. Ynys Afallach, as mentioned above, is
the Welsh equivalent of the Irish Emhain Ablach. Afallach
later appears as Evalac or "Evelake" in the L'ESTOIRE
DEL SAINT GRAAL and I have shown elsewhere that this name
was assimilated to the Biblical Amalek, eponym of the
Amalekites. In the genealogies appended to Nennius,
Aballac is duplicated as Amalech. MS. Copyists frequently
confused the letters n and u. An Enloch name could easily
have been rendered at some point as Euloch and hence as
Evloch. Evloch, wrongly identified with Afallach, a
presumed eponym for Avalon, was connected with the
Otherworld apple-island and utilized by Geoffrey of
Monmouth, who has Caliburn (= Caledbwlch) forged in
Avalon, a placed ruled by Morgan le Fay, who knows "the
art of changing her shape, of flying through the air."
Could it be that
Geoffrey’s Avalon or Ynys Afallach took on
components borrowed from the story of the Irish Stone at
Enloch? That Morgen (Geoffrey's spelling) as queen of
Ynys Afallach can in part be traced to Muirgen of Enloch?
That Niviene or Nemhain (see above) was further developed
as a character by being associated with Emine's father,
Ninene? That the tale of Arthur’s Sword in the Stone
has at least part of its origin in the presence of
Fergus’s Caladbolg at the Stone of Enloch? Romantic as the above-mentioned
notion is, there is a much less exciting, yet much more
reasonable explanation for the motif of the Sword in the
Stone. First, it is important to
remember that the first author who tells of the Sword in
the Stone does not, in fact, have the weapon in the stone.
Instead, in his romance Merlin, Robert de Boron
states that the sword was in an anvil, and the anvil was
on top of a stone. Furthermore, the sword, anvil
and stone were in a churchyard. It has long been recognized that
the story of the sword in the anvil has its obvious
parallel in the Norse tales featuring Sigmund the Volsung
and his son, Sigurd the Dragonslayer. I am quoting the relevant
passages from the excellent recent translation of the _Volsungasaga_
by Jesse Byock: He [Odin] brandished the sword
and thrust it into the trunk [of Barnstokkr] so that it
sank up to the hilt. Words of welcome failed
everyone. Then the man began to speak: "He who
draws this sword out of the trunk shall receive it from
me as a gift, and he himself shall prove that he has
never carries a better sword than this one." Then the old man walked out of
the hall... They stood up now, and no one disputed
whether or not to grasp the sword; each though the one
who reached it first would be best off. The noblest
men went up to it first, and then each of the others,
No one who came forward succeeded in moving it, no matter
which way he tried. Now Sigmund, the son of King
Volsung, came forward. He grasped the sword, and
drew it from the trunk. It was as if the sword lay
loose for him… Regin now made a sword. He gave
it to Sigurd, who took it and said: “This is your
smithying, Regin.” Sigurd struck the anvil and the
sword broke. He threw down the blade and told Regin
to forge another, better one. Regin made a second sword and
brought it to Sigurd… Sigurd tried the sword and be
broke it like the first one… Now Regin made a sword [from the
fragments of the sword Sigmund had previously drawn from
the tree]. And when he brought it out of the forge, it
seemed to the apprentices as if flames were leaping from
its edges [cf. the Welsh Dream of Rhonabwy’s
description of Caledfwlch: “… with a design of
two serpents on the golden hilt; when the sword was
unsheathed what was seen from the mouths of the serpents
was like two flames of fire…”]. He told Sigurd
to take the sword and said he was no blacksmith if this
one broke. Sigurd hewed at the anvil and split it to its
base. The blade did not shatter or break. In Robert’s Merlin,
the sword is not only drawn from the anvil, but several
times re-inserted. This re-insertion of the
blade into the anvil is quite likely a variant on
Sigurd’s triple testing of the swords upon the anvil
in the Volsungasaga. More light has been shed on the
existence of the Sigurd story in early Northern England
by Shona E. McAndrews in her dissertation An Analysis
of the Man and Dragon Combat from the Sigurd Legend in
the North of England to the First Carvings of St. Michael
and the Dragon (http://www.stbees.org.uk/publications/semdiss/). We even find Regin the Smith
with his anvil on a cross-shaft in the Halton churchyard,
Lancashire, and an allusion to the same character and
scene on the cross-shaft at Kirkby Hill, Ripon, Yorkshire.
A Sigurd grave slab was excavated at York Minster. York
was the center of Danish rule in North England and,
perhaps not coicidentally, it is to York that Arthur
first goes to fight the Saxons after he becomes king by
drawing the sword from the anvil. As the Sigurd story had been
preserved in northern England by the Northmen who settled
there, and the real Arthur was of northern England, and
as the motif of the drawing out of the sword by the
rightful heir and ruler is, at least in Europe, found
otherwise only in the Sigurd tale, it would seem
reasonable to maintain that this Norse tale does preserve
the prototype of the Arthurian sword in the anvil. Going
from a sword in Barnstokkr to a sword in an anvil is not
difficult to account for, as the Sigurd story has the
same sword that was drawn from the tree cleave an anvil
in two. Lastly, let us imagine one of the
cross-shafts bearing the Sigurd story, with an anvil and
sword portrayed. Furthermore, let us see this cross-shaft
with its surmounting circular cross broken off, leaving
only a stone pillar or portion of stone pillar.
This gives us a) the sword b) the anvil c) the stone and
d) the churchyard, with the story of the drawing forth of
the sword to go with it. The Barnstokkr in the story of
Sigmund's and Sigurd's tale is thought to be (and I agree
with this assessment) the Ash Yggdrasill, the cosmic tree
whose trunk is the axis upon which the sky turns.
Barnstokkr means “child-trunk”, and this name
is a reference to the two children, Lif and Lifthrasir,
who hide in the cosmic tree of Hoddmimir during the Norse
Ragnarock or “Doom of the Powers”. Yggdrasill,
or “Ygg’s Horse”, was the tree upon which
the god Odin as Ygg (“Terrible One”) hung.
It may, therefore, be compared with the rood or cross of
Christ, which was symbolized by the stone cross-shafts,
some of which bore the Sigurd story. It seems to me that the circle is pretty well complete concerning the relationship of the Norse and Arthurian sword in the tree/anvil motifs. While it is impossible to say what the actual line of transmission was from England to Robert de Boron, it is possible that some Arthurian version of the Sigmund-Sigurd sword story had reached him before or while he was writing his Merlin. NOTE Another possible origin for the Arthurian “Sword in the Stone” motif was brought to my attention by Dr. Linda Malcor. In 1180, the medieval Italian knight Galgano Guidotti plunged his sword into a rock when he renounced war and worldly goods to become a hermit. The abbey at Montesiepi near Siena preserves the sword in its chapel. There the hilt and some of the blade protrude from the rock in the shape of a cross. For many years the sword was thought to be a fake, but recent metal testing has determined that the alloys and style of the sword are consistent with a genuine 12th century weapon. In addition, ground penetrating radar has shown that beneath the sword is a six and a half foot by three foot room, which is quite possibly St. Galgano’s tomb. If St. Galgano really dates to the 12th century, this would place a ‘Sword in the Stone” story just prior to Robert de Boron’s Arthurian version, which is dated c. 1200 A.D. What remains to be determined is what may have influenced Robert to import such a tale into his “Merlin” romance. And an important detail is missing from the St. Galgano legend: the Italian knight’s sword does not bear an inscription, which is true of the Arthurian ‘Sword in the Stone”. I think I may have the answer to this riddle. As I have already mentioned, Geoffrey of Monmouth said Caliburnus was forged on the Isle of Avalon. Medieval tradition identified Avalon with Glastonbury. Robert de Boron places the “Sword in the Stone” in a churchyard, and Arthur’s grave was supposedly discovered in the yard of St. Dunstan’s church. It is the inscribed lead cross of this grave that holds the clue to unraveling the mystery of the “Sword in the Stone”. From the account of the exhumation of Arthur at Glastonbury, by Gerald of Wales, c. 1193 (144): Unde et crux plumbea lapide supposito, non superius ut [nostris] solet diebus, [sed] inferiori potius ex parte infixa, quam nos quoque vidimus, namque tractavimus litteras has insculptas et non eminentes et exstantes, sed magis interius ad lapidem versas, continebat As this passage has frequented been mistranslated, I enlisted the help of Dr. David Howlett, MA, DPhil, editor of the Medieval Latin Dictionary and author of the “Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, Fasicule 5”, University of Oxford: “Whence also a lead cross with a stone placed beneath, not further above, as is customary in [our] days, [but] rather infixed [the antecedent is feminine, so 'cross', not 'stone'] from the lower part, which we also have seen, for we have passed hands over these letters, ensculpted and not raised and outstanding, but rather turned inward toward the stone, it contained ... There is no way one could construe this as implying that the cross was under the stone. Instead, we are to envisage an inscribed lead cross whose lower portion is infixed, i.e. thrust into, a stone.” We thus have, in St. Dunstan's churchyard at Glastonbury/"Avalon", where according to Geoffrey of Monmouth the sword Caliburnus was forged, an inscribed cross driven into/piercing a stone - a stone which was found above the supposed tomb of King Arthur. To this we may compare the Italian St. Galgano cruciform hilted sword, driven into the rock above an interior chamber which may well be the grave of the knight-turned-saint. Robert de Boron, perhaps utilizing the St. Galgano example, merely transformed the inscribed cross thrust into the stone at Glastonbury into the "Sword in the Stone." His doing do may have been facilitated by a more purely local or British example of a literary motif that may, ultimately, have been the prototype for Arthur’s Sword in the Stone. This is found in the “Vita Sancti Edwardi”, where Bishop Wulfstan of Worcester, in order to prove his legitimacy, thrusts his staff into the gravestone of the late King Edward. This action was in response to the claim by Lanfranc, Archbishop of Canterbury, that Wulfstan was not worthy of his position. Other holy men try to pull Wulfstan’s staff from the stone, but all fail. Wulfstan himself them approaches and easily extracts his staff from the stone. The episode in the saint’s life has recently been discussed in detail by Marsha L. Dutton in her “The Staff in the Stone: Finding Arthur’s Sword in the Vita Sancti Edwardi of Aelred of Rievaulx”, ARTHURIANA Volume 17, Number 3, Fall 2007. I have not found evidence of influence from the Alanic practice of thrusting the war-god's sword into the earth or into heaps of brushwood, an idea put forward by Dr. Linda Malcor. The Stone of Enloch and Arthur's Sword is Copyright © 2008, August Hunt. All rights reserved. Used with permission. 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