Subject Area
History; Humanities
Description
Translated by:
Christopher Berard and Morris Tichenor
At the Abbey of Saint Denis-en-France, the Benedictine monk and chronicler Guillaume de Nangis (d. 1300) wrote a Latin World Chronicle from Creation to AD 1300. The text contains an account of the reign of King Arthur of Britain that includes the celebrated Sword in the Stone Episode. This iconic scene was not traditionally part of the ‘historical’ account of King Arthur’s biography. The pseudo-historical Brut chronicle story of King Arthur, which originates with Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae [History of the Kings of Britain] (c. 1136), has Arthur, aged fifteen, succeed to the throne of Britain without contest. Geoffrey’s Historia implies that Arthur was widely known to have been King Uther Pendragon’s son and heir apparent. The prose redaction of the Estoire de Merlin [Story of Merlin] (c. 1210), an Old French romance attributed to Robert de Boron (fl. 1191–1212), contains the earliest-known attestation of the Sword in the Stone Episode, and it is built around an alternative history of Arthur’s childhood. According to it, Merlin compels King Uther Pendragon and Queen Ygraine to give up their son (Arthur) as a newborn. The enchanter sees to it that the child is baptized ‘Arthur’ and adopted by the worthy knight Sir Antor and his wife. The couple raise Arthur as their own alongside their true biological son Kay. At the dawn of the fourteenth century, the Sword in the Stone Episode had evidently become so firmly rooted in Arthurian legend in France that Guillaume could not resist including it in his Latin World Chronicle.
Our translation is based on ‘Appendix A: Latin Excerpts from BL Royal 13 E IV’, ed. Daniel Williman and Karen Corsano, in Daniel Williman and Karen Corsano, The World Chronicle of Guillaume de Nangis: A Manuscript’s Journey from Saint-Denis to St Pancras (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2020), pp. 177–88, at pp. 180–82.
Publication Date
1300
Type
Article
