[Music]
greetings
i am shad and like many other medieval
enthusiasts there is a special place in
my heart
for the tale of king arthur and the
knights of the round table
indeed this story is one of the
ancestors
of the great and awesome genre of
medieval fantasy
it's not the only one i mean beowulf
certainly
is one of the big ancestors as well
fighting dragons seriously guys right
but certainly king arthur is as well i
mean
magic sword and wizards so it's kind of
evident
therefore with this story being so
important to the genre of medieval
fantasy i think it's pretty good that we
understand
its historical foundation what parts of
this story are actually rooted
in history and what parts are fictional
and what i find interesting about this
if we were to take hold of the
historical parts and then adapt the
fictional parts
to fit the historical parts more
accurately what would they look like
specifically let's take a look at the
prime and one of the more popular
elements of the king arthur story
excalibur excalibur is often depicted as
a medieval arming sword in fact
i have one of the recreations right here
you've probably seen it hanging on my
wall
this is excalibur or as they sell it
anyway
one of the many designs and yeah this is
a very
classic fancy high medieval styled sword
behold
excalibur with the dragon on the pummel
and the dragons on the cross guard and
stuff
indeed the pummel even says excalibur
the thing is if excalibur did exist and
there's one case where you can kind of
say it might have you know
that there is a sword it's very strongly
based off of
this is not what it would have looked
like so to get an
idea of what excalibur really would have
looked like we need to go into the
origin of the arthurian legend
because that will give us the basis as
you look into the historical origin of
the arthurian legend
there is a bit of a divergence that
happens between arthur the man
and arthur the legend now what do i mean
when i say
arthur the legend well i'm meaning
arthur and his knights of the round
table
which excalibur is a primary part of and
merlin and the whole story with
morgana and all that stuff we can say
with quite a bit of confidence
that the knights of the round table the
round table itself camelot and excalibur
never actually existed that is all
fantasy
but it's not to say they're not based
off of historical things
so we'll come back to that but first
let's look at arthur
the man as to arthur the man there is an
account of an
arthur in the historia bratonum and now
it's interesting in regards to this text
the history of brutonum
there is questions as to its validity
but it identifies arthur as a romano
britannic
leader who led the armies in the defense
of britain
during the anglo-saxon invasion of the
late 5th century and early
6th century which culminated in the
battle of
badon the issue about historical texts
like this is that you don't know how
much creative licence the authors took
uh for instance the accounts of the
battle of troy uh talks a lot about
greek gods having direct involvement now
we're pretty sure that uh
you know the battle of troy actually
happened troy was a city but as to the
direct involvement
of zeus and such you know artistic
license there and we do know that the
arthurian legend was a vocal tradition
carried around by troubadours and just
people telling the story right
i mean a lot of stories are actually
just conveyed uh vocally anyway the
iliad was a complete recitation before
it was ever written down to paper so
again we have no real way to tell and
know
if arthur was included or mentioned in
these historical you know
accounts because of the story already
being popular and someone wanting to
give a bit more validity to it so in the
end all we can say is that
arthur as a king the heroic you know
iconic figure
uh a man could have be have existed that
this
legend is based off and the most likely
one is this arthur mentioned
as a hero general king who fought
against the anglo-saxon invasion
but there's no real mention of magical
swords wizards
knights of the round table camelot or
anything like that
so then where does the legend of king
arthur come into this well there is
another historical figure
that has a lot more similarity with the
king arthur legend than the actual
historical
arthur that seems to be what he might
have been based on
and that is charlemagne and his 12 peers
in fact these 12 peers the foremost of
charlemagne's court and his foremost
warriors were actually called
paladins and i talk about them in my
video the historical origin
of the fantasy paladin so charlemagne
has a set of loyal soldiers that are
very much equivalent to you know the
medieval knight
and he also has a sword that is
attributed to having certain
supernatural properties
but the sword wasn't called excalibur it
was called joyous
the similarities are a bit too much to
ignore in my opinion
and it's fairly safe to assume that the
legend of king arthur a certain prime
parts like the knights of the round
table and excalibur
were actually more based off of
charlemagne than the historical arthur
but you know wanting to make this a hit
a story a legend
of the origin of britain so the britons
you know very likely looked their own
history to an important figure that
played an essential role in establishing
hey look there's this arthur guy well
then let's just kind of combine them and
then we have
the legend the tale of king arthur and
the knights of the round table
there is another part of the arthurian
legend that's based off
a separate historical event though this
is less of historical event and more of
a
legend or a tale and this is the story
of saint galgano
and in his story there is a part where
he thrusts his
sword into a stone and there it
remains supposedly to this day
indeed you can even go and visit it now
there is no direct
evidence to say that the sword of saint
golgano is the true
inspiration and basis for the sword in
the stone just like there is no direct
evidence to say that certain other
elements in the arthurian tale
is based upon charlemagne his knights
and his sword
but the correlations are very strong
but i'm not going to use the sword of
galgano as a basis for what the
historical version of excalibur would
have looked like
because the sword in the stone is
actually not excalibur in most
renditions of the tail there are some
cases where excalibur was the sword of
the stone but more often than not it
isn't
but in any regard i've shown you
pictures of the supposed sword of
gilgano and as you see it's just a
classic 12th century style sword
which brings us back to the two primary
sources of either
inspiration or indeed the foundation of
the arthurian tale
but this also gives us two possible
origins to
the historical version of excalibur so
in part of this video we'll be actually
trying to figure out what
joyous would have really looked like to
try and get us the foundation of what
excalibur
possibly did look like if it actually
existed because it taken
it is joyous that's what it was based
off of but then we'll also look at the
sword
that the historical arthur would have
used as well
because his sword probably would have
looked a little bit different
to a carolingian sword because the
actual historical arthur
this romano british celtic
leader well most likely that was
probably a celtic style
sword so joyous uh charlemagne sword
they say exist today and it's you know
in a museum the thing is though
uh throughout the history of this sword
here the blade was replaced and the hilt
was replaced which technically means
this sword
is has no actual physical well actually
the blade might have been
reforged okay but in terms of
looking the same doesn't look a single
thing like it would have actually looked
like in charlemagne's hands
i mean that crossguard is a dead
giveaway so joyous probably looked
far more like this the style of sword
that is before you
is what is generally called the
carolingian
sword or indeed the migration period
sword
it is the ancestor and precursor to the
viking period sword that i particularly
like to call the
sphered and the descendant of the roman
sparta
carolingian style swords are generally
defined by their capital i
style hilts and charlemagne sword coming
from this period
most definitely was made in this style
but of course it being you know the
sword of one of the most prominent kings
we can safely say that this sword was
built to the best
quality possible and indeed made as
fancy as can be and you could very much
say that this is
the most historically accurate depiction
of the sword that excalibur is based on
and it's interesting you could kind of
call uh
excalibur joyous because joyous is a
sword excalibur is clearly based on
so therefore it did kind of exist
historically and this is what it most
likely looked like therefore this is
what excalibur looked like in history
but there's a couple of
leaps that we're making to bridge that
connection because ultimately
excalibur as the sword thought of in the
arthurian legend didn't exist it's
fictional but what about the sword
that arthur himself would have used or
just the man arthur
king arthur is based on which you know
they say his name was arthur as well so
hey well as i mentioned this is most
likely a celtic style sword so something
like this now the celtic style swords
actually
exist for a fairly long period and it
needs to be said that the celts actually
inhabited
a large portion of europe depending on
the time period
we're talking about from like the 6th
century bc
to around the fall of rome and of course
the celts saw a lot of expansion and
also suppression and evolution
throughout this time so it's kind of
incorrect to just lump them all in
together as one group and people
when in fact there was a lot of
different cultures throughout this time
period
and location and the ones that we want
to focus on for this video are actually
the
later period celts of brittany this
image here shows the evolution of celtic
style
sword hilts beginning in bronze kind of
age technology
going through to iron therefore the
style of sword that this celtic
britain arthur would have used would be
one of these latter designs
and it's interesting if people want to
put the arthurian legend into a more
historical context as to try and define
what king arthur the man was like
well then give him the sword that fits
the period
and as you've been able to see both of
the possible historical origins of
excalibur
look something very different to this
but there's an obvious reason why
excalibur is often depicted as a later
period sword
and it's the practice that uh arises in
medieval artwork
what you can often find in medieval
artwork when they're depicting say a
historical battle like the battle of
chrissy
right the artist it according to how
uh the weapons and armor that were worn
in their day even though they're 100 or
200 years removed from the actual event
so they're actually it's like if i was
to depict say the american revolution
and draw all the soldiers as modern
green berets
very historically inaccurate but it's
not necessarily something
that we don't do in popular media
because you can understand that this was
kind of a type of the popular meeting of
the day
we love modernizing classical stories
think about superheroes spider-man when
he started what was that in their 70s or
80s
like or no even before then actually but
every retelling of spider-man brings him
forward to the modern period so
it can be more relatable to the people
who are reading it
you can see this really in any reboot
it's always brought to the modern day
and so that's what they were kind of
doing in the medieval period
without retelling historical events or
depicting them
visually and because the arthurian
legend became really popular
in the medieval period like you know the
high medieval period specifically the
depictions of
arthur well of course show him according
to what was contemporary to them at the
time the story was being told
which translate excalibur looking like
the sword that we often see when we
think of
king arthur and king arthur being a high
medieval figure in full plate armor and
all that stuff when
the actual historical basis of
this uh not only the man but the legend
itself
are actually things that are much
earlier around the 5th century and
charlemagne's not 5th century that's
more 7th century but still not behind
medieval period they're not wearing full
plate or anything like that it's not
medieval arming swords or heater shields
heavens not even kite shields around in
that period so we're still
looking at you know the round boss
shields and stuff
so that is the historical origin and
foundation of
the arthurian legend both the story and
the man
and what excalibur really would have
looked like
thank you for watching i hope you've
enjoyed and i hope to see you again
until that time
[Music]
you