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The Sword in the Stone: An Error in Translation?

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Where have we heard this before? One word changed by a translator down through the years has made a legend out of what quite possibly could have been a perfectly ordinary event.

The stories of errors in translation or transliteration are legion, almost as numerous as the numbers of manuscripts that were lost when the Library of Alexandria was demolished. (Indeed, it is interesting to speculate what kind of historical proof for all kinds of theories is at the bottom of the ocean along with the rest of the great Library.) Translations of all great historical books (indeed, all historical books, period) have been--and continue to be--subject to the whims of fancy of the hobgoblins who create the errors that create such wonderful things as the Sinning Bible. Remember that one? One medieval translation of the Good Book left the "Not" out of the Eighth Commandment. How did it read? Thou Shalt Commit Adultery! The story of King Arthur--with its many shades of truth, conjecture, bias, and applicability to any and all generations--would seem to ripe for such an error. Indeed, one of the primal legends of the genre might, in historical fact, have been nothing more than victor's battlefield spoils.

Here's how it happened:

The familiar story is that the young Arthur, squire to Kay, went in search of a sword for his knight and half-brother. Seeing no alternative, Arthur pulled the sword from the stone that bore the inscription that said that anyone pulling the sword from the stone would be King of England. (Now, the first appearance of the sword was in an anvil on top of a stone. You don't hear much about the anvil anymore, do you?) Anyway, Arthur pulled the stone out and got to be king. All fine and dandy, right? No matter whether Merlin used his magic to put the sword in there in the first place. No matter whether the sword was really Excalibur. (Sharp readers of the legends will tell you that Excalibur came from the Lady of the Lake, not from the stone. What Arthur did with the stone-sword we don't rightly know.)

But what if Arthur didn't pull the sword from the stone? Would that make him less of a king? It is an age-old question, one that was asked in a recent column on this website. Are our heroes admirable because of what they did or because of how we believe in them?

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