THE WATSON FAMILY - On a road trip to Glastonbury, the magic Dinobot picks up signals left by Merlin the Magician, from Ley Lines pointing to Camelot.

Excalibur is the mythical sword of King Arthur that may possess magical powers or be associated with the rightful sovereignty of Britain. Its first reliably datable appearance is found in Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae. Excalibur as the "sword in the stone" functioning as the proof of Arthur's lineage is an iconic motif featured throughout most works dealing with Arthur's youth since its introduction in Robert de Boron's Merlin. The sword given to the young Arthur by the Lady of the Lake in the tradition that began soon afterwards with the Post-Vulgate Cycle is not the same weapon, but in Le Morte d'Arthur both of them share the name of Excalibur. Several similar swords and other weapons also appear within Arthurian texts, as well as in other legends.

LEGEND: THE SWORD IN THE STONE

Romance tradition elaborates on how Arthur pulled out Excalibur. In Robert de Boron's c. 1200 French poem Merlin, the first known tale to mention the "sword in the stone" motif, Arthur obtained the British throne by pulling a sword from an anvil sitting atop a stone that appeared in a churchyard on Christmas Eve. In this account, as foretold by Merlin, the act could not be performed except by "the true king", meaning the divinely appointed king or true heir of Uther Pendragon. As Thomas Malory related in his 15th-century Middle English Arthurian compilation, Le Morte d'Arthur, 

"Whoso pulleth out this sword of this stone and anvil, is rightwise king born of all England."

The scene is set by different authors at either explicitly London (historical Londinium) or generally in the land of Logres (which can be a city and also associated with London), and might have been inspired by a miracle attributed to the 11th-century bishop Wulfstan of Worcester.

After many of the gathered nobles try and fail to complete Merlin's challenge, the teenage Arthur, who up to this point had believed himself to be the biological son of Ector and had gone there as a squire to his foster brother Kay, succeeds effortlessly. Arthur first achieves this feat by accident while unaware of the contest and unseen. He then returns the sword to its place in the anvil on a stone, and later repeats the act publicly as Merlin comes to announce his true parentage.

The identity of this sword as Excalibur is made explicit in the Prose Merlin, a part of the thirteenth-century Lancelot-Grail cycle of French romances also known as the Vulgate Cycle. Eventually, in the cycle's finale Vulgate Mort Artu, when Arthur is at the brink of death, he enigmatically orders his surviving knight Griflet to cast Excalibur into a nearby lake. After two failed attempts to deceive Arthur, since Griflet felt that such a great sword should not be thrown away, he finally does comply with the wounded king's request. A woman's hand emerges from the lake to catch Excalibur, after which Morgan appears in a boat to take Arthur to Avalon. This motif then became attached to Bedivere (or Yvain in the chronicle Scalacronica), instead of Griflet, in the English Arthurian tradition.

However, in the subsequent Post-Vulgate Cycle variants of the Merlin and the Merlin Continuation, written soon afterwards, Arthur's sword drawn from the stone is unnamed. Furthermore, the young Arthur promptly breaks it in his duel against King Pellinore very early in his reign. On Merlin's advice, Arthur then goes with him to be given the actual Excalibur by a Lady of the Lake in exchange for a later boon for her (some time later, she arrives at Arthur's court to demand the head of Balin). In the Post-Vulgate Mort Artu, it is this sword that is eventually hurled into the pool at Camlann (or actually Salisbury Plain where both cycles locate the battle, as do the English romances) by Griflet in the same circumstances as told in the story's Vulgate version. Malory included both of these stories in his now-iconic Le Morte d'Arthur while naming each of the swords as Excalibur: both the first one (from the stone), soon shattered in combat in a story taken from the Post-Vulgate Merlin Continuation, and its replacement (from the lake), returned by Bedivere in the end.

EXCALIBUR AS A RELIC

Historically, a sword identified as Excalibur (Caliburn) was supposedly discovered during the exhumation of Arthur's purported grave at Glastonbury Abbey in 1191. On 6 March 1191, after the Treaty of Messina, either this or another claimed Excalibur was given as a gift of goodwill by the English king Richard I of England (Richard the Lionheart) to his ally Tancred, King of Sicily. It was one of a series of symbolic Arthurian acts by the Anglo-Norman monarchs, such as their association of the crown of King Arthur with the crown they won from the slain Welsh prince Llywelyn ap Gruffudd.  
       

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