the once and future king sword in the stone

Fortunately, I won’t have to spend much time on the story itself as I assume it is thoroughly etched into your brain. A lot to take in, right? I agree, which is why we’ll start with a length introduction into the history of the Arthurian myth. But the Arthurian myth we know today also comes to us through France and a whole other tradition of story-telling, namely the Arthurian Romances. In fact, these tales go further back than most people are aware of today in their most original and primal form, they come to us from Welsh and Breton accounts. This time around, we are digging deeper and earlier into the Western canon (we promise that we’ll explore non-Western literature in the future) and going back to what is arguably one of the sources of the entire damn fantasy canon: King Arthur. It was fun! It was wordy! Go read those posts. In our last installments, we looked at Tolkien’s legendarium (because where else were we going to start?) and then at Moorcock’s The Eternal Champion. We’ll look at how classic books and literary genres have influenced metal and, in some rare cases, how metal did the opposite. Progress! Anyway, in case you don’t remember exactly what this column is about, it’s where I (alongside a few guests here and there) can explore the intersection of my two biggest passions: metal and literature. Hello and welcome back to Maps of Meaning, Heavy Blog’s column exploring the ties between metal and literature! Hey, it didn’t take two years for me to write another entry this time around.

The once and future king sword in the stone