Excalibur (1981): The Weird Wisdom of Epic Fantasy
Still a masterclass in movie mythmaking, knowing when to print the legend, and why the lessons of fantasy can only be learned by letting go
Poor King Arthur.
It was so hard to take him seriously on film after Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), a mortal blow to Arthurian dignity dealt in a clatter of half-coconuts. So memorable is the misty medieval world of that beloved Python parody (an atmosphere ingeniously evoked by Terrys Jones and Gilliam on a budget almost half that of Hawk the Slayer) that serious Dark Age movies are still careful to avoid comparison with high-kicking, shrubbery-obsessed knights and anarcho-syndicalist peasants. (“Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government!”)
But Arthurian cinema was already considered a lavish joke by then, a genre long overdue for parody.
Camelot (1967), starring Richard Harris and Vanessa Redgrave and based on the Broadway musical, was a mega-budget flop, famously savaged by the critics. MGM’s The Knights of the Round Table (1953) was a pompous Technicolour bore full of daft American accents. Hollywood’s take on the Matter of Britain was more Prince Valiant than Geoffrey of Monmouth, the stuff of Arthurian Westerns like Ivanhoe (1952), full of grown-ass men running around like schoolboys thwacking each other with wooden swords.
If you wanted a decent Arthurian movie in the 1970s, you either went to the arthouse and watched Robert Bresson’s Lancelot du Lac (1974) or Eric Rohmer’s Perceval le Gallois (1978), or else caught a kids’ matinee re-release of Disney’s The Sword in the Stone (1963).
When John Boorman’s unapologetically straight-faced yet utterly fantastical Excalibur landed in 1981, boasting tits, bums, severed limbs and a dauntless commitment to its own mythmaking, many critics were left bemused.
“What a mess.” (Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times) “A misguided folly.” (Geoff Andrew, Time Out) “At its earnest best, Excalibur is Star Wars without the redeeming humour.” (Vincent Canby, New York Times)
Based on Le Morte d’Arthur, the 15th century compendium by knight-turned-cutthroat Sir Thomas Malory, and featuring an equally legendary cast (including then legends-in the-making Helen Mirren, Liam Neeson, Gabriel Byrne, Ciarán Hinds and Patrick Stewart), Excalibur was part of a short-lived boom in fantasy cinema.
Hawk the Slayer (1980) got there first, followed by Disney’s unexpectedly brilliant Dragonslayer (1981). Excalibur was released on the same day in the UK as Ray Harryhausen’s swansong Clash of the Titans. Soon to follow were Conan the Barbarian, The Sword and the Sorcerer, The Beastmaster (all 1982), The Dark Crystal and Krull (both 1983).
Spurred by the technical innovations and box-office success of Star Wars (1977), secondary world fantasy was finally moving from books to the big screen. But these movies were either aimed at children or else derived from the gutter pulps. Either way, fabled kingdoms and magic swords were not a thing to be taken seriously by critics.
Pauline Kael liked Boorman’s movie better than most, calling it “a serious, R-rated fairy tale… one lush, enraptured scene after another.”
Unique among the fantasy films of its day, Excalibur was a luscious and complex epic fantasy aimed squarely at adults, the kind of thing not seen again until Game of Thrones aired in 2011.
By the 1970s, Boorman had proved himself a brilliant if erratic visionary, as prone to commercial success (Point Blank [1967] and Deliverance [1972] as he was to embarrassment (Zardoz [1974], Exorcist II: The Heretic [1977]).
He undoubtedly dodged a mithril-silver bullet in 1970 when he abandoned a single-movie adaptation of The Lord of the Rings commissioned by United Artists and producer Saul Zaentz. Boorman developed the project with architect-turned-screenwriter Rospo Pallenberg and ended up recycling much of it when the pair came to write Excalibur several years later.
“I had to make a decision about what period I would make it in, and I wanted to tell the story right on the cusp between the Druids and Christianity. On the other hand, you can’t defeat people’s expectations. It’s a great mistake of trying to make it kind of real… which is pointless because the myth is much stronger than the reality.”
John Boorman, from Excalibur: Behind the Movie (Mark Wright, Alec Moore, Lawrence Fee, 2013)
This is the fundamental challenge facing writers dealing with mythological stories rooted in actual history: How historically accurate should we be?
How best can we communicate this story to a target audience who may be more familiar with Minecraft than Euripides? How do we manage the conflict between necessary fact and the need for artistic license?
Historical novelist Scott Oden tackles this in his essay, “But It’s Only Mythology!”
Boorman’s Excalibur is set ostensibly in late 5th century Britain, at a point long after the invading Romans had packed their sacci and gone home and the barbarian Saxons were now at Albion’s gate. Yet the movie doesn’t give us authentically smelly fur-clad Britons1. Instead, it gives us knights in full-plate armour of a kind that didn’t exist for another seven centuries, a goodliest fellowship of men guided by principles of chivalry that likely never existed at all.
“I chose this sort of 12th century armour because people associated it. They had seen this before… But I put it psychologically on the cusp of the Druids and Christianity… We were taking it out of time, out of period, into the world of myth.”
John Boorman, from Excalibur: Behind the Movie (Mark Wright, Alec Moore, Lawrence Fee, 2013)
Choosing myth over hardline historical accuracy allows Boorman the flexibility to transcend linear time, encompassing within a single believable world the many centuries over which the Arthur story developed2. Like Malory’s source-text, Excalibur evokes a totality of Arthurian lore, a folk memory, a once upon a time.
Crucially, Boorman knows the kind of story he wants to tell and he understands the kind of imagery and symbolic language to which his audience will be most receptive.
And his movie delivers this vision with the kind of all-or-nothing conviction required to convince us of its dignity and significance, as well as a cast of world-class board-treaders who can make all that fairy-tale dialogue sing. Hearing Patrick Stewart roar his lines makes you want to charge once more unto the breach at Harfleur.
Excalibur opens with the boom of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, a deliberately anachronistic note that echoes the neighbouring Norse sagas, themselves adapted in Fritz Lang’s silent Weimar-era masterpiece Die Nibelungen (1924), another epic fantasy movie about mortals struggling to resist the tides of Fate.
Merlin emerges from the mist, an unearthly Nicol Williamson in ragged robes and silver skullcap, his jester voice lilting with ancient Gaelic, capering between whimsy and menace. He’s an avatar of Fate, aloof as he beholds the fiery scrum between Uther Pendragon (Gabriel Byrne) and the Duke of Cornwall (Corin Redgrave). The movie’s battle scenes are chaotic, knights crashing into each other, lumbering like elephants, mortals struggling through the mess of the world. Boorman doesn’t beautify his historical violence like, say, Zack Snyder in 300 (2006).
Like Odin, Merlin is attended by crows and, as fantasy-movie wizards go, he’s no kindly grandad Gandalf or ditzy Dumbledore. He has more in common with Bayaz, the bald, underhand sorcerer of Joe Abercrombie’s grimdark novels, pulling the strings of lesser men for his own sinister purposes.
When horndog Uther falls in lust with the Duke’s wife, Igrayne (Katrine Boorman), and breaks a truce between their lands, Merlin is quick to take advantage. He agrees to cast a spell that will enable Uther to take on the form of the Duke and enter his castle, allowing Uther to have his way with Igrayne. But Merlin does this only on condition that Uther surrender the fruit of their union.
Months later, the sight of his newborn son stirs the tyrant Uther into renouncing his violent ways, only for Merlin to appear like Mephistopheles and claim the soul that he is owed. The redemption of one man (and the rape of one woman) mean little next to the fate of the land.
UTHER: “To kill and be king. It that it?”
MERLIN: “Perhaps not even that.”
UTHER: “You strike me with words hard as steel.”
Merlin is inhuman, immune to the loves, lust and sentiment that is our mortal undoing. He’s a cosmic eunuch, genderless. The knights are always telling him he’s not a man; he’s something in-between.
Arthur grows to be a young man (a wide-eyed Nigel Terry) fated to pluck Excalibur from the rock, heralding his destiny to unite all of Britain. Merlin tutors him in the ways of kingship. He speaks of ‘The Dragon’, the irresistible life-force of almighty nature. Kinda like an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds and penetrates us, binding lord, land and serf together.
This spell breaks when Arthur draws upon the Dark Side, summoning Excalibur’s power out of pride and anger to win a duel with the peerless Lancelot (Nicholas Clay) snapping the unbreakable blade as he lands the winning blow.
The lesson Arthur must learn is that the king and the land are one, that he is a literal embodiment of Britain. He must see beyond himself and his macho desires, synchronize with the flow of nature, so the Dragon’s blessings may be bestowed upon those who follow him, and those he rules. Joseph Campbell, George Lucas, Ursula K. Le Guin and Lao Tzu have all been here before.
Magic in Excalibur is as elusive and poetic as the bridge of dragon-smoke upon which Uther rides to meet Igrayne. What does Merlin whisper to those horses on the battlefield to make them run away? What does he mean when he speaks of “other worlds”? What strange force compels an enemy to knight Arthur rather than kill him?
Alex Thomson’s Oscar-nominated cinematography makes the mossy crags of County Wicklow look like the jungles of the Amazon. (Thomson later shot both Legend [1985] and Labyrinth [1986].) The steel of Excalibur shimmers with the same ethereal green. The movie gleams like a dragon’s hoard. The world hums with weirdness.
But the age of magic fades as Arthur and Guenevere (Cherie Lunghi) are wedded before Christ. Merlin laments, “The one God comes to drive out the many gods. The spirits of wood and stream grow silent. It’s the way of things. Yes... it’s a time for men, and their ways.”
Arthur and his knights gleam in their armour like Star Wars droids on Oscar night. The mithril halls of Camelot echo the stark, blocky tunnels of the Death Star. Again, a self-righteous empire will be undone by a force of human nature, in this case Lancelot and Guenevere’s pressing need to bang each other senseless.
When Arthur’s malevolent half-sister Morgana (Helen Mirren) goads Gawain (Liam Neeson) into accusing his Queen of infidelity, Arthur and his court, like the damned players of Lang’s Die Nibelungen, must abide by their own laws, doomed by their own decree.
Arthur discovers his wife and his best friend in their woodland bower and drives Excalibur between the sleeping lovers (a motif borrowed from the story of Tristan and Isolde). Arthur’s rage and jealousy sunders the unity of the Round Table. Excalibur is lost and magic gone from the world, along with the wisdom that might have saved it.
The movie’s apocalyptic final third is the euphoria of a medieval flagellant, a fever-dream of visions and omens, mud and pestilence.
Enter Mordred, the Anti-Christ, a child of forced incest between Morgana and Arthur, his birth announced with a bolt of lightning that strikes down the King and the land along with him.
Reality and dream interweave as Arthur lies stricken and his knights take up the quest for the Holy Grail that will restore him. They too must learn that Arthur and the land are one. We follow the vision-quest of dogged Perceval (Paul Geoffrey), taunted by the cackling boy Mordred, an evil cherub in gold armour.
Perceval is strangled on a tree of death, escapes to find Lancelot a bearded madman, sheds his armour and is reborn to pluck the Grail from his very dream, and with it heal the King.
As Pauline Kael wrote, “the whole film is soaked in Jung.”
Trees blossom as a revived Arthur rides to war against Mordred to the crash of Carmina Burana. Infidelities are forgiven, brothers are reunited, and father embraces son at spearpoint before taking the last boat to Avalon.
“What is the spell of this enchantment thrown over a thousand years of English literature and English art?” writes Peter Ackroyd.
“It is a legend of origin combined with the myth of revival; part of the power of the Arthurian saga lies in its uncertain significance so that the very absence of meaning, particularly in the ambiguous death of Arthur, has encouraged a hundred different meanings – national, social, tribal, cultural – to rush into the available space. Arthur himself lies suspended between heaven and earth, the significance of his equivocal posture matched by the sense of suspended significance in the texts devoted to him.”
Peter Ackroyd, from Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination (1981).
Excalibur is as ‘Hero’s Journey’ as they come, a thoroughly male rites-of-passage, the saga of a man cleansing himself of toxicity, of selfishness and vanity, of all conception of himself. While the musical Camelot was perhaps the first movie to portray the Arthurians as real, everyday people, Excalibur’s characters are hewn from pure archetype. (“I was not born to live as other men,” says Arthur. “But to be the stuff of future memory.”) Yet it turns out Morgana – and not Arthur – is the most intriguing of Excalibur’s pantheon.
She’s the coiled serpent to Eve’s innocent Guenevere, Lilith, the original femme fatale. Helen Mirren gets all the best outfits, exuding pure venom in that snake-scale evening gown. (The movie’s costumes by Bob Ringwood are wondrous.)
In compiling at least 300 years of Arthurian canon, Malory’s Morte d’Arthur excises much of the character and motivation of Morgana that had been developed in previous texts. He reduces her to a Loki-like trickster, constantly scheming against her earnest half-brother, but reconciled by the end when she stands as one of the sorcerer queens who bear away Arthur’s body for respite in the mists of Avalon.
In Excalibur Morgana is motivated by a selfish craving for power, but she also wants to destroy Merlin in revenge for the rape and deception of her mother Igrayne. She gets her way by raping Arthur in return while magically disguising herself as Guenevere. (Yes, Boorman’s movie, like pretty much everything in ancient myth might warrant a few trigger-warnings.)
But while Malory chose to redeem Morgana, Boorman has her punished. Having kept herself young and beautiful by way of magic, Morgana is tricked by Merlin into casting a spell that so exhausts her powers that she reduces herself to a withered hag, the traditional comeuppance for women guilty of vanity and an unseemly lust for agency.
“Since classical times, the hag has been reviled; and the hag who does not know herself to be a hag but primps and coquettes like a young woman came in for special abuse. Desire in a woman who cannot justify it by the grace of fecundity becomes excessive and unnatural; her lust ipso facto a mark of perverse insatiability.”
Marina Warner, from From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (1994)
Check out Sophie Keetch’s retelling of Morgana’s story, Morgan Is My Name (2022).
Excalibur doesn’t focus on the romance of the Arthurian saga, like the musical Camelot. It’s not excited by spectacles of derring-do, like Knights of the Round Table or the Arthurian Westerns. It isn’t beholden to the charisma of King Arthur himself. Arthur isn’t the movie’s dominant character, not really. Excalibur is about the cold steel of Fate, the sword a liminal totem existing somewhere between civilisation and the earthy id.
Its magic is the wisdom that guides us towards finding a way past our own selfishness, greed and vanity, and we must constantly return to that mystic wellspring, for, as Merlin says, “it is the doom of men that they forget.”
One of the core lessons of fantasy is learning to do without it.
In Labyrinth, Jennifer Connelly’s Sarah must resist the temptation to wallow in her own fancies. To choose not to put aside childish things and remain cloistered in fantasy at the cost of her baby brother would make her as much a monstrous child as one of David Bowie’s goblins.
Fantasy expresses our trials and traumas in a symbolic language that lets us see our way forward more clearly so that we might return to the real world, empowered.
Judy Garland’s Dorothy learns to conquer her terror of that awful Miss Gulch by liquidating the Wicked Witch of the West. We shed a tear when Samwise reminds us that there’s some good in this world, Mister Frodo, and it’s worth fighting for.
But we can’t drive with the map pasted to the windshield. We can’t land a punch if we’re forever watching our trainer show us how it’s done. And so we must relinquish our grip on magic and return home. Just as Dorothy returns to Kansas and Sam returns to the Shire, we must put our storybooks aside and return to reality.
Just as Arthur wisely orders Perceval to fling Excalibur back into the lake and let magic return to the dreaming.
Fantasy is always more than the sum of its wizards and artefacts, its magic can’t be hoarded or catalogued, its totality is beyond our grasp or control.
Boorman’s Excalibur is a movie about fantasy, its sword is wisdom unsheathed, a dream, like Arthur himself, the stuff of future memory.
Stay weird.
Excalibur is available from Arrow Video as a brand-new 4K restoration from the original 35mm negative presented for the first time on home video in its original 1.66:1 ratio, along with a king’s ransom of commentaries and featurettes.
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For that you need to read Bernard Cornwall’s powerfully immersive The Winter King (1995).
As with Superman, the lore of King Arthur didn’t arrive fully formed, but was built over decades by contributions from various authors. A British warrior chieftain named Arthur may have existed in the late 5thcentury, battling rival warlords and invading Saxons amid the ruins of Roman Britain. Yet so little evidence exists, he may as well be a myth.
This legendary figure of Arthur was already a figment of antiquity by the time of his earliest mentions in literature, the Welsh poems of the 9th-10th century. Meanwhile, oral tales of Arthur’s exploits had spread from Britain to the continent.
The first definitive account of the Arthur legend was in The History of the Kings of Britain (c.1136), written in Latin by Welsh cleric Geoffrey of Monmouth (d.1154-55). Geoffrey sought to glorify the ancient Britons, who had been conquered and colonized by the Anglo-Saxons (confusingly known back then as ‘the English’, though originally tribes from Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands). He also sought to flatter his Norman patrons, who had conquered the Anglo-Saxons in 1066. Roman and Saxons invaders had pushed the original Britons west into the areas now known as Wales and Cornwall.
One of the most important books of the Middle Ages, History of the Kings of Britain influenced poets from Spencer to Shakespeare. It was a national epic that established the foundations of the story of Arthur, son of Uther Pendragon, born at Tintagel, a Chosen One who rose to become a champion of Christianity and the nemesis of the Saxons, husband of Guinevere, friend of Merlin, eventually betrayed and mortally wounded by Mordred. Though Mordred here was Arthur’s nephew not his son. Also, his sword was called ‘Caliburn’ not Excalibur, his fiefdom ‘Caerleon’ (from the Welsh for ‘City of Legions’) not Camelot.
History of the Kings of Britain was built upon by other authors over the following decades, adapted and romanticized into Norman-French verse in Roman de Brut (1155) by poet Robert Wace, who added the Round Table.
The great medieval poet and romanticist Chrétien de Troyes wrote five seminal Arthurian romances – Erec et Enide (c.1170), Cligés (c.1176), Le Chevalier au Lion / The Knight of the Lion and Le Chevalier de la Charrette / The Knight of the Cart (both c.1180) and Le Conte du Graal / The Story of the Grail (unfinished c.1182-1190).
These tales focused on chivalry and the agonies of love, expanding upon Arthur’s world with additions including Lancelot and the Grail. De Troyes also renamed Arthur’s sword ‘Escalibor’.
Layamon was a priest and poet from late 12th / early 13th century Worcestershire, who adapted Wace’s Roman de Brut into the epic poem Brut (c.1185-1225), a mythologized history of Britain from its foundation by Brutus of Troy to the saga of Arthur. As the first translation of Wace into English and first in English to describe Arthur, Brut is considered the first serious treatment of ‘the Matter of Britain’, the overall body of medieval literature containing the myths and legends of England. (‘Matter’ as in ‘substance’, not ‘matter’ as in ‘concern’.)
While the French liked to emphasize chivalry and spirituality in their Arthur stories, Brits like Layamon revelled in grimdark violence, existential dread, and weird monsters.
The French Vulgate Cycle is a vast, five-volume saga from the 13th century (c.1215-1235), focusing on Lancelot’s affair with Guinevere, Galahad’s quest for the Grail and Merlin’s mentorship of Arthur. It was written as prose rather than poetry by authors unknown.
Le Morte d’Arthur (c. 1469) is a multi-volume epic written in English prose by Sir Thomas Malory. A knight himself, Malory fought at the Siege of Calais in 1436, inherited an estate then embarked into a spectacular crime spree that eventually landed him in Newgate Prison. It’s here that Malory may have spent his time writing Le Morte d’Arthur.
Malory worked pretty much everything that had gone before into a single, cohesive narrative, establishing the Arthur myth as we know it today.
If you’re looking for a concise (and beautifully written) introduction to the Matter of Britain, I’d thoroughly recommend Amy Jeffs’ Storyland: A New Mythology of Britain (1922).
SOURCES: The Arthurian Encyclopaedia, edited by Norris J. Lacy (1986), Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination by Peter Ackroyd (1981).
Good to see that movie critics back then were as clueless as they often are today. (Obviously Excalibur is objectively the greatest fantasy film ever made.)
helen mirren. morgana. hubba.