Big Brained Irony.

There’s a video on YouTube showing the final scene of John Boorman’s film Excalibur, in which King Arthur is lying mortally wounded and instructing Sir Bedivere to cast Excalibur back into the lake. When Bedivere falsely claims to have done so, Arthur sees through the lie and instructs him further, saying ‘One day the sword will rise again and another king will come.’ And so was born the legend of the Once and Future King.

As you would expect, there are a lot of pea-brained comments on this video from people who would have trouble working out how to switch an electric light on, and today I saw the latest, presumably from some anally-retentive Little Englander. It said:

‘And take out the Muslims and Communists.’

At first I was tempted to reply: ‘You forgot the blacks, the Asians, the Jews, the Catholics, the gays, the gypsies and the Irish.’ But I decided it really wasn’t worth my time replying to a brain as small as his, so I didn't.

But then a neat little fact occurred to me. The earliest reference to Arthur, not as a king but as the leader of a band of warriors fighting the encroaching Anglo-Saxons, comes from early British oral tradition, later committed to print in early Welsh folk tales. And so the people who the real Arthur - assuming such a person ever existed - was actually trying to ‘take out’ were the very people who were to become the English. Isn’t that deliciously ironic?