What to the contemporary medieval scholar is the historical truth of King Arthur? For better or worse, this question has galvanized academics for generations. Much like the recurrent retellings of Arthurian romance across mass media, arguments over the titular king’s historical existence refuse to die, even as academic publishers have spilled barrels of ink in an attempt to lay it to rest.

Mampato and Ogú is a Chilean adventure and science fiction comic strip originally published in a children’s magazine of the same name. Since its third installment, cartoonist Themo Lobos assumed creative direction of the comic, adding the creative elements that came to define the series. Primarily aimed at a young readership, the premise of the series is that Mampato, a young boy in possession of a time traveling device, can travel to any time and place. One narrative arc follows the journey of Mampato and his prehistoric friend Ogú to Arthurian England. Interestingly, this storyline was first serialized in the years leading to the democratic election of Salvador Allende in 1970 and republished in a compiled format a few years later during Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship.

At the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol, among various signs and symbols, one demonstrator held a poster that labeled Donald Trump ‘Braveheart’ and showed him screaming ‘Freedom!’ and brandishing a claymore sword in one hand and the severed head of Karl Marx in the other.[1] Earnest analysis of the poster renders something approaching farce: The poster equates Trump’s recent 2020 electoral defeat with the Wars of Scottish Independence; even more absurdly, it recasts a man who was exempted from military service in Vietnam due to ‘bone spurs’ as a military leader who literally was torn limb from limb for his commitment to Scottish freedom. Yet, the people circulating such pieces of propaganda are not concerned with accuracy or perceived histrionics, not when their strategies lie in emotionally and symbolically appealing to a political cause. Logic and particularities aside, according to this poster, we are meant to understand that Trump, like William Wallace, is a masculine, martial, and self-sacrificial icon and that we should support his equally noble (but nebulous and apparently anti-communist) cause of liberty. The past here is merely a vehicle for politics.

At Disneyland, if you are very lucky, a costumed actor dressed as Merlin might choose you from the crowd. After a few unlucky fathers get to try their strength on the iconic sword lodged into a glittering stone, a small child will inevitably have the proud moment of being worthy of this prize. The Disney movie and various children’s book adaptations, such as T.H. White’s Sword in the Stone, of the Arthurian legend, center this iconic moment. The epic pull of the sword from its stony sheath launches a young Arthur onto the throne, proving him the rightful and worthy king.  The sword-in-the-stone scene is arguably one of the most celebrated and influential moments in Arthuriana, permeating throughout popular culture as a recognizable short-hand for heroism that has in many ways become surpassed its original sources. We find heroic characters throughout Hollywood test their mettle by pulling magical swords, hammers, and even tridents.

‘Falconry will break your heart in a hundred ways.’ During my time at a falconry apprentice seminar, the master falconer repeated this mantra through tears as she held the body of a small kestrel to her chest in a futile effort to revive it after it had been attacked by another falconry bird. The tender and fragile bond between falconer and hawk is hard to understand from the outside—it might look like a simple case of human superiority and especially male desire to control the wild. Yet the actual experience of spending so many hours in the company of birds produces men and women whose consciousness is subsumed by that of their avian partners. They see things from the perspective of the bird and bend their own minds and bodies to accommodate this other species.