Friday, October 12, 2018

Galgano Guidotti's sword in a stone

It's like the King Author tale except it's Italian and it's real. The sword is preserved at the abbey of San Galgano in the town of Montesiepi 30km from Siena.

Wherever that is.

The sword was driven into the rock by a 12th-century Tuscan nobleman who saw a vision of the Archangel and renounced his life of violence and lust in exchange for pious hermitage and was later turned into a saint.

Boink. You're a saint. Just like that.

The story goes that the Galgano followed the Archangel to the hill of Montesiepi where he met the twelve Apostles and the Creator Himself.

That would be God.

Surprised he wasn't burned to a crisp.

After the vision his horse refused to obey his orders and instead led him back to the hill where his vision occurred. And that convinced Galgano to give up his warring ways and his arrogant life. Then a voice told him to get rid of all his material things and Galgano replied that would be as hard as splitting a rock. To emphasize his point Galgano pullled out his sword and stuck it into the rocky ground. Amazingly, the rock yielded and the blade went through. That freaked him out so bad that he took up residence right there on that spot and never left the hill, living there in poverty with the wild animals and a few visitors here and there.

There's another version of the story. Of course. He was looking for wood to make a cross but with no wood around he jabbed his sword into the ground because that's like a cross, and it set like cement.

I believe the real story is probably something a lot more prosaic. He was being hounded. By debt collectors, by a woman bugging him about marriage and telling him she's pregnant, by his family, by his king, by the town, and he said, screw this, and he went off to the hill and swore never to bathe again and that kept everyone at a sufficient distance and off his back. Permanently.

All along people thought the sword is a fake. Researches say the composition of the metal is the style of the era of the legend. Radar analysis shows a cavity beneath the sword 6' x 3' thought to be a burial recess.


Duckduckgo images [galgano guidotti sword stone]

5 comments:

edutcher said...

In them thar days, people were usually pretty grateful if you stopped killing everybody in sight (no Pennsylvania Long Rifles on everybody's mantel), so beatification seemed reasonable.

AllenS said...

Pretty hard to drive anything into a rock using only your hands.

Evi L. Bloggerlady said...

Sometimes just living in the woods on nuts and berries and handouts is the right course of action.

Now a days, they are mostly homeless heroin addicts doing that. But I have never seen one stick a sword or needle into a stone.

Amartel said...

"Ground-penetrating radar analysis also revealed that beneath the sword there is a cavity, about two meters by one meter, which is thought to be a burial recess, possibly containing the knight's body."

They put him in a hole in the rock (one hopes already deceased at that point or maybe he was a vampire) covered it in medieval cement and stuck a sword in it. Then they made up a sword story or someone else made it up years after everyone who knew the truth was dead.

ricpic said...

Children Of A Lesser God

"Ha Ha Ha" crow all the secularists,
"What a religious nut!"
Meanwhile technology takes us where it will.
Anyone question that? Anything but.