The French ‘Excalibur’ has vanished from a rock it had been wedged in for the past 1,300 years.
The famed Durandal sword is presumed to have been stolen from the southern village Rocamadour, despite it being wedged and chained to the stone 32 feet off the ground.
The cliffside community is devastated over losing its popular tourist attraction; according to Mayor Dominique Lenfant, the residents feel as though they have lost a piece of who they are.
Police have opened an inquiry, but given the magical sword’s unusual and high position buried in the cliff wall close to the sanctuary, they are puzzled as to how it was removed.
Mayor Lenfant said the town was devastated, according to The Telegraph.
‘We’re going to miss Durandal. It’s been part of Rocamadour for centuries, and there’s not a guide who doesn’t point it out when he visits,’ she told La Dépêche, a French newspaper.
‘Rocamadour feels it’s been stripped of a part of itself, but even if it’s a legend, the destinies of our village and this sword are entwined.’
Legend has it that the sword was the sharpest blade in existence, so sharp that it could cut through rocks with a single blow and could not be broken.
A myth says it was first given to Emperor Charlemagne by an angel before it was wielded by his nephew Roland, a legendary knight.
Durandal is mentioned in the 11th-century poem The Song of Roland. In the epic, it tells of the sword’s magical powers and says it contained one tooth of St Peter, the blood of St Basil, and the hair of St Denis.
In an attempt to prevent the sword from falling into the hands of the Saracen army he had bravely battled, Roland is reported to have attempted to shatter it on a rock before his death at the Battle of Roncevaux Pass.
But he ended up throwing it into a valley, where it miraculously flew for miles and ended up getting embedded into Rocamadour’s cliff.
It seems that statues, swords, buildings, countries, and cultures were once beautiful, but now they’ve become cesspits, but that’s modernisation for you, now covered in cement, traffic, litter, and huge buildings that now cover our once beautiful green, and then they call it ‘going green’.
People don’t seem to care that our historical sites are gradually disappearing in favour of turning them into a complex of apartments.
Aside from the tragic loss of an ancient relic, it may be that it is now quite easy to remove after hundreds of years of weathering, water ingress, and such because sometimes quite precious things are protected less adequately by the state.
These historical landmarks are no longer there, demonstrating the general downfall of our civilisation. People no longer honour their past or their forefathers. Of course, there have always been stupid people who don’t respect what they can’t understand, but in the 21st century, you would think that we would have fewer stupid people, but we seem to have more.
When someone takes something that many others have enjoyed for their own gain, it is a sign of the selfishness of our times.
The sword, or a replica of it, of which nobody is really sure, was presumed to have been stolen from Rocamadour, France, as of July 2024, with no known culprit.
THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO 