Excalibur
Geoffrey of Monmouth, in his "Historia Regum Britanniae" ("The History of the Kings of Britain", c. 1136), Latinised the name of Arthur's sword as "Caliburnus" (potentially influenced by the Medieval Latin spelling "calibs" of Classical Latin "chalybs", from Greek "chályps" ["χάλυψ"] "steel"). Most Celticists consider Geoffrey's "Caliburnus" to be derivative of a lost Old Welsh text in which "bwlch" (Old Welsh "bulc[h]") had not yet been lenited to "fwlch" (Middle Welsh "vwlch" or "uwlch"). In the late 15th/early 16th-century Middle Cornish play "Beunans Ke", Arthur's sword is called "Calesvol", which is etymologically an exact Middle Cornish cognate of the Welsh "Caledfwlch". It is unclear if the name was borrowed from the Welsh (if so, it must have been an early loan, for phonological reasons), or represents an early, pan-Brittonic traditional name for Arthur's sword.
Return to Nevèrÿon (series)
The invention of "sword and sorcery" is generally credited to Robert E. Howard, a pulp writer from Cross Plains, Texas, who committed suicide at age thirty. Howard's Conan the Barbarian stories and his King Kull tales fixed the major tropes of the genre from 1925 on, when the first Conan story, "Spear and Fang", appeared. Delany twists and plays with these conventions in his Nevèrÿon stories, to create his critical effects. Fritz Leiber, who coined the term "sword and sorcery" and whose Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser tales appeared from the 1930s through the 1980s, introduced the possibilities of self-satire and humor into Howard's vision of blood, guts, and primitive glory. Joanna Russ’s Alyx series—certainly the greatest direct influence on Delany—and G. Spencer-Brown's "Laws of Form" (specifically “Chapter 8”) have already been mentioned as important sources. Others almost as important are the work of the French Psychiatrist Jacques Lacan (discussed in parts of the appendix, "Closures and Openings", in the final volume, "Return to Nevèrÿon"), as well as critical theory in general. Each of the stories begins with an epigraph from a theoretical thinker.