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.
The Phoenix on the Sword
"The Phoenix on the Sword" is one of the original short stories about Conan the Cimmerian, written by American author Robert E. Howard, and first published in "Weird Tales" magazine, in December, 1932. The tale, in which Howard created the character of Conan, was a rewrite of the unpublished Kull story, "By This Axe I Rule!", with long passages being identical. The Conan version of the story was republished in the collections "King Conan" (Gnome Press, 1953) and "Conan the Usurper" (Lancer Books, 1967). It has most recently been republished in the collections "The Conan Chronicles Volume 2: The Hour of the Dragon" (Gollancz, 2001) and "" (Del Rey, 2003). It is set in the pseudo-historical Hyborian Age and details Conan foiling a nefarious plot to unseat him as king of Aquilonia.