While The Sword in the Stone begins with Arthur as a boy, Excalibur first tells the story of Uther Pendragon, Arthur's father who conceives him during a night of deceptive love with Igraine, Cornwall's wife. (This is where Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur begins.) Boorman stresses the strength of Uther's lust: After making peace with Cornwall and uniting the land under his kingship, he is ready to forsake all he has won for a single night with his new ally's wife. He calls upon Merlin to transform him into the likeness of her husband so that she will not know she is being tricked — a proposition to which Merlyn agrees, provided that "the issue" of Uther's lust shall be his. After Arthur is born, however, Uther attempts to renege on his promise and love his infant son, but Merlin rips the baby from Igraine's arms. As in White, Merlin knows the future and has made this particular bargain to restore peace to the land; he attempted to do this with Uther, but the king's passions made him rekindle the very fires that Excalibur (the sword given to him by Merlin) helped him extinguish. Only Merlin, who proves himself a humanitarian concerned with the restoration of order, can help undo the damage caused by Arthur's father.
Boorman's Arthur shares many of the qualities of White's protagonist. As a boy, he is naive and nervous; after he discovers his destiny as king he is embarrassed by Ector's and Kay's falling prostrate before him. When warned by Merlin of Guenever's future treachery, Arthur refuses to heed his tutor's words, provoking the magician to remark, "Love is deaf as well as blind." As a king forced to face the adultery of Lancelot and Guenever, he must (as he is in The Candle in the Wind) let his own law be tested on whom he calls, "The two people I love most." When Guenever asks him to champion her and he refuses on the grounds that he must act as judge, he explains, "My laws must bind everyone, high and low, or they are not laws at all." When she counters this with, "You are my husband," he replies, "I must be King, first." Like his novelistic counterpart, Arthur is pained yet trapped in the snares of his own law, and Lancelot's rescue of Guenever from shame relieves the king as it does in White's novel.
