St. Galgano is the source of a real-life sword in the stone story.

He was born in Tuscany in 1148 and grew up to become a knight. He lived the rowdy life of a soldier, fighting and filling his senses with pleasures of the flesh.

One night, when he was 20 years old, he was visited by Michael the Archangel, who showed him a vision of the Lord flanked by the disciples on a nearby mountain. When he woke the next day and mounted his horse, it refused to go anywhere except to the nearby mountain that had appeared in Galgano’s dream. So he went there.

Accounts differ as to what happened next. In one version of his story, he was overcome with reverence and wanted to pray. Finding no cross to center his attention, he thrust his sword into the ground, where it fused with rock and formed a cross in its hilt.

In another version of his story, a voice called out to Galgano, urging him to give up his life of dissolution. Galgano replied that it was easier to split stone with a sword, and thrust his weapon into a rock to prove his point, expecting it to snap in half. To his shock, it entered the rock to its hilt, as though he were cutting butter, and became one with the stone.

In either case, the event resulted in Galgano taking up the prayerful and simple life of a hermit on that mountain top, and he became a sought-after voice of wisdom and spiritual insight. When he died in 1181 at the age of 33, a number of bishops and abbots attended his funeral, and he was canonized a saint just four years later. An abbey was built on the hilltop and around his sword.

St. Galgano’s sword (pictured here) remains on the mountain top today in Tuscany, surrounded by the ruins of the abbey that was built there. Recent studies have validated that the sword is not a modern fake—it is of a simple design that would have been common in the 12th century. Radar analysis shows a cavity beneath the sword, which may hold the saint’s body.

The story of King Arthur and Excalibur became popular in the decades after St. Galgano’s canonization, so some think that this saint’s sword might have been the inspiration for that legend, though the influences are hard to trace. St. Galgano is depcited above by Luigi Gregori, who was artist in residence at Notre Dame from 1874-1891, in an illustration that belongs to the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art on campus.

St. Galgano, you dedicated your life to the Lord in a dramatic conversion that involved a sword in a stone—pray for us!

Image credit:

Luigi Gregori (Italian, 1819-1896), Saint Galgano, n.d., black chalk on wove paper. Raclin Murphy Museum of Art: Gift of the Artist, AA2009.056.367.)