“There's nothing about both hands!”
“True; that comes a little lower down, where sir Bedivere tells king Arthur what he has done. He says—
“'Then with both hands I flung him, wheeling him'.
“—Now do you think anybody could do that, and make it go flashing round and round in an arch?”
Barbara thought for a moment, then said—
“No, certainly not. To make it go like that, you would have to take it in one hand, and swing it round your head—and then you couldn't without a string tied to it. Or perhaps it was a sabre, and he was so strong he could send it like a boomerang!”
“No; it was a straight, big, heavy sword.—How then do you think Tennyson came to describe the thing so?”
“Because he didn't know better—or didn't think enough about it.”
“There is more than that in it, I fancy: he was misled by a printer's blunder, I suspect. Some months ago I found the passage which Tennyson seems to follow, in a cheap reprint of sir Thomas Malory's History of King Arthur—then just out, and could not make sense of it. Yesterday I found here this long little book, evidently the edition from which the other was printed—and printed correctly too. In both issues, this is what the knight is made to say:
“'Then sir Bedivere departed, and went to the sword, and lightly took it up and went to the water's side, and there he bound the girdle about the belts. And then he threw the sword into the water as far as he might.'”