Another traditional account which Tennyson has mainly followed in a poem,
is this: The king bade Sir Bedivere take his good sword Excalibur and go
with it to the water-side and throw it into the water and return to tell
what he saw. Then Sir Bedivere took the sword, and it was so richly and
preciously adorned that he would not throw it, and came back without it.
When the king asked what had happened, Sir Bedivere said, "I saw nothing
but waves and wind," and when Arthur did not believe him, and sent him
again, he made the same answer, and then, when sent a third time, he threw
the sword into the water, as far as he could. Then an arm and a hand rose
above the water and caught it, and shook and brandished it three times and
vanished.

Then Sir Bedivere came back to the king; he told what he had seen.
"Alas," said Arthur, "help me from hence, for I fear I have tarried over
long." Then Sir Bedivere took King Arthur upon his back, and went with him
to the water's side. And when they had reached there, a barge with many
fair ladies was lying there, with many ladies in it, and among them three
queens, and they all had black hoods, and they wept and shrieked when they
saw King Arthur.

"Now put me in the barge," said Arthur, and the three queens received him
with great tenderness, and King Arthur laid his head in the lap of one,
and she said, "Ah, dear brother, why have ye tarried so long, until your
wound was cold?" And then they rowed away, and King Arthur said to Sir
Bedivere, "I will go unto the valley of Avalon to heal my grievous wound,
and if I never return, pray for my soul." He was rowed away by the weeping
queens, and one of them was Arthur's sister Morgan le Fay; another was the
queen of Northgalis, and the third was the queen of Waste Lands; and it
was the belief for years in many parts of England that Arthur was not