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From Steve.

26th Febrary '10

Well, it is not unique. There was one from the same litter at an antique
militaria show here in January. It was about $2000 AND had a genuine COA.


So this it is not a one of a kind fake but something that someone is churning out. The dealer also had the same model but domed pommel.

 

I'd be very interested to receive phots of any fake Viking swords.

Though hopefully "better" than these , also sold wity a Certificate of Authenticity by a well know "dealer" in Manhattan.




 

 

 

 




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From "S"

27th Feb '10

 

 

I have read the posts about my sword and I'd like to make a couple of observations.

 

First of all thanks to all who have responded you, this has started an interesting  discussion on the subject, and that is good.

 

 

  • Which brings us to the pommel itself.  Regrettably, it's very hard to tell, from the pictures, exactly what I'm looking at.  What it looks like is that this square "thing" at the end is either an integral part of or welded to the tang, a construction technique I have never seen on any ancient "assembled" blade (to distinguish it from cast swords, such as one encounters, fairly routinely, during the Bronze Age).   I simply cannot imagine what this thing was or how it was assembled.  It makes no sense, even if I postulate some kind of "sandwich" pommel construction (such sandwiching being more common on the guard than the pommel, tho' occasionally seen in the pommel's construction).  If, in fact, that square "thing" on the end is the totality of the pommel, then I'd call this a fake of the worst sort - a pommel is a counterweight to the blade, a very functional part of the sword, but this little plate of metal isn't sufficient to counterbalance anything (let alone an unfullered, 3 lb. blade). 

 

The pommel of my sword is not square, as Harry thought , it has an hexagonal section, exactly like the guard section.

 

 

The weight, however, especially for the blade length, is horrifically off the scale.  3+ lbs would be "hefty" for a 30" blade and is almost inconceivable for a weapon with a 23" blade (esp. since the sword would have weighed more before it lost mass and material to rust and decay).   That excess weight is particularly bothersome for Dark Age weapons since iron (and steel) were in far more limited supply than both before and after that time ("bog iron" and meteorites being primary sources, since iron mining had essentially collapsed along with the Roman Empire in the West).  One simply cannot imagine a Dark Age smith, entrusted with that much iron/steel, turning out a short, stout weapon like this. 

 

Secondarily the fact that it weighs a lot (but I still affirm that many known swords have a proportional high weight, many published in books) doesn't necessarily mean that it is a fake.

 

The suggestion  that this piece  uses too much iron for "Dark Ages" is not conceivable, is an unproved assumption. The Roman Empire "collapsed" in 476 A.D., but many barbarian peoples already lived in it and used  Roman iron, forged the weapons in the Roman fabricae etc.: so this doesn't mean that iron had disappeared all of a sudden, because the Eastern Roman Empire, which had Langobards, Visigoths and Ostrogoths and many other federal groups were  strong and alive and had many contacts with the Eastern part of the world, trade routes etc ..

 

 

  • ....In fact, there should be significant differential deterioration near the edge where it was common to apply a band of steel for the cutting edge (and the thinness of the edge should have, again as you observe, also been prone to deterioration), with deterioration especially at the juncture between the steel edging and the main, pattern-welded body of the sword (where one should be able to feel a little "ridge" at the point of joining due to the erosion of the softer/less robust iron).

 

The "ridge" between edge and central part of the blade that he mentions is present in this sword too.

 

It seems to me that in this case many prejudices are set into the demonstrations, that is the cultural prejudice that all already known forms create a paradigm for what is not known yet, and that everything that differs from this "paradigm" must be rejected as false...The fact that a sword appears very old doesn't imply that fine crafts couldn't be within the skill of the people who forged it, as the construction of the guard and the pommel tend to suggest.

 

Nothing has been said of the silver surface phenomenon....I have many other "silvered items", from different places.

 

Such as:

 




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I'll take some more photos of the inscription on the blade and I'll send  I'll send them to you. What I called  "chaotic runes" are simply runes, chaotic because written in every direction, without following any ornamental pattern.

 

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The discussion continues>>>