Perfect Sword

How to Test a Sword for Sharpness

26 January 2025
Edoardo
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Categories: Perfect Sword

One Norse tale tells how a Viking warlord would test the keenness of his sword by slicing through the neck of a nearby slave. If the slave’s head fell from his body, then the blade was not sharp enough. Only when the head remained in place, balanced upon the now severed neck, would he judge the sword properly sharp.

If this seems unlikely, one of the bodies excavated from the Bowl Hole cemetery at Bamburgh revealed a man who had been killed by a sword cut that had struck him on the shoulder, passed diagonally down through his body, severing his spine and several ribs, before reaching his waist. That’s how sharp some of these weapons were, and how lethally they could be wielded.

The Classification of Swords

26 January 2025
Edoardo
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Categories: Perfect Sword

Ewart Oakeshott did more for the study of swords than anyone else in the 20th century. Oakeshott received no formal training in scholarship, nor did he have an academic position to lend weight to his opinions. His standing amongst his peers was entirely the product of decades of handling, owning, assessing and cataloguing swords.   

Without any academic training, but with boundless interest and energy, Oakeshott set about revolutionising how old weapons would be regarded and classified. His great insight was to treat the swords as practical weapons, forged and used by men to kill other men.

It might seem obvious now, but before Oakeshott the people responsible for looking after and curating collections of arms had seen them in terms of the history of art rather than as weapons, assigning ages and provenances to weapons based upon the decorative features of hilt and guard, pommel and scabbard rather than using the business end of the sword for classificatory purposes.

Oakeshott, on the other hand, visited museums and old houses, trying out those weapons he was allowed to handle. As he did so, he began to develop a physical understanding of the nature of the weapons he was wielding, getting a feel for balance, weight – the indefinable ‘life’ that marks out an exceptional weapon as something that seems alive in the hand.

The First Iron

26 January 2025
Edoardo
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Categories: Perfect Sword

The earliest iron artefacts so far found, dated to circa 3200 BC, were made from meteoritic iron. The iron was found as nine small beads which were excavated in 1911 from two burials in Gerzeh, north Egypt, a prehistoric burial site that has produced a great deal of information about very early Egyptian civilisation.

Seven of the beads were found in one grave, four in a necklace that was also strung with lapis lazuli, carnelian, gold and agate, and three at the waist.

The other two beads, discovered in a nearby grave, were found in each hand of the dead body, the grave itself being almost a magpie assemblage of grave goods, including beads made from lapis lazuli, obsidian, gold, carnelian, calcite, chalcedony, steatite, faience, garnet and serpentine, as well as a porphyry bowl, a miniature pink limestone jar, a bird scutiform-shaped palette, an ivory spoon, a flint flake, shells, a jackal canine tooth, 16 stones of carnelian, green jasper, quartz, a lump of red resin and nine pottery vessels.

In both cases, the richness of the grave goods that were buried with the dead person to accompany them into the afterlife tells that they came from rich and powerful families.

From The Perfect Sword.

What is a Sword?

26 January 2025
Edoardo
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Categories: Perfect Sword

The sword as a weapon exists on more levels than the purely practical. It is more than the sum of its parts.

A sword is a signifier, an indicator of rank, power, prestige and potential martial prowess. A man (or potentially a woman) with a sword has the wealth and status necessary to ensure access to a good diet, leisure time to train, a psychology that is suited to fighting, and the will to use it.

A person carrying a sword also carries the threat of a sword, which is usually far more important than the sword itself. A man carrying a sword seldom had to wield it in order to get his way.

In most cases, it was far better to convince via the threat of a sword than to actually use it.

From The Perfect Sword.

Broken Sword

6 July 2022
Edoardo
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Categories: History, Perfect Sword
A pattern-welded sword forged by Owen Bush.

Perhaps the most evocative relic of the 7th century is a rusty broken sword.

Excavated by Brian Hope-Taylor from the castle grounds in the 1960s, it was forgotten and, after Hope-Taylor’s death, was about to be put into a skip when his home was emptied – it was only the quick thinking of some pHD students that saved it.

The Bamburgh Sword was forged in the seventh century of six strands of pattern-welded iron, making it possibly the finest weapon ever made, well, anywhere. It was wielded, in battle and rite, for three centuries before, finally, it broke and the shards were interred in the grounds of the stronghold it had helped to protect.

Such an extraordinary weapon was fit for a king – given where it was buried and when it was forged, the extraordinary possibility arises that the Bamburgh Sword was the very weapon wielded by Oswald, the Lamnguin, the White Hand, the king who returned from over the sea.

After centuries under ground, the blade itself is a corroded shadow of its once self but it is on display in the Archaeology Room in the castle. However, this exquisite pattern-welded blade, forged by Owen Bush, gives some idea of what it would have looked like when it was drawn from its scabbard and wielded in battle.

In autumn, Birlinn is publishing ‘The Perfect Sword’ by Paul Gething and I which tells the story of this sword, how it was forged and the men that made and used it.