Posted on 12/27/2008 6:39:09 AM PST by decimon
It must have been an appalling moment when a Viking realised he had paid two cows for a fake designer sword; a clash of blade on blade in battle would have led to his sword, still sharp enough to slice through bone, shattering like glass.
"You really didn't want to have that happen," said Dr Alan Williams, an archaeometallurgist and consultant to the Wallace Collection, the London museum which has one of the best assemblies of ancient weapons in the world. He and Tony Fry, a senior researcher at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington, south-west London, have solved a riddle that the Viking swordsmiths may have sensed but didn't quite understand.
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
It is an interesting curiousity that most ancient swords (those not found in graves) have been found in river beds. The reason for this is still a matter of much discussion and debate. I suppose that the simplest explanation is that the owners either drowned, or in struggling to save themselves from drowning they dropped everything weighting them down.
There can only be one.
Everything about this article is wrong and stupid. Ulfberht swords are a well researched subject within Hoplology. His name was not in raised letters near the hilt. Rather, they were inlaid along the broad fuller of the blade. The inlays are supposed to be flush and when they fall out his name in actually evident in depressed letters.
The author also got the trade economics of the enterprise wrong. The original Ulfberhts were made of local bloomery steel produced in smelting stacks. It is the fakes which are made of Eastern steel, and not because the local contemporaries used import steel. Instead, it was the case that foreign counterfeiters were making fakes from their local variety of steel and exporting them like modern Chinese counterfeiters. They were not as litigious about trademark infringements back then.
He also misunderstands the physical evidence and gets the relationship between brittleness and carbon content reversed. Carbon content is a hardening factor in steel production and the absence of carbon leaves ferric alloys softer and therefore LESS brittle. This is especially the case with bloomery steels, as they begin as wrought iron, a material with a sort of ropey and fiberous grain structure.
Lastly, all steels blades are (and were) heat treated. That is the whole point of selecting steel as a blade material. That invariably consisted of heating and quenching the blade to harden it, followed by a tempering to draw out the brittleness. This typical blade of Northern European construction quite springy and flexible.
Modern reenactors and experimental archeologists have pain-stakingly reproduced these methods and are only just now beginning to approach the qualitative standards of past examples.
ping!
Vikings raided as far south the Med, Turkey, and north Africa. I suspect that those with “good swords” made it back.
The others? Well, they should have tested their hardware before leaving.
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Thanks decimon. |
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> The interesting thing from the article, for me anyways, was the part where they said the best swords then had much more carbon steel than the inferior ones (an obvious point), BUT ALSO that MODERN carbon steel is twice as better as that in the best olden swords.
I found that interesting, too.
What the article misses out is that Viking swords are not made of a single homogenous type of steel but, like Japanese swords, they usually use two or more. Usually a hi-carbon steel and a lo-carbon steel.
Unlike the Japanese, who hammer-weld-and-fold the steels on top of each other multiple times, the viking swordsmith lays the steel bars side-by-side and braids-and-twists-and-hammer-welds them together, so that throughout the sword you get tough lo-carbon steel alongside hard-and-sharp hi-carbon steel.
That is how the swords are able to take significant shock while maintaining an edge. And that is also why some viking swords have a “flame” pattern etched into the blade: that is the effect of the braiding-and-welding.
Don't fret, I did that myself once (about two days ago, right here in fact).
What it tells me is that 'negotiations' for a sword should properly begin with "excuse me while I hammer this thing against whatever affords itself in the next ten or fifteen minutes"
I'd be just tickled to have one of those "cheap German knock-offs" just the same.
PPS: Ulfbehrt is a silly name, but I doubt very many people told him that.
Hmmm....should I buy the GM Mal-Abu, the Honda Miseri-Accord, or go for the Be(ss)emer Blade.
I liked that edgy reply. /rimshot!
You’re bound to get a lot of mileage out of those remarks. /rimshot!
;’)
Those cheap imported counterfeits give a whole new meaning to the phrase, “Blade Runner”. Also, to, “what’s that tinkling sound?”
(fake) Ulfberht to Cortana & Durendal: You two crack me up!
The swords were pattern welded from strips of iron and edged with steel. The reason besides a scarcity of steel, the softer iron absorbed the shock of a blow, much like a hammer is hard and soft.
A real Viking always parried with the flat and never with the edge.
Pattern welding.
> Pattern welding.
That’s right! You’re obviously familiar with this.
You can also get an interesting effect by pattern welding steel cable. Cable will approximate some of the effects of Viking blades, except the combination of steel properties.
For cable, most of the hard work you can do with an oxyacetylene torch — in fact it’s best to because even bare cables usually have lots of muck that you need to burn off before you put it in your forge else it will make a mess of your coals.
Ground down and etched the effect is really neat!
One of the first tests in sword dating is the emery and muriatic acid test. Polish a little and the acid will bring out the pattern, then a touch of a Brinnell hardness tester will give you a broad range date.
With advent of really good armor (plate and plate-reinforced mail) the sword fell out of use as a battlefield weapon against equally armored opponents. The knights used maces, warhammers and poleaxes against each other. Swords were still useful against levies, archers, etc.
During that period and for a while afterward, people carried swords like we carried pistols and for the same reasons.
Damn it didn’t take Eagles fans very long, did it.
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