Details

LOT 0392

Viking Iron Pattern-Welded Sword

9TH CENTURY AD

38 1/4" (730 grams, 97cm).

A finely-crafted sword with a thin (about 3 mm) blade and long (110 mm) grip; the hilt of the general form of Petersen's Types H and I, featuring a sub-triangular pommel with an elliptical cross-section and with a noticeable step where the rounded pommel connects to the flatter upper guard; the hilt unusually thin and flat for a Viking-period sword; the tang broad and flat, with continuation of the bars of the pattern-welded blade; the lower guard about 90 mm wide, flat and slightly elliptical in cross-section with a broad, rectangular slot for the blade and tang; the blade about 50 mm wide at the hilt, composed from two twisted iron billets and an outer shoe, the billets worked up from blocks of iron of varying grades, twisted flattened, placed side-by-side with the direction of twist opposed, forge-welded to each other, then thinned and stretched to the length of the blade (presently 81 cm); the cutting edges formed from a single billet of steel, split and forged onto the core; the present surface showing the construction method and the characteristic herringbone pattern created by the opposed twist of the central billets.

Provenance

Ex Wigington collection, UK in 1984; formerly in a 19th century collection.

Literature

Cf. Petersen, J. De Norske Vikingesverd. En Typologisk-Kronologisk Studie over Vikingetidens Vaaben, Kristiania, 1919, p.101 Type I (fig.86-87) of which 16 swords are known to have been found in Norway, and Petersen claimed that these are from East Norway and Trøndelag. The type also appears in Peirce, I. Swords of the Viking Age Woodbridge, 2002, p.18.

Footnotes

The present sword is to be published in the monograph Denkowicz, K., Kucypera, P. & Pudło, P. "From the Roman Period into the Early Middle Ages: Reflections on a Certain Peculiar Sword, (Nicolaus Copernicus University, forthcoming, 2014). It is the authors' contention that the blade of the sword can be assigned a date in the early centuries AD, the 'Canterbury-Kopki' Type of M. Biborski, while the hilt is undoubtedly later - possibly a Scandinavian copy of a Carolingian type from the later 8th or early 9th century AD. The authors conclude that the blade was of Roman manufacture, and that the present hilt was fitted to it in the Viking period, a practice known from several other examples (e.g. the Korsgården, Hedemark, Norway and the Bargello Museum, Florence, Italy).

CONDITION