oak sih4

36

succcssors have much in common, as art forms, with the severe purity of thc Chinese porcelain of the Sung dynasty. Be that as it may, this handsome aspect is something of a bonus when it is added to thc fact that the sword was so closely associated with much of what was most significant in a man's life - family ties, loyalty, valour in the excitement of combat, and the last funeral rites. A man was never parted from it; he carried it in the king's hall and on all social occasions. It hung at his back when he was at table and by his bed while he slept -it was indeed his "shoulder-companion." We can appreciate the lament of the poet Bersi the Ducler, a famous swordsman (an archetypal D'Artagnan) of the tenth century, when he declared that when he could no longer wield his sword, life would hołd nothing morę for him.

"The trolls may have my life when I can no longer redden keen Laufi. Then you may carry the destroyer of the mailshirt into the howe."

Thcse blades have their point of balance very much nearer to the hilt, giving them a swift mobility without in any way lessening their tremen-dous striking power. Thirty years ago, in my Archcteolojgy of Weapons I com-pared the agility of these swords as against their predecessors with the speed and maneuverability of a fighter aircraft of the 1940s with the slow move-ments of a biplane of 1917. Now we could say they are as an Fili is to a 1943 Mustang.

We can only make guesses, some inspircd, some absurd, as to where the pattern-welded blades were madę, but when we come to the "new" blades of the 9th - lOth centuries, we are on surer ground. A great num-bcr which have survived and been examined are found to have a name inlaid, in large letters of iron, in the broad shallow ftiller of the blades. This name, UFLBERHT can be said with some confidence to be Frankish and to originate somewhere in the region of the Middle Rhine. The town of Solingen grew up here, from which fine sword-blades came all through the Middle Ages and down to our time. Another source of blades, maybe for an even longer period, is the ancient Noricum, from where the Romans and their adversaries in Western Europę got their blades. This is now pin-point-ed by the town of Passau on the Upper Danube, from which fine blades were exported all over the known world.

Though Ulfberht is the name of a Frankish bladesmith, no one man could possibly have madę all the Ulfberht blades, for the earliest to be found in dateable contexts are of the years around 850, and the latest found in early 12th-century graves may havc been madę decades earlier than the time of their burial; and even though many survive, one man in a long working life could not have madę them all. But how long was a working life for a skilled craftsman? The average expectation in the lOth century was about 35 years; and for every Ulfberht blade which survives, literally hun-dreds must have been madę. Thus, hundrcds of blades over a period of 250 years is a great many blades. So Ulfberht may have been a smith, but he obviously was thc founder and President of Ulfberht, Inc., which as a company long outlasted him.

A rival firm seems to have set up during the lOth century, because after circa 925, swords have been found in dateable graves bearing, in the same techniąue of inlaid strips of iron, the name INGELRI. One of the first blades by this maker to be found and identified (it was in a lakę at

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