I collect weapons from both shows and video games, and Eris' nameless short sword really caught my eye and I wanna know if anyone has a place in mind that I can get it from.
My FIL has an interesting sword that’s been in the family awhile, no one knows who’s initials is written on the inside of the guard other than the family name. The makers mark looks to be intentionally tarnished for what ever reason and the other side seems to have tiny little writing. Any info on this would be greatly appreciated.
I recently received a set of items from a late family member, and included was a sword. At first I assumed it would be some sort of Masonic or ritual blade, as he was a Freemason, but further research has led me to believe it may be some sort of British Officer Sabre. However, one of the engravings appears to be an American Indian, which makes me all the more confused.
Any help identifying the blade, possible price points, and maybe where to sell is appreciated, thanks in advance.
Just another bladesmith but I traveled down a slightly less traditional route in regard to insperation..
Made this awhile ago but never shared.
I got this sword at a pawn shop for decoration. The blade appears to have some rust and discoloration. What's the best way to restore it?
EDIT: SCIENCEFORGE319 NOT 315
A gift for my partner from an amazing creator who had only done minis before!! Check him out!
3D printed, painted, with resin details and leather. (The pommel is completely resin!! Adds awesome weight to it)
u/scienceforge319
I was absolutely heartbroken when my first sword suddenly had a hole punched in it. Especially since my wife gave me that one as a wedding gift. However, her being amazing, she bought me a new one as a birthday present!
Top: new sword
Bottom: old sword
Both by Wojmir
First time posting here. Is there a way to reverse the oxygenation or am I SOL?
I was gifted a 96 cm (38”) swordfish bill and decided to make one of my friends a graduation gift. Apparently he loves swords. It took 3 years (of procrastinating) but I made a sword with a koa handle and the shadow box out of Monkeypod and velvet. I used coconut coir rope and chicken feathers to attach the hand shield. (This was traditionally used to prevent blood from making the sword slippery). I messed up on the shadow box because the velvet isn’t perfectly flat but turned out mean. My friend was super stoked.
Super rough shotel I forged last year. It was an extremely fun experience and quite a challenge to forge the bevels and deep curve at the same time. It’s also the first sword I forged so I’m pretty proud of it despite the lack of heat treat. I simply didn’t have the equipment to do it justice. The handle is very rough, done with an angle grinder but it is quite comfortable despite the deep grinding marks. The pommel plate is wrought iron.
Does anyone know what type of sword this is? It's my first sword that I bought at a renfaire recently. I'm having a lot of trouble finding out what kind of rapier it is since its really big and relatively heavy.
Anime Featured:
This time around, I drew 10 swords, instead of just the usual 6, due to the sheer quantity of katana out there in anime. For this post, I will be restricting 10 different swords with no magical/cursed/flaming powers (Those swords deserve their own list). Nevertheless, these swords are wielded by extraordinary swordsmen and women in anime with their own quirks and fighting styles.
I decided to go back to the archeometallurgical literature I own to do some brief analysis and make it public. There is something fascinating about the steel of antique swords. The patterns we can appreciate are rarely seen with modern, industrial-grade steels, and those who collect nihonto or wootz blades will probably understand me.
However, I am posting this review of the available data for a more mundane reason, which is to close the divide between the "perceived" technology of these tools and the real, archaeometallurgical data. Understanding the limitations of the period steel can bring us closer to understanding how these tools were used in their historical context. In my opinion, modern practitioners and reviewers do not really appreciate the difference between a state-of-the-art Albion and a 500-year-old Solingen blade. And every time I hear collectors or practitioners talking about historical metallurgy, there is so much confusion about the steel and heat treatment used.
So here we have it: a total of 84 blades, a few daggers but mostly swords, from the late 11th century to the 17th century. First, to understand these data, some methodological notes. This part can be skipped for those interested in the results.
Methodological Notes
The primary literature used to inform these graphs was "The Sword and the Crucible" by Alan Williams and "Technology of Sword Blades from the La Tène Period to the Early Modern Age The case of what is now Poland" by Grzegorz Żabiński, and a handful of other papers. The book of Williams is probably the most complete on the subject, and a must-read for those interested. However, some of the analyses are very brief, no more than 100 words per sample. I have excluded the pre-11th century blades from both books. The analysis was divided into total and "post 1300", to capture the late medieval and early modern period. The 1300 period was chosen since Zabinski gives very broad spans, such as 1350- post 1400; therefore, any other time cut might have excluded some blades from the Renaissance.
A. Composition
Both Williams and Zabinski have their own categorisation to determine the sword type and the construction method, and I loosely followed it with some caveats. For example, Williams divides the 10th to 17th century blades as follows in order of quality :
However, there are some challenges in applying this classification. In his IIA samples, IIA.5, we read:
>A half-section was removed; the microstructure shows a fairly homogenous steel, which had been folded and forged into shape, then hardened by slack-quenching and tempering. The three higher-C% bands have an average hardness of 437 VPH; the two lower-C% bands one of 253 VPH.
So the steel is defined as fairly homogenous - yet containing different bands of low and high carbon steel. Was it really one single piece of steel? No further details are given on the carbon gradient. Further, in II.A.8, 9, 10 he cites three different rapiers, which were made by folding bloomery steel so that
>the carbon content varied between 0.2% (in the core) and 0.6–0.8% (near the edges and surfaces).
Perhaps one single ingot, but far from being homogeneous. Therefore, the threshold between IIA and IIB feels arbitrary at times. The same rapiers have been analysed in a paper by Garner and one by Merico, and show either different steels used in combination or even wrought iron pieces in the section of the ricasso. Again, not really a proxy for "homogeneous". Zabinski extends the classification of Williams, but loses its "quality scale". In his typology, carburised iron blades end up as subsets of Williams' IIA type, which becomes rather confusing. Therefore, to simplify the composition, the following was used:
They are partially ranked by quality, but with some caveats; a lot of those samples did not give accurate measures of the carbon content. The line between banded and homogenous steel is very much based on the paper's way of describing the steel billet. So there might be some overlap: the presence of alternating layers is observed in virtually all micrographs shown, therefore, how much "homogeneous" something can be is very much arbitrary.
B.Hardening
Next is the hardening method. This is based on the difference of the microstructure observed in the egdes/flat (outer layer) as opposed to the core/centre. Some observations had to be dropped, as the core was unknown in Williams sample. However, in some examples, he describes what could be seen as a gradient of hardness and/or carbon content approaching the core, therefore this can be a sign of laminated/carburised edge structure which will inherently yield a partial heat treatment.
The categories used are:
A big caveat of this analysis is that a micrograph can only give us a snapshot of the blade. Many of these blades could only be sampled at one section. In cases where multiple samples were analysed, such as the aforementioned rapiers, it was clear how the ricasso and the blade had different compositions and hardening.
C.Hardening measurements
All the hardening measures were given in Vickers hardness. Multiple studies reported either different ranges or an average value. These were sourced for the core and the edge. The values used, when available, were the reported averages. Otherwise, the average between the minimum and the maximum value was considered. For the core, either the reported average or the minimum value was considered, as the presence of a ductile phase will dictate the mechanical behaviour of the blade.
Results
The results are very interesting. When looking at the amount of blades showing banded steel and composite (either laminated or carburised edges) is almost the totality of the sample: 92.2% overall and 90% for the Late medieval period. Even considering the more "homogeneous" versus the clearly composite blades, the majority show low carbon steel cores (57% and 52%, respectively). This is a very different situation from the so-called "monosteel" factoid I keep hearing about when it comes to medieval swords.
The result is consistent in the difference between the edge hardness and the core. Even if some blades sported martensite in the core, there were many instances of ferrite/pearlite zones embedded within. There are also notably fewer observations (48 blades), but high hardness values are almost nonexistent. The average for core hardness was 172 for the total sample and 170 for the late medieval swords.
Edge hardness is also very low, compared to the modern standard. The average blade is around 438 or 44 HRC. There are some properly hardened blades, but measures above 520-580 are almost nonexistent among the 74 blades showing edge hardness. It is notable that even well-made blades, such as one signed Passau, did not even reach 400 Vickers.
The overall assessment holds with the type of hardening, informed by the microstructure. Only a mere 5.2% and 6.7% show something akin to a full quench and temper (with relatively low hardness by modern standards). The vast majority of the sample has hardened edges and ductile cores. More than 90% of the blades had unhardened or partially hardened cores (if these were hardened at all in the first place).
Most blades were quenched by slack quenching, or had composite billets with zones in the core that would not harden anyway due to low carbon. Not really the equivalent of what I would call "spring temper", "spring steel" or anything similar. And most importantly, period steel was not alloyed; therefore, the hardenability of the blade was relatively low. Thin blades, such as those found in rapiers, could harden at the tip, but anything substantially thicker and/or wider would have formed complex phases of martensite, bainite, pearlite and ferrite. In fact, many longswords in the sample feature this type of hardening.
Conclusion
Some notes: the sample by Zabinski includes blades found and/or located in Poland - this does not imply that those blades were made locally. A few blades are signed from Passau, and the possibility of trade between western European centre of arms is discussed in the book. There are blades from Spain (Toledo), Germany (Solingen), English swords, Italian swords from Brescia and so on. The sample is rich and widely distributed across Europe, and most of these blades were well crafted and functional tools. A few were corroded, and there are naturally some missing data, especially for the material found in the core. Not to mention that I did the sample review, and I might have missed some data entry. Are these representative of late medieval blades? I think so, and this is the best we have in terms of evidence. Is it complete? Probably not. But I do not expect any additional information to change the picture at large.
This might come as a shocker for someone who has never opened a book and believes that European blades were by far and large spring "mono" steel blades. In fact, it is a mantra I hear every other day. But experts within this field, well familiar with the literature, have been saying this for a while [1](https://www.youtube.com/live/4heLPFFaLaU?si=0he7kB9ms3ZFlXXT&t=5700), [2](https://www.youtube.com/live/5jrL5mvf4V8?si=vbE1Fbfo6ekhJdKB&t=4260), [3](https://youtu.be/5djVkOgu8vs?si=YaGbB99vBU\_\_awKS).
Does it mean these blades were badly crafted? No, they were not. Some were exceptional pieces of technology for the period. Yet these are swords that would likely take a set on a bad cut, and get severe edge rolls during use. And I feel practitioners, collectors and enthusiasts should start to learn properly how these tools would have behaved under stress, since modern tools are far more forgiving and durable than anything made 500 years ago.
References:
Williams, A. (2012). The sword and the crucible: A history of the metallurgy of European swords up to the 16th century. Brill.
Żabiński, G., Stępiński, J., & Biborski, M. (2014). Technology of sword blades from the La Tène period to the early modern age: The case of what is now Poland. Archaeopress Archaeology.
Fajfar, P., Medved, J., Klančnik, G., Lazar, T., Nečemer, M., & Mrvar, P. (2013). Characterization of a messer—The late-medieval single-edged sword of Central Europe. Materials Characterization, 86, 232–241.
Merico, P., Faccoli, M., Gotti, R., & Cornacchia, G. (2024). Archaeometallurgical investigation of a fragment from a medieval sword blade. Metallography, Microstructure, and Analysis, 13, 257–271.
Merico, P., Faccoli, M., Gotti, R., & Cornacchia, G. (2024). Archaeometallurgical study of a 16th–17th century "rapier" sword manufactured in Caino (Northern Italy). Metallurgical and Materials Transactions B, 55(2), 782–798
Tonelli, G., Faccoli, M., Gotti, R., Roberti, R., & Cornacchia, G. (2016). Archaeometallurgical investigation of a Renaissance falchion sword manufactured in Caino (Northern Italy). JOM, 68, 2233–2249
Lantos, S., et al. (2025). Unburied Mohács: New research results on the battles of 1526 and 1687. Budapest: Hungarian National Museum
Gener, Marc. (2009). Metallographic study of some 17th and 18th c, European sword (rapier) blades.
Mori, Carolina & Ghiara, Giorgia & De Montis, Paolo & Piccardo, P. & Gatta, Giacomo & Trasatti, Stefano. (2021). Archaeometallurgical Analyses on Two Renaissance Swords from the “Luigi Marzoli” Museum in Brescia: Manufacturing and Provenance. Heritage. 4. 1269-1283. 10.3390/heritage4030069.
Žákovský, P., Cymbalak, T., Hošek, J., & Dejmal, M. (2017). Archaeological find of a late medieval long sword from Prague – Nové Město/New Town. Přehled výzkumů, 58(2), 141–182.
Petersen T2 has been finally revized by Michal Viskupič. Many photos included.
This is the first blade I pulled out of an old collection passed down to me.
Trying to identify this sword and would appreciate any help. I know nothing.
