Old Tajung Keris(es?)
 

Good day all. I would like to share a few pics of old Tajong hilts and keris(es? is there such a word for plural of keris?)

These are part of a larger collection and have been kept for 20 - 30 years, gathered from various South Siam locations.

Enjoy.

Impressive collection, thanks! I love the hilts especially.
Regards

These are nice Keris, I've a few here myself . Thanks for sharing.

Question, why the Bugis Pendokok? I am aware of a similar Patani pendokok from my own collections (but not found on Tajong), but I do not see this design amongst these?

Perhaps you can tell us more about the design elements of each province that makes these keris so interesting? Perhaps some or all have a long well established regional provenance which reflects in the carvings?

Gavin

Pretty impressive.

In Indonesian and Malay the plural of 'keris' is "keris-keris", or in the old form "keris2".

But we're using English here so I reckon "kerises" is just fine.

NICE collection !! :)

I think Alan is probably correct here since he knows much more about Indonesian languages than i do, but in English i have always just used "keris" as the plural of keris much the same way that moose, sheep or shrimp are the same both singularly and plural. :shrug:
A fine collection of keris tajong indeed. Never found the right one at the right price and since they are a bit outside my usual interest in keris other thing have taken priority. It does seem to me that the focus of interest for those who collect these is far more directed on the dress (specifically the hilts) than the blades themselves.

I can't check my reference books for now but I seem to have read "krisses" as the plural of "kris" in many books written in English such as those from Frey and Van Duuren?
Regards

Yep, i've certainly seen that spelling. But frankly it sounds funny, like you are lisping when you say it. I'll stick to plural keris myself under i find a point where it doesn't proper communicate what i am trying to say. Just my own 2 keris there...
;)

Actually David, I use "keris" as the plural form also. I probably should use "kris" as the correct English spelling, but I'd sooner not. However, as Jean has said, a lot of keris-literate writers in English use "kerises" or "krises". In any case, we can always get around the problem with sentence construction.

1 keris, 2 keris, 3 keris more, look at all those keris....keris it is.... ;)

One a Krissy, two a Krissy, three a Krissy, four
Krissy dressed in tight blue jeans,
Knocking on my door.
Come in little Krissy,
Don't stand there in rain,
I've had a Krissy once before
And I'd like to once again.

A nice title and very educational book. I am following his steps....

The European manner....

Gavin

This is why I have come to love this keris warung kopi website so much.

I would not vote for the use of "krises" as a plural, because it comes too close to "crises". Especially when you pronounce the word as "creece", then you have a "crises" on your hands. :cool:

Gavin, I believe those shown are more of Patani pendokok rather than Bugis. I do not have the depth of knowledge to provide details on the different design elements of different provinces. But from my limited knowledge, the tajongs are more commonly adorned with "teming",( Kelantanese/ Pattani word - which is sort of molded to the base of the Tajong hilt, usually made of silver, brass, or suasa , as per attached pics), than pendokok. I may not be fully accurate on this though.

Thanks for this insight kayoba84.

Teming is not something I am familiar with, I've only ever seen the simple tajong cup form noted at pendokok in line with the name for other types from the Malay region.
I hope a more learned Keris forum member can chime in about the name Teming.

Gavin

The Pendokok of Tajong was a bipartite construction, consisting of Teming (one of Tajong kayoba84 show has a proper Teming) and a hilt cup. If we see a suassa Teming, we can be sure hilt cup was made of equally valuable material, and in most cases has been sold, pawned... or whatever. Somewhere on forum there is a picture of such hilt cup in a Malayan museum (or ACM?). A museum in Basel owns one complete ensemble, the best Tajong ever.

Becouse of the loss of hilt cup the Tajong hilt (with or without Teming) sits to low on Pesi.

The second example kayoba84 shows us in his last post is quite typical hilt cup from Terengganu, yet with slightly elongated proportions. I doubt though, it was originally intended to be a hilt cup for this Tajong (which had a Teming in his past). The rest are Malayan Bugis style Pendokok, not intended for Tajong, and one specimen, which could be a younger version of Tajong hilt cup. Difficult to judge from the picture.

Gustav,

Thank you for the enlightenment in your post.

If I understand the detail you have written and I use the image attached, the Teming is only the plain metal wrapping and the Pendokok is then the more decorative cover over the Teming?
What is the reference citing this? I ask as 90% of my books are currently in storage and the best reference I have at hand being "Spirit of Wood" does not note this in the glossary of terms?

With thanks

Gavin

By large I agree David, but the blades, although not a pamor type which is so often the allure of a good keris, the blades from this region are often so very interesting and extremely well constructed with beautiful "lava" like crucible steel cores, well defined differential steel edges and an array of differential heat treating throughout.

In the proper finish, they can look quite spectacular.

Gavin

According to contemporary Peninsular & Singaporean collectors, a tajong is defined by the dress (both hilt and sheath), so in the absence of proper dress, it isn't a tajong, but rather a pandai saras blade, or a carita blade, or whatever.

I agree with Gavin that in general the blades dressed as tajong are of generally good quality, unlike the middling to poor quality blades that are often found in coteng dress. Peninsular blades lack contrasting pamor, but they are typically well-forged, with good detail work. It's not uncommon to find a better quality carita blade in tajong dress.

Thanks for posting these images, kyoba84, I'm deeply envious of your collection.

Tajong with a pandai saras blade, in the collection of the Asian Civilizations Museum.

Tajong with a carita blade, in the collection of the Asian Civilizations Museum.

Treming is an accepted standalone as an alternative to pendokok for tajong hilt. Many tajong keris in Kelantan and Patani have suasa or silver teming and in fact some prefer teming rather than pendokok. Once you decide to put teming, you do not put pendokok over it.

incidentally the a friend recently made a watercolor of the hilt you showed. I was wondering where he based his warercolor from !!! ...

Hello Nik,

Just to clarify, treming was just a typo, isn't it? BTW, what does teming mean?

A pendokok seems to work well with a round buah pinang which is quite rare with tajong hilts; would you agree that tajong with slender/conical buah pinang look better with teming?

The splendid Basel tajong hilt shown above does have a double construction of a simple cup (a bit different from the usual teming) and, apparently, a separate de luxe pendokok from gold... Any other antique high-end examples extant that exhibit complex hilt fittings?

Regards,
Kai

Kai, teming/temi is a variation of pronounciation spoken by East Coast Malaysian. The correct word in standardised Bahasa Malaysia and Bahasa Indonesia is Temin. Which means some sort of a metal sleeve to reinforce hilts or spear shafts. Below are the entry for temin in both in Bahasa Malaysia and Indonesia.

http://prpm.dbp.gov.my/Cari1?keyword=temin

http://kbbi.web.id/temin

To digress a bit. Recently collectors in Malaysia have started using the word "akuk" or "akut" (which does not appear in the dictionary) to refer to belalai gajah. I think this word is also pronounced according to the Malaysian east coast dialect.

In my opinion the word is actually "angkup" (which is listed in the dictionary) where it refers to the shape of the belalai gajah that resembles a small picker. This instrument is however, modern. Probably in old Malay the word angkup was used to describe something that is shaped like a picker, or it means "closed" - "bertangkup" in Malay. Below is a picture of an angkup.

Kai, may I ask you to explain the bit of difference of the Basel Tajong's "simple cup" and an "usual" Teming?

Thank you very much.

Hello Rasdan,

Thanks, that helps!

So basically we can just translate this into English as ferrule since it has no specialized connotations and concentrates on function rather than stylistic details.

Regards,
Kai

Hello Gustav,

In the tajong hilts with slender/conical buah pinang, the temin/ferrule seems to have the function to avoid damage to the buah pinang (which seems to be very prone to fatal splitting - more so than in most other keris hilts IME).

The cup style is close to a plain Sumatran selut/pendokok and without offering any structural support it won't really help to avoid splitting of the buah pinang.

Arguably, the functional difference of a ferrule vs. cup may not be much of a consideration for the very high-end examples like the one in Basel since a splendid look may be much more important than function...

Regards,
Kai

Thank you, Kai.

It seems to me we are looking at the same thing, Teming. In visible parts there is no difference, about the part hidden by hilt cup we can only speculate. Kayoba's Teming is a little bit elongated (for an example, which doesn't cover whole Buah Pinang).

You're welcome Kai. Yes, the direct translation is ferrule. :)

Re: Angkup
 

@ rasdan :This is quite interesting, and enlightening. Outside and inside calipers. I adjusted a couple to more secure positions upon the wood screws on which they hung on the wall at work just this morning. My apologies for "thread necromancy" and, perhaps, irrelevant commentary. I was following a train of thought during the course of research, and it led me here.
Google Translator leads me to believe that "angkup randu" means something like "operator's manual for tweezers" or "hand-operated tweezers". Please don't feel obligated to reply. I'm sure the matter will sort itself out in time.

Mickey, in Indonesian, Javanese, Old Javanese "randu" means kapok tree.

In Modern Malay, Indonesian "angkup" means tweezers, pliers.

In Modern Javanese "angkup randu" could be understood as "unopened bud of the kapok tree" > "angkup" in Javanese is an unopened bud.

I do not know what "randu" means in Modern Malay, but I have a very foggy memory that in Classical Malay it is verb that means some sort of arm action.

Well, i don't mean to keep this resurrected thread alive for long (though it is nice to see these tajong once again ;) ), but i will just say that Google Translator knows jack about Malay based languages. You will find the most ridiculous translation or words and phrases almost every time. It is near useless for understanding Bahasa Indonesian, Javanese or Malay.
Carry on! :)

I think most keris people would know this,its pretty basic knowledge, but maybe some of the new boys might not, so it is worth mentioning I guess.

There is a type of Solo mendak that is named "angkup randu" because it carries the angkup randu motif, which is pretty prevalent in Central Javanese ornamentation, and is also one of the common batik motifs.

This motif is a representation of the kapok tree bud.

The Malay meaning of "randu" was troubling me, so I looked it up in Wilkinson, published 1901, here is the dictionary entry:-

Randu. I. The action of the arm in stirring
up water or anything, when the arm is thrust
into water and worked round and round so as
to set the water in rapid motion. Randukan:
to work up or mix anything by working the
arm round and round in it; Sej, Mai., 122.

Re: Kapok, Google Translator, "angkup randu", et al.
 

I often take things for granted; the most recent pertinent instance may have been assuming that the majority of readers of this forum will automatically associate "angkup randu" with a specific design of mendak. I don't get out much, so I've never seen "angkup randu" used in any context except in reference to a mendak. Now that I think of it, this particular design I seem to recall as having been described by Mr. Maisey as something like "an ideal, single-use collapsible shock absorber" (words in quotation marks not a direct quote, but intended to convey my recollection of the meaning I think he intended at the time).
Kapok, I have read, is what the Imperial Japanese Naval and Army Air Services used as the filler in flotation vests/life jackets for their air crews. (I suspect it's been used for the same purpose more recently than that).
I think that I may go ahead and submit a post describing "My Initial Impressions of the General Atmosphere of the 'Keris Warung Kopi' and the Reason for the Delay Between My Registration and My First Post".
My experience with Google Translator has been more hit than miss. For Malay-English, I'd say it's worse than useless. Better to copy and paste any unknown Malay text and translate it as Sundanese, then Indonesian, then Javanese, and then you might have an idea of what it means. For English-Indonesian and the other way around: very, very good. Something like 98.28% of my Feisbuk friends are Indonesian, and none have ever voiced any suspicion that I'm Inggris bule, and not Indonesian. I straight up told one guy that I was using a translator to chat with him, and I had a hard time convincing him that I wasn't pulling his leg. Javanese-English is very hit-or-miss. A very big problem is G.T. doesn't have an understanding of different registers. And then there are terms like "Buta Nawasari/Naswari/Ngawasari"; I still don't know if it's Bengali or Hindi which I ought to translate from. Perhaps it's Balinized Bengali, and therein lies the problem. A while ago, some Balinese danganan name I tried to translate came up as something like "cousin does not know knee broken". The important thing is: for all translations, click the "reverse translation" feature to be sure it makes sense, and that words with more than one possible meaning are being translated into the meaning you intend. This can be tricky; sometimes you need to change the word order to correspond to the syntax of the target language. Sometimes the syntax of colloquial spoken English is incorrect syntax, which causes the translation to make no sense. Sometimes you'll need to use a synonym for the translation to come out right. Google Translator is my default tool to use for all the languages I need to translate from/to (Chinese, Japanese, French, German, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, Polish, Hungarian, Russian, Spanish, and Bahasa); only for Spanish do I sometimes need to use another as an adjunct.

Well Mickey, i am glad you are having some luck with Google Translator through what sounds like an extremely excruciating and convoluted method of multiple transition translations. Though i suspect that your Indonesian friends are either being very polite to you or it is THEY who are pulling your leg. I can't imagine that any native Indonesian speaker could be fooled by a Google translation into believing they are speaking to another native speaker though such translations.
:shrug:

Interesting post Mickey. I guess I just don't have the necessary skills to use Google Translator (GT) effectively, because I seldom get any sense out of it.

I actually had cause to use it last week, I had it translate a passage written in BI into English, the reason I did this was because a good friend who lives in Bali --- he's been there about 11 years --- had used Google translator (GT) for the entire text of a Lombok story translated from I don't know what into BI.

Even though my friend has lived in Bali a long time, his BI is pretty rudimentary, I think because he is constantly required to use English for his work, so he uses GT for longer pieces of writing. Anyway, I read the BI text and it was perfectly clear, then I pulled a couple of paragraphs that we had been discussing from the text and ran them through GT. The result I got was a mess, but knowing what it was about because I'd read the original I could understand the GT job.

So yeah, GT makes a mess of syntax, and screws a few other things up, but for a mechanical service, its probably not too bad.


In respect of mendak, my thoughts on the possible function of a mendak as a "shock absorber" applies to all mendak, not just the angkup randu motif. All mendak are lightly made and do collapse under pressure, not like a metuk which solid metal.


The name "Buta Nawa Sari" is Balinese. Buta = evil spirit, but in fact, not all buta are invariably evil; buta inhabit graveyards and forest areas.

The word "Nawa" is commonly understood as "nine", but its other common meaning is as an indefinite length indicator --- you say something is "nawa" and in context that indicates that the something is long, but how long depends upon context.

The word "Sari" is again subject to context, but in all contexts it indicates the "essence" of something. In the use as an attribute of Nawa Sari, that essence is the pandan flower. The problem with the name "Buta Nawa Sari" is two fold, firstly he may not originally have been a buta, secondly the word "nawa" does have at least one other meaning and that other meaning could well solve part of the riddle. Right now the "nawa" problem is being worked on.

One thing appears to be certain, and that is that Nawa Sari is indigenous Balinese.

Kapok is a common product in Jawa, it is used to fill mattresses and pillows.

EDIT Mickey, what you said about GT on English to BI translation seems as if it is correct, I just ran several tests on it, nothing deliberately constructed to confuse, just simple, straight forward statements and what GT produced was better than 90% OK.

So, I thought to myself:-

"what are some of usual misunderstandings that occur between native English speakers and native BI speakers?"


I told GT that:-

"I am English and that rujak is far too hot for me, and the gado-gado is no better"

and what GT translated that as was:-

"Saya orang Inggris dan rujak itu terlalu panas untuk saya, dan gado-gado tidak lebih baik"


which is acceptably OK, but not what anybody who speaks Indonesian would have either understood, or said --- particularly if the Englishman was sitting at the same table and drinking copious quantities of water with his eyes and nose running and his throat & belly on fire.

Of course, it is possible to lead GT down an incorrect path by pretending that it is a real live person, but no matter how much it might like to be, it cannot ever eat rujak or gado-gado.

Google Translate is a dangerous program to use. Mostly it provides pretty comprehensible translations of simple texts. But in ambiguous cases the final result comes out as something ranging from hysterically funny to totally insane. Often both.

On this Forum I have seen GTs of Russian texts, and one of my favorite ones is a translation of “shashka”, a Caucasian guardless saber. There is also an almost 100% identical homophonic word ”shashki”, which means “checkers”.
Almost always, a sentence” This shashka was made...” is translated as “ This checker was made...” Go figure:-)))
I can go on and on with it.
Caveat emptor!