A keris for comment
 

Hi,

I'm new, and I just thought I'd share some items from my collection. I would appreciate anyone's thoughts on this keris esp. in terms of dapur and pamor (which is something I'm still trying to familiarise myself with). It's dressed in fairly typical "dance keris" fashion, so I decided to just put up pictures of the blade. My apologies in advance for the low image quality.

Greeting Orang Lama and welcome to the forum. Nice to see another Maritimer here (i live in Nova Scotia ;)).
I suspect your keris might be more likely from Lombok rather than Bali. Firstly it has a rough topography, rather than the polished treatment most Bali blades received, but certain features like the gonjo don't seem quite fully in Bali form, but that might just be due to erosion. I am also not used to seeing Bali kembang kacang actually touching the gandik as it does in your keris, and i usually expect to see jenggot with ron dha on top of the kembang kacang when greneng is present on a Bali keris, but that also might be gone due to erosion.
We often see older blades like this in "dance dress". I think that perhaps before they began making those awful fake pamor blades they filled this tourist dress form with old unwanted blades. Not that this is a terrible keris. I actually quite like it. It is a 13 luk blade and i think the pamor is a standard wos wutah.

Welcome to the forum. If you resize the height of the picture to 700 pixels before you upload it to the site, the whole blade will fit on the screen at once. I am looking forward to seeing more of your collection.

Just a heads up IP. You can easily zoom out your screen a bit if you want to see the entire length of blade in the verticals on your screen without scrolling. I am more concerned if if the horizontals don't fit the screen. With the larger files we can at least get better resolution for making our assessments. ;)

Thanks David. Good advice from the voice of experience. If I remember correctly visual arts are your specialty? I like to post a first picture as an overview. then the high-resolution shots after the initial hook. I do not believe that most users will take the time to zoom out to 50% to get that overview. although I know we have several dedicated users who do this and MUCH more. Of course, for me, this is seen through the filter of having spent a lot of my time at work trying to find ways for people to absorb information in more effective ways, especially younger ones. It has become kind of an obsession formed by existential threats ;)

What is the maximum width the screen can hold?

I believe it is 1280. At least that is what is suggested for maximum upload.

nice old keris :)

Good to see you on board OL.

Dhapur & pamor change their names from place to place & time to time.

Most collectors use Central Javanese terminology for pamor, but dhapur is probably better covered by not using specific names, except for those Javanese keris that do conform to a known standard, something such as the Surakarta Pakem. Just naming major blade features is probably sufficient for other keris.

The most usual collector terms for the pamor in this keris would be:- wos wutah or beras wutah, both these terms have the same meaning:- scattered rice. The type of pamor is mlumah, meaning that the layers of pamor material are laying flat against the steel core of the blade. This is a random pamor.

If we accept that this keris is Balinese or Lombok origin the correct local terms become more difficult to apply and in most cases would not be recognised by the community of collectors.

The word "dapur" is Bahasa Indonesia & means "kitchen"; the word "dhapur" is Javanese & means "shape, form, design".

I thought it was a Ngulit Semangka pamor

Thank you so much everyone for all the comments! I should also thank everyone for all their input over the years as I've lurked this forum for quite some time and it has been an invaluable resource for me. I'm still getting the hang of the response function, so to try and get through everything:

@David Thank you for the info. I was also a bit puzzled by the fact that the blade seemed too corroded to be Balinese and had just assumed that it must have been brought in from elsewhere and dressed up by a dealer.

@IP Duly noted, I'll see what I can do next time :)

@Marco Thanks! It's not a masterpiece, but I quite like it. It has a nice "honest" feel to it and, as David noted, compared to the modern fake pamor blades...

@A.G. Maisey Thank you for the info and duly noted wrt the terminology and "dapur" vs "dhapur" ;) (According to Wikipedia that's a retroflex stop like in the Indian languages. Interesting...)

And in the meantime, this is the hulu(?) from one of my other keris. Apparently it might represent "Rare Kumara, a tutelary deity for
children on Bali"?

Not to my eye Marco, but you can call it this if you wish, the difference between ngulit semangko & wos wutah is only one of pamor layering, NS is fewer layers & broader layers, WW & its sub-variants are more layers and more narrow, for example, in classic Solo WW the bakalan will have a nominal 128 layers of contrasting material before the cold work, but for Solo NS those layers will be reduced to 64, or maybe only 32.

Obviously, NS is cheaper to make than WW.

I am talking nominal layers, not finished layers, because we lose layers of material during welding, forging & cold work.

So 'nominal' is referring to the original forging of the 'blank' (I've forgotten the term for it) :o, which is later finished into a complete keris; correct?

Yes Rick, it works like this, let's say you start with 2 pieces of iron & one piece of nickel, so you put the nickel in between the 2 bits of iron & then you take the weld, OK, then bend that iron + nickel sandwich in two, weld again = 2 layers of nickel, & again = 4 layers, & again = 8 layers, & again =16, again = 32, again = 64, again = 128 layers of nickel.

Forge out that billet with 128 layers, cut it in half, make a sandwich of two pieces of pamor & steel in between, take the weld, then forge to approximate shape and carve inyo a keris.

However --- every time you heat up the material and forge or weld, you lose material through flaking, so these layers are imaginary, thus they are nominal layers, as if you had lost nothing, but the bottom line is that you start with one layer (or whatever), and the more you forge & weld, the thinner that layer (or layers) gets.

Ngulit (or kulit) semangka (or semongko) is the same pamor as wos (or beras) wutah, the only difference is the number & width of the bands of contrasting material.

thanks for the explanation Alan :)

You're welcome Marco.

this thread is the perfect example for why i am here, to learn. Thx all

Suggest you get a copy of The World of the Javanese Keris if this is your interest by Garret Solyom. :)

I don't disagree, but not all that easy to come by these days and when it does this relatively thin paperback runs around $100USD. Though i believe i just saw a copy going for about $60 if you google it. ;)
There may also be some online options.

Whoa! :eek:
I'm glad I have a backup copy. :cool:

learning by listening ;-)