Quote:
Originally Posted by werecow
A replica tries to reproduce something real. This is just a forgery.
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I would not call it a forgery, because forgery implies an intent to deceive. Jacenty would not post the sword here if he really intended to potentially sell it as a Polish-Hungarian saber.
Anyone can do as they please with their own items - collecting is a hobby, aimed at deriving pleasure and if Jacenty likes the sword the way it looks now, then it is his absolute right to have it that way. Or he may want to use for reenactment - whatever his purpose, it does not matter, as it is his sword.
However, I disagree with a couple of notions:
1) Taking a European blade that has been hilted in North Africa and putting a European hilt on it does not restore it back to its original state. First, there is no evidence whatsoever that this blade was ever mounted on a Polish-Hungarian hilt before it found itself in Algeria - in fact, as Jim has pointed out, it is very probably that it may have been produced for the Maghreb market in the first place. Second, marrying it with a new hilt, or even with an old one does not restore it, but it destroys whatever actual history there was, and the end result is a compilation of parts, which may be esthetically pleasing, but historically never really existed - a sword Frankenstein of sorts. This is true even of regulation military patterns, where people still distinguish between original and parts weapons, for example when it comes to dress daggers, but even more so when it comes to ethnographic arms who by their very nature are all unique.
2) If katana and keris can be re-hilted over and over and it is culturally acceptable to do so, why not this blade? Katanas and keris have their own very specific cultural context, within which refreshing the blade's dress is considered normal and even encouraged. However, other swords do not exist within the same cultural context, especially in the Western world. Besides, a katana in a new saya, with a new tsuba and all the rest of the hilt parts is still a katana. In contrast, when you remove an Algerian hilt and put a Polish hilt on, the result is an attempt at a total cultural transformation of the object, from an Algerian sword to a Polish (or Hungarian, or Cossack) one. It takes an actual, historically correct identity and replaces it with a new, fake one.
This post came way longer than I intended, and it is probably somewhat pointless - anyone can do what he/she wants with their swords. But we just have to be aware that the end result here is something that may look like a Polish-Hungarian saber, but is not even close to being an authentic one.