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Originally Posted by celtan
I believe you are referring to my sword.
Mine does taper, it's the angle of the picture that makes it look as if having parallel edges...
Both Russians and Prussians tangled with Swedes, Could this actually be a remounted captured blade? There even was a brief Anglo-Swedish War, wasn't it?
Do you have any idea of my sword hilt's date? The rather similarly hilted British sword is a 1796 model. The foliate shape of the blade is very interesting, almost sensuous...
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That is indeed the type of blade I was talking about. A remounted trophy blade could be possible I guess, a whole lot of Swedish swords were lost to Russia after Poltava for example. The Anglo-Swedish war seems like an unlikely candidate though:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-S...%E2%80%931812)
Stuart's blade isn't a perfect match for any Swedish model, but as officers were often free to buy their own swords, it could simply be a less common variant. Regarding the profile taper there are some 18th century swords for heavy cavalry with a rather moderate taper, but these would be quite a bit larger than Stuart's sword.
As for your sword, the hilt is of a type which was in use in Sweden for quite a long time, so the dating will be quite vague I'm afraid. The relatively straight knucklebow and finely grooved, non-spherical pommel would indicate that it's from the latter part of the period in which these saw use though, perhaps something like 1760-1820?
This would also mean that we can identify it as an infantry officer's sword, originally this hilt was used by all kinds of officers, but somewhere pretty soon after the death of Karl XII it fell out of use with cavalry officers, leaving this type for the infantry (cavalry officers had two hilt types to choose from back then, infantry officers didn't have any choice).