A warrior's keris

[BluErf]

A true-blue Keris Sulawesi sepokal made for the purpose of combat, no doubt.

Massive 15inch blade forged from very good steel (maybe European?), with no apparent pamor except for the wengkon. Blade is very sharp, with not much perabots, but it cuts a nice enough profile. This keris cut me when I forgot myself and touched its edges carelessly. It has quite a number of nicks on the edges, especially towards the upper half. If you look at the last picture, you can see the temper mark goes 4/5 of the way down towards the base. Given these characteristics, I hazard that this keris was a warrior's keris, and one who had his fair share of combat.

Notice that on the aring end of the ganja, there is an 'x' incised on top. I always associate such notches as being the 'anchor' for applying kinatah. Of course, I have no proof, and there are no gold residue left.

The profile of the sampir is typical 'awkward' Sulawesi style, but strangely, when it is put together with the equally 'awkward' batang, hulu and pendoko, it looks 'correct' and 'complements' each other. I'm not sure if you get what I mean -- there are times when you look at a keris and have the feeling that the parts do not fit properly together. Something is 'wrong'. Only when you replace the parts with those from the same region, then does the whole keris look 'correct'.

The sheath is made from yellowish-brown kemuning wood which I've grown to associate with Sulawesi. In fact, I'm pretty sure that by looking at the wood, one can tell which region it came from, even if its the same species, like in this case.

The buntut is a very 'crude' ivory plug, but with very nice webbed cracks at the bottom only.

The sheath is damaged in 3 places, but was repaired expertly a long time ago. I think most of you can only see 1, at most 2, of the spots where the repairs were made.

The interesting thing about this sheath is that it is very compact, and when the keris is sheathed in it, it makes one think that it must be an average sized blade in there. Only when the blade is unsheathed does one realize the monstrosity of the blade. 15inches may not sound very much for a keris, but when it is a Bugis sepokal blade, it is massive. There is no excess length or width in the sheath, evey last 1/8in is used to house the blade. So I give very high marks to the mranggi who created this 'optical illusion'.