Origin of my "mystery keris"

[A. G. Maisey]

Gentlemen, I have taken the liberty of doing a little bit of alteration to the way in which the images of these keris were presented.

What you see now is the orientation that I , and probably most other keris conscious people need to enable us to make relevant comments on a blade:- the blade should be upright and the gandik should be to the viewer's left. I have resized the images to a height of 600 pixels, this size will usually let us see the complete image in one viewing, without scrolling.

However, as has been pointed out in another current thread, we are not looking at keris, we are looking at images of keris.

Those images represent the keris, and we try to get some sort of an idea of what the real keris actually looks like from that image.

If the image is not a true representation of the keris, it becomes virtually impossible to draw supportable conclusions

Regretably neither of these keris have been photographed in a way that makes supportable comment possible --- well, at least I can't make any comment that I can support.

The images need to be produced with the camera focussed on about the middle of the blade and at 90 degrees to it, that way you get an image that retains the true proportions of the blade.

Greybeard has mentioned that the image of his keris became distorted during processing. This distortion makes it very difficult for us to get any sort of a clear idea of what sort of blade it is that we are looking at.

Sirek appears to have photographed his keris with the camera pointed along the blade, rather than mid-blade at 90 degrees.By photographing at this angle, the proportions of the blade are also distorted.

I would guess that many of us have some ideas about these blades, but if others are like me, nobody is going to commit himself to an opinion because there is insufficent accuracy in the images to be able to say too much about these blades with any degree of certainty.