Mysterious Medieval Sword

[Battara]

Greetings folks,

Thought this little article would be of interest (if it wasn't posted before):


Medieval Sword Carries Mysterious Inscription

By Elizabeth Palermo August 11, 2015

This 13th-century sword with a gold inscription was likely made in Germany, but was found at the bottom of the River Witham in 1825. (Image credit: The British Museum)

A medieval sword inscribed with a mysterious message is stumping researchers and causing a stir among armchair historians.
The 13th-century weapon was found in the River Witham in Lincolnshire, in the United Kingdom, in 1825. It now belongs to the British Museum, but is currently on loan to the British Library, where it's being displayed as part of an exhibit on the 1215 Magna Carta.

The sword looks fairly ordinary at #rst glance. Weighing in at 2 lbs., 10 ounces (1.2 kilograms) and measuring 38 inches (964 millimeters) long, the weapon is steel, with a double edge and a hilt shaped like a cross. But on one side of the sword is a mysterious inscription, made by gold wire that has been inlaid into the steel, which reads, "+NDXOXCHWDRGHDXORVI+."

What does this strange group of letters mean? No one knows for sure, according to the British Library, which recently posted information about the weapon on its website, along with a request for readers to help crack the seemingly incomprehensible code.

Is the message some kind of magical incantation, meant to empower the weapon's owner with mystical abilities during battle? Perhaps the inscription is a religious blessing, or maybe it's just the complicated signature of whoever forged the weapon. Those who read the British Library's blog post put these and many other theories forward regarding the sword's enigmatic message.

A close up of the sword's mysterious inscription. (Image credit: The British Museum)

Wordy weaponry


Dozens of commenters chimed in to help solve the mystery. And luckily, one of those commenters had a lot of insight into the history of inscribed swords in Europe. Marc van Hasselt, a graduate student of medieval studies at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, has studied similarly inscribed swords and said that these weapons were "all the rage" in 13th-century Europe. The British Library recently updated its blog post with more information from van Hasselt.
Many inscribed swords have been found in countries including Poland, France, Sweden, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, making the River Witham sword "part of a large international family," according to van Hasselt.
The River Witham sword was forged in Germany, which was then the blade- making center of Europe, according to the British Museum. And pre-Christian Germanic tribesman inscribed runes onto their swords, axes and armor to "endow the items with magical powers," the Fyris Swords Project researchers wrote in a paper published in the journal Wa!en- und Kostümkunde (Weaponry and Costumes) in 2009.

It's possible that this ancient tradition was carried over to Christian times and that the inscriptions on the blades were therefore meant to "invoke God’s holy name and his grace to gain support and protection in battle," according to the researchers.

Such swords were likely owned by wealthy warriors, according to the British Museum, which speculates that the River Witham sword belonged to a knight or some other rich individual who rode into battle during the crusades of the late medieval period. The British Museum also suggests that such swords may have been a part of the ceremony in which a man became a knight and vowed to defend the church.

Cracking the code

Even though historians are fairly certain why inscribed swords were popular in the medieval period and who owned them, they still aren't sure just what these swords actually say. Interpreting the inscriptions on the blades is like "trying to crack a mysterious code," according to the Fyris Swords Project researchers.
While historians aren't entirely sure what language the letters on the sword represent, they are fairly certain that the letters are a short-form version of Latin, according to van Hasselt, who said that Latin was the "international language of choice" in 13th-century Europe. The #rst two letters on the River Witham sword are ND, which van Hasselt said might be a kind of invocation that stands for "Nostrum Dominus (our Lord) or Nomine Domini (name of the Lord)."

The XOXcombination that follows could refer to the Holy Trinity of the Christian faith. And the two plus sign-shaped symbols before and after the inscription are likely Christian crosses, according to the Fyris Swords Project researchers.
This sort of speculation about what the sword's inscriptions might represent has been going on for more than a century (researchers have been publishing their interpretations of the inscriptions in the journal Wa!en- und Kostümkunde since 1904). The variety of the letter sequences on the swords makes it clear that the inscriptions are not general statements (i.e., a standard blessing written out in short form). Quite the opposite is true, according to the researchers.
"[The] inscriptions (even though sometimes showing a constancy of letters) are extremely variable and appear to be very personal. One might say the individual secret of every sword bearer. It must have been a special dictum [saying] so obvious and so self-evident to him that it was not necessary to spell out its signicant meaning," the researchers said.

Commenters on the British Library website have suggested a number of possible interpretations of the River Witham sword's inscription (which you can read under the library's blog post). But just as with the other inscribed swords found throughout Europe, it's unlikely that anyone will be able to say with complete certainty just what message this medieval sword conveys.

Follow Elizabeth Palermo @techEpalermo. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

[Philip]

thanks for posting this article, about an exceptional sword.

Interesting that Ms Palermo gives no credit to the late Ewart Oakeshott, who covered the subject of esoteric religious inscriptions quite thoroughly in his 1960 book, The Archaeology of Weapons: Arms and Armour from Prehistory to the Age of Chivalry, p 215-19.

[fernando]

Looks like this theme is approached now an then in our forum, like in HERE, for one.

[David R]

Originally Posted by Philip

thanks for posting this article, about an exceptional sword.

Interesting that Ms Palermo gives no credit to the late Ewart Oakeshott, who covered the subject of esoteric religious inscriptions quite thoroughly in his 1960 book, The Archaeology of Weapons: Arms and Armour from Prehistory to the Age of Chivalry, p 215-19.

Happens a lot. Time passes, people forget and someone else claims the laurels.

[Jim McDougall]

Originally Posted by David R

Happens a lot. Time passes, people forget and someone else claims the laurels.

This is indeed an often occurrence in all fields of study as material and findings become firmly emplaced in the literature, and many do not reference the cited sources. Most serious students in particular fields are well aware of those who pioneered the key material
The use of mysterious inscriptions on sword blades such as those noted in this article and in numbers of other cases in medieval times were typically related to religious invocations and phrases. The fact that these seem often to be jumbled or indecipherable words may be that the combinations were not words at all, but acrostic representations of words in invocations or phrases.

The practice of using acrostics or repeated letter combinations became popular in Italy in later centuries, and in varying degree was used in many sword blade centers. Often certain 'magical' or 'talismanic; symbols or glyphs were interlaced among these letter groupings.