Cast bronze hilt

[sirek]

Hello everyone,
A Balinese hilt of copper over wood I have seen quite often (picture 1)
but now i have a hilt of cast bronze weight 400 gr/14,2OZ/0.888LB (seems very heavy to me for a hilt) the previous owner owned it for about 50 years. Is this a rarity?, or do you see this more often? I had never seen a hilt of solid bronze?

[David]

Originally Posted by sirek

Hello everyone,
A Balinese hilt of copper over wood I have seen quite often (picture 1)
but now i have a hilt of cast bronze weight 400 gr/14,2OZ/0.888LB (seems very heavy to me for a hilt) the previous owner owned it for about 50 years. Is this a rarity?, or do you see this more often? I had never seen a hilt of solid bronze?

I can't say that i have seen one of these created in cast bronze before either. So i do suppose in that sense we could consider this a "rarity". The better question though might be "is it desirable"? For myself, with admittedly little experience with a hilt of this type, i would say probably not. The weight of the hilt alone might be enough of a discouragement for me. I would think that when we see this style of hilt created in lesser materials like this we are looking at hilts that were made to mimic more elaborate court examples of gold and silver. And this is not a particular good or finely detailed example of a bronze casting. It does appear to have some age, but i think it is more likely vintage rather than antique. I'm not really sure what market or strata of society such a hilt would originally have been created for.

[GIO]

The Etnology museum in Leiden has a keris with a similar hilt, but made of brass instead of bronze. The aspect is clearly that of a cast object, not that of an embossed metal sheet. Obviously this kind of hilts can be considered a rarity, because of the weight and consequent unbalance of the keris and the difficulty of melting the material. Enclosed please find a scanned photo of low quality because of the big size of the book.

[GIO]

Sorry for the upside-down image

[GIO]

Please apologize, I cannot fix the problem

[kai]

There are genuine hilts cast from bronze/brass. I haven't seen any solid ones - only with fillers like clay or cutler's resin.

The one shown in the first posting apparently was never in use (obstructed pesi hole; freshly cut base after casting); it also exhibits casting flaws at the front which (in addition to its heavy weight) make a real use as hilt unlikely IMHO.

From the pic, the one from Leiden does not look like a high quality example either (again, IMHO).

Regards,
Kai