STINGRAY BLADE

[A. G. Maisey]

The sting-ray idea was actually Gardner's idea of origin of the keris. There were a lot of ideas about origin around at one time, and this one seems to be the one that Gardner favoured. He tells of archaeological finds of sting ray barbs in the old Dutch East Indies, in places far removed from the sea and postulates that these finds are evidence that the keris began as a ray barb.

The hilt on your tombak, Barry, is a very common form of Balinese hilt, and it is a very common occurrence to find old tombak blades, broken and re-cycled pedang and keris blades fitted with all sorts of hilts and handles to allow them to be either used or sold. If you trawl the markets for long enough, and often enough in Jawa and Bali you'll find every variation and combination imaginable. There nothing at all unusual in the combination that we see here.

The thing is that mostly collectors will focus on recognised and known forms, especially forms that they have seen illustrated, when they see something that hasn't been illustrated somewhere, or that they don't recognise, they get the idea that it is "fake", or "tourist". Most times this opinion is wrong. The variation in genuine, original weaponry in Indonesia is infinite, and the actual keris, pedangs and tombaks that can be seen on the ground, for sale and in indigenous collections far out distances anything that could be imagined.

I learnt a long time ago that if you cannot reference an item to a known source, collectors will rarely buy it, and I guess most people who buy to resell have learnt the same lesson, thus all these little oddities stay in their places of origin and very rarely get seen in the wider world.

Actually, in olden times in Jawa some weapons were poisoned and various recipes exist for the way in which to apply poison to a weapon.

Probably the fact that arsenic is used to darken a blade led to some confusion about poisoned blades, but it is true that actual poison was used on blades in the past.