Contemporary bangkung? knife/ID & origin help

[Ian]

Hi WW,

Yes, fairly recent work. If you have the item already, is the edge chisel-ground or a V-grind? It looks chisel-ground to me, but hard to tell from the picture. If it is chisel-ground, then that likely reflects some Visayan influence.

The lightly carved okir on the scabbard looks vaguely Maranao to me, but perhaps another forumite can be more specific. The scabbard seems to have been nailed together along the edges with small brads. Very unusual for Moro work.

The blade shape has a convexly curved edge, quite marked in the distal one-third, which is unusual for a bangkung in my experience. The ones I've seen and handled had a straighter edge in that area.

The multifaceted hilt and small circular ferrule look more Tagalog or Visayan than Moro to me.

If you look at examples in the Show us your Bangkung thread here it appears that some of the blade forms are similar to a ginunting, which is a Tagalog sword that has been popular with recent Filipino martial arts practitioners and adopted by some of the Filipino military for a general purpose machete (but nevertheless remains a formidable fighting blade also). The modern ginunting versions usually have a concave blade edge and a partially sharpened back edge.

Overall, I don't think this is a bangkung, and I don't think it is necessarily Moro work. The blade shape is similar to an Antipolo knife I had, and there may well be other examples from elsewhere in the Philippines.