Twisted rods

[Gustav]

Alan, the question then - in which time period in classification Madura could such Pamor have been made?

Something similar regarding finesse I have seen only on Madura Sepuh, with complex Lawe Satukel.

[A. G. Maisey]

Gustav, that question cannot be given an answer that can be supported with any of the banks of knowledge or belief that form a part of the Central Javanese world of the keris.

In fact, it is not really possible with any keris from anywhere to provide an opinion on age based only upon the pamor element in a blade.

The main source of pamor material for Jawa/Bali, was Luwu, and material from Luwu was a trade commodity from about the 14th century.

The foundation of all pattern welding, not only in SE Asia, but in other places across the world, was the necessity to remove impurities from iron before it could be turned into material that was adequate for use in weapons and some tools.

One of the earliest techniques used in this purification process was to begin with a stack of irons, forge weld it & then run it through a process of twisting & welding until the material demonstrated evidence that it was clean enough for purpose. This twisting & welding produced patterns which over time were developed into an art & became proof of quality for the buyer.

The early examples of this were the Merovingian blades, but they used relatively thicker material & fewer bars than the later Viking examples, this was 5th -8th century in what is now France, Germany, Belgium.

This same process of welding & twisting for reasons of material integrity occurred later in Jawa, and for the same reasons, & with a similar result. Over time the various patterns produced by the process developed into an art, the patterns became entrenched as motifs, the motifs gained talismanic intent & belief.

The "twisted bar" type patterns were one of the earliest that smiths developed for producing clean material, & in all honesty a twisted bar pattern is not at all difficult to produce, provided the forge techniques are understood.

So, we might find a twisted bar motif in a very early piece of work, but when the manipulation of the twisted bar has been carried out to produce a particular complex pattern, well, then we are very probably looking at a much later piece of work.

In Jawa these complex pattern welded motifs appeared to begin to be produced when Javanese smiths began to use improved forge technology imported from the Indian sub-continent & notably from Europe.

But it is not just a matter of the overall progression of technology & technique. It takes time for any smith to become a master of his trade, so the early work of any smith might be simple random patterns, but his later work might be master works of the art.

My own early efforts in forge work & pattern welding followed exactly this progression, & I have seen the same course of development with other modern day smiths. I began to learn forge work in the late 1970's, I had stopped intensive work before 1998, the only reason I began to do forge work was to understand better the process of production used in a keris blade. I still do some forge work, & I have taught basic processes to a number of other people, but I never undertook forge work to produce income, it was only ever for the purpose of education.

As we all know, keris blades do not carry the name of the maker, nor the date of manufacture.

A blade made 500 years ago can look as if it has come from the work bench yesterday, if it has had a protected life.

A blade made last week can look as if it is several hundred years old if it has intentionally been made to look so.

To attempt to place a keris blade into a period of time based only upon the type & character of the pamor is totally impossible.

To use the tangguh system to date a blade is perhaps not quite so impossible, but the very name of this system, ie, "tangguh" tells us exactly what the nature of a tangguh classification is:- it is an opinion, and as with any opinion, it is only as good as the knowledge & experience of the person who provides that opinion.

I apologise for this long winded preamble, but I do believe it was probably necessary, not because you, Gustav, do not already have this understanding, but because many people who might read our comments here might not have a similar understanding.

Gustav, to address your question:-

"--- in which time period in classification Madura could such Pamor have been made?"

I cannot give you a supportable answer, & in my opinion, nor can anybody else.

There are several blades shown in this thread, based upon what I believe I can see in the photos, my guesses for two of them, --- post 1 & post 18 --- are 19th century, ie Madura sepuh, the one in post 7 we know to be pre-1674.

[Gustav]

Alan, I asked specifically about Pamor because the execution of it is not very typical for Madura, as I mentioned above, and also the configuration of patterns is not something one sees three times a day. So there is a possibility one has encountered a related blade, especially if he has an experience going long back, and is able to draw conclusions, which possibly allow a more secure placement in a certain time period.

Regarding twisting&welding, probably the first people in Europe who did it, were the celts, already BC, possibly already around 300 BC. At latest around 200 CE Romans could do quite complex pattern welding. There is a possibility it all started in South-East-Europe or Middle East, together with longer swords, which displayed such twisting&welding.

The revival started in the 16th cent. somewhere in Middle East, the earliest known dated yataghan with twisted pattern is from end of 16th cent., around 1600 twisted pattern reached China, and, at the same time or shortly after, what today is Indonesia.

[A. G. Maisey]

Thanks for explaining your reasons for focussing on the pamor Gustav.

When we use twisted bar techniques to produce intentional patterns there is a lot more than just the forge work to consider. The pattern that becomes evident on the finished blade is as much the product of the cold work on the bench, as it is the product of the hot work in the forge.

After the final twisting has been completed, the resultant bar then needs to be forged down into a billet of suitable size to be used to produce a blade, & the blade is forged to shape, but then that forged blade needs cold work to turn it into the form that will be ready for heat treating. As we reduce and smooth the surfaces we cut further & further into that twisted material, and what happens is that as we cut deeper into the twisted the material, the pattern changes.

I’m not at home right now, so I do not have access to books, but I believe that either Sache or Jim Hrisoulas illustrates this effect quite well. I went looking for something on line that would show this, I came up with this:-

https://www.provos.org/p/pattern-welding-explained/

scroll down a bit & there are a couple of short videos that demonstrate this pattern change effect pretty well.

Here is another link to a good article that can assist in understanding how various patterns can be revealed in a twisted bar during the cold work, rather than the hot work:-

http://www.vikingsword.com/serpent.pdf

Bearing this in mind, & being aware that twisted bar patterns have been made a great many times, by a great many smiths, over a great many years, and with those smiths having variable levels of skill, both as individuals & in the same smith over his working life, it becomes obvious that we cannot really use a particular pamor pattern to fix the point in time when it might have been produced.

In respect of the blade in post#1, my immediate impression is that I am looking at Madura post 1980, patterning of this & similar designs is not at all uncommon in recent Madura blades, but when I look more closely at some other characteristics of this blade I am reluctant to place it as late as recent Madura. I’d really need it stripped down & in my hand to provide an opinion that I could defend.

As for having seen a keris blade with similar pamor work to this one, yes, I have seen a great many, but none that could be regarded as particularly old, so if this is an older blade, & for the sake of this discussion I think we can take it as an older blade, then I cannot recall having ever seen a blade with pamor similar to this blade that could be reliably dated to earlier than 19th century. Even in the period up to beginning of WWII, keris with pamor similar to the pamor on the blade in post #1 is scarce.

I estimated this post #1 keris as 19th century, & the reason I did this is because stylistically it is old Madura and most of the old Madura blades that we encounter seem to be 19th century. However, keris makers from our current era & from previous eras, have made blades that were copies of earlier styles. Pauzan Pusposukadgo made quite a number of keris that were copies of earlier Mataram blades, I myself made a copy of an old West Jawa blade.

In respect of the working of iron in the forge to make it usable, that has been a part of producing tools & weapons from iron from the very beginning. However, there is a big difference between the processes used in welding to clean iron in order to make it usable & manipulating and welding iron in order to produce a pre-determined pattern. The cleaning process is simply piling & twisting, & although this does produce a pattern, it is a random pattern not a pattern that has been produced intentionally, nor that can be copied. The work involved in producing a pre-determined pattern requires far greater skill than the skill required to simply produce iron that is adequate for use as a tool or weapon.

As Gustav has commented, patterns in welded iron had been produced in Roman times & before, but the welded blades of the Merovingians were deliberate essays in producing predetermined patterns as an art form, proof of the maker’s competence & an assurance of quality.

There is a lot of conjecture & supposition in archeo metallurgy, but it seems to be generally accepted that forge techniques & technology had advanced sufficiently by the time that the Merovingians rose to power for them to develop true pattern welding as the art that we now recognise. The Merovingians were in fact a continuation of the old Roman Empire, but the area that they controlled was limited (in modern day terms) to Germany, Belgium, some of Switzerland & Austria & most of France. This being so, it is understandable that they built upon the Roman foundation of iron working.

Perhaps we should be careful in using the term “pattern welding”. In my understanding it is a fairly recent term that was first used not long after the end of WWII by an archaeologist, & he appears to have used the term to refer to a sword found in North Germany & dating from about the 3rd century, so, not actually Merovingian, but a couple of hundred years later the rise of the Merovingians began & by about the 7th or 8th century true pattern welding was well established. A pattern in welded ferric material might be apparent in very early work, but is it a true pattern, or is it merely a chance happening generated by the work necessary to produce useable material?

The use of the word “pattern“ infers predictability, an arrangement that can be repeated or copied, so what we refer to as a “random pattern” is a contradiction in terms, simply because it is random.

I’d like to be able to think of, & use, the term ”pattern welding” to mean true, repeatable patterns, not the unpredictable result of a necessary process.

[Gustav]

Alan, thank you for the elaborate response!

I believe the blade from #1 surely is 19th cent. and perhaps could be earlier. The Warangan finish on it is an old one, surely pre-WWII.

Regarding Roman swords and pattern welding - there is a series of books dedicated to Illerup Adal finds. Illerup Adal is a bog in Danemark with spectacular deposit of offerings, and one of the most important sources for well preserved elite Roman spatha. The spatha from the site can be dated around 200 AD, along with 90% of weapon finds.

Pattern welding with twisted rods, often more than two, is among the less complex patterns found there. Others include welding of separate, pre-forged parts, similar to Pamor Poleng, or using braiding. Work of such complexity did appear again only since the second half of 19th cent., true for many things Roman.

Pattern welding with twisted rods did appear even on foot soldiers Gladius and Pugio. The problem is the possibility to recognize the pattern. Illerup Adal is an unique situation, mostly blade surface of Roman, not to speak about earlier swords, doesn't allow to see any traces of it without using X-ray.

[A. G. Maisey]

Not at all an elaborate response Gustav, what I have written, I consider to be very simple & very basic. It took me a long time to write it, because my initial response was far too long and far too detailed, I needed to keep cutting & cutting to bring content down to a level that could be both easily understood and that would (hopefully) clear the fog that surrounds the creation of pattern welded motifs:- it is not just forge work, the real art, the real work in revealing those motifs is in the cold work.

In fact, now, & in the past, in Indonesia, although the mpu or pande keris might direct or oversee the hot work, that actual hot work is mostly left to a common smith, the work requiring the real skill is the cold work. I do hope that I have had some success in assisting a little understanding of how pattern welded motifs are created.

At the present time there is a lot of play acting going on in Indonesian keris work, what we call "sandiwara". From what I have read of reports on Javanese work in an earlier era, I think the same applied then too. Maybe it always has applied. In any case, one thing is certain:- what an outsider is permitted to see is a long way from the reality.

Smithing in general seems to have acquired some sort of mystical reputation, there has been a heightened interest in smithing work in recent years, but really, it is just work, & pretty hot, dirty heavy work at that.

I had never heard of Illerup Adal until I read what you have posted. I've followed up on your lead, & it does give a slightly altered perspective on the time frame, still within the long established parameters, but it certainly does appear likely that in later Roman times a good degree of control over pattern welded motifs had begun to appear. But I'm still not clear on whether this controlled work from Illerup Adal can be attributed to Roman workers or Danish workers. Still, this is not really material, the progression remains as previously understood, even if the parameters might be a little different.

The graphics you have posted are really quite informative, can you advise the place & time of manufacture to which they are attributed?

[Gustav]

Alan, those pattern welded swords which can be attributed to roughly 200AD (the latest coin found there is from 187 AD, one can only speculate, that the swords were not necessarily new when their offering took place) are absolutely certainly Roman and absolutely certainly not Danish. Swords with no pattern welding could be of different origin.

To reach such a level in pattern welding seen in those swords - there should have been a way longer then a generation or two from simple piling of rods to pattern welding displayed here. These are patterns, of which a Merovingian, 2 centuries later, didn't even dream of, not denying the mastery working with twisted rods from 5th cent. onwards.

The people who till now are of oppinion complex pattern welding started in 5th cent. are repeating information, which is more then 80 years old and certainly outdated. According to Arbesman...

The drawings I posted can be found in this fantastic publication, which should be in the library of every person with deeper interest in the history of pattern welding:

https://www.abebooks.de/978878841538...qfFM7ZJ-_9rwqw

Vol.11 - text, vol. 12 - drawings and photographs.