Viking Sword with an History

[Reventlov]

Originally Posted by Tordenskiold1721

Thank you for your in-depth explanation and additional material that cast light on this very interesting sword Reventlow ! (Christian Detlev Reventlow?)

Glad you found it to be of interest! I must confess that my username was actually borrowed from an Isaac Asimov novel long ago...

Originally Posted by Tordenskiold1721

You show examples of wire wrapping on Viking sword grips, do we agree that we are talking sometime between the end of the 900 hundreds to early period 1000 ?

Yes, this definitely seems to be the time-period for this sort of grip. I can offer a dozen or so more examples... At least half are of type-S and greatly resemble the Thames sword; several of the others are of seemingly related types T and Z. These types are not at all common in general, so the correlation seems to be more than mere coincidence.



Now what is even more interesting is that the wire grip also appears on a small number of swords which are of very rare or even unique types. The sword below has a fantastically ornate hilt of cast silver, and must have belonged to a very prestigious (royal?) owner. The sword comes from Dyback in the region of Scania, in Southern Sweden, formerly Danish territory. Note that the lower guard is actually shaped very much like the type-Z sword above, and the lower portion of the "guard" is in fact the mouth of the scabbard which has become fused to the hilt.


It has been suggested that the ornamentation can be linked to the Anglo-Saxon Winchester style, characterized by bushy, leafy, scrollwork designs. So here we may have evidence of Anglo-Saxon gifts or trophies brought home by Vikings, or a product of the Anglo-Danish environment of the Danelaw or the period of Canute's rule over England. The Winchester style is exemplified in the Benedictional of St. Æthelwold, dating to around the 960s-80s. Note that this purely Anglo-Saxon product also shows a sword with the curving guard and triangular, two-piece pommel resembling Petersen's type-L.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Saxon_art

The upper portion of the pommel of the Dyback sword is lost, but amazingly the corresponding component of another sword of the same type has also been recovered, again in Scania. The metalwork is so similar, it seems surely to be the product of the same artisan.



The wire-wrapped grip occurs again on a couple of swords from Norway of even more unusual typology. The better preserved example is shown below. The sword seems to combine the small curved guard of the Anglo-Saxon type-L with the unusual pommel of the type-AE variants (which strictly speaking does not appear in Petersen's typology). Like the Langeid sword, the pommel seems to be silver plated and decorated with Nordic designs... the clubbed tips of the foliage/tendrils seems to me to be a feature of the Ringerike style, which would suggest a slightly later date for this sword compared to the previously discussed examples.



Classic examples of the Ringerike style appear in the form of several weathervanes from Norway and Sweden. Another example is a runestone recovered from the yard of St. Paul's Cathedral in London, which dates to reign of Canute. Again, it might be possible to interpret this very rare style of sword as the result of the combining Anglo-Danish influences of the late 10th-early 11th centuries.



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking...ingerike_Style