A rare Karo Batak knife for sharing & discussion

[kai]

Hello Detlef,

Congrats on a good grab and a really fine piece!

I have recently purchased a rare Karo Batak knife with Djulung-Djulung blade but I wouldn't call this knife Andar-Andar since a A-A coming normally with a sukul (handle) nganda but this knife has a sukul djering. On plate 100 from Volz is shown a very similar knife (picture 9).

Andar-andar and julung-julung are synonyms AFAIK. Very much like kalasan, they do come in all sizes and with lots of different hilt types!

The knife is 51,4 cm long inside scabbard, 39,5 cm without, the blade alone is 29,5 cm and 7 mm thick near the handle, weight is 251 gram.

While this one may be on the shorter side of things, I'd opt for shortsword rather than knife as a description of function; as you know, the word piso refers to any kind of blade in Karo.

Handle is scribed buffalo horn with a possible low grade gold ferrule with silver bands, scabbard mounts from silver.

As already mentioned by others: a really nice hilt; the carved/cut motifs appear to be a bit unusual! Any hints that the ferrule may be fire-gilded?

Scabbard mouth is deeply carved in traditional manner.
The last two pictures show it together with two Karo Kalasans from my collection for size comparison.

A very nice match with the kalasan with blonde (or greenish) horn hilt!

Regards,
Kai