Damned fake designer swords.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/dec/27/archaeology-vikings-sword

"It must have been an appalling moment when a Viking realised he had paid
two cows for a fake designer sword; a clash of blade on blade in battle
would have led to his sword, still sharp enough to slice through bone,
shattering like glass.

"You really didn't want to have that happen," said Dr Alan Williams, an
archaeometallurgist and consultant to the Wallace Collection, the London
museum which has one of the best assemblies of ancient weapons in the world.
He and Tony Fry, a senior researcher at the National Physical Laboratory in
Teddington, south-west London, have solved a riddle that the Viking
swordsmiths may have sensed but didn't quite understand.

Some Viking swords were among the best ever made, still fearsome weapons
after a millennium. The legendary swords found at Viking sites across
northern Europe bear the maker's name, Ulfberht, in raised letters at the
hilt end. Puzzlingly, so do the worst ones, found in fragments on battle
sites or in graves.

The Vikings would have found it impossible to tell the difference when they
bought a newly forged sword: both would have looked identical, and had razor
sharp blades. The difference would have only emerged in use, often fatally.

Williams began to test the Ulfberht blades when a private collector brought
one into the Wallace, and found they varied wildly. The tests at the NPL
have proved that the inferior swords were forged in northern Europe from
locally worked iron. But the genuine ones were made from ingots of crucible
steel, which the Vikings brought back from furnaces thousands of miles away
in modern Afghanistan and Iran. The tests at Teddington proved the genuine
Ulfberht swords had a phenomenally high carbon content, three times that of
the fakes, and half again that of modern carbon steel.

The contemporary fake Ulfberhts used the best northern metal working
techniques, which hardened the metal by quenching - plunging the red-hot
blade into cold water. It enabled them to give the blade a keen edge, but
made it fatally brittle.

In the 11th century the Russians blocked the trade route, and the supply of
crucible steel ended. Evidence is emerging that the swords from burials are
the fakes, or the work of less prestigious makers. The genuine Ulfberhts
have mostly been found in rivers. "I don't think these were ritual
offerings," Williams said. "They are mostly from rivers near settlement
sites, and I think what you have almost certainly is some poor chap
staggering home drunk, falling into the river and losing his sword. An
expensive mistake."

Their work has also proved that many of the Ulfberht swords in some of the
most famous weapons collections in the world are fakes. The Wallace's is the
real McCoy, but the one brought in by the private collector which started
the hunt turned out to be fake."


--
History is not what it used to be.


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