Swords
of the Viking Age
This
is an important and welcome book as very little has been written on this subject
in such detail in English. The author’s aim is to provide an overview of
swords that have been found and dated to between the 8th and 11th
centuries.
He
says in his preface “Selecting, inspecting and writing the various drafts of
the swords contained in this book has been a source of great joy”. Mr Peirce
manages to convey something of his “joy” in the pages that follow.
The
book begins with an introduction by Ewart Oakeshott the well-known sword
historian. He refers to the works of classification previously carried out by
such scholars as Jan Petersen, R. E. Mortimer Wheeler and others.
Oakeshott then proceeds to discuss, among other subjects, the links
between swords of the Viking Age and those of the migration period and later
swords of the 12th to 14th centuries. One very interesting
part of his foreword is his discussion of known, named sword makers of the
period and the methods they used to mark their swords. This is supplemented with
some notes on durability and duelling.
Lee A. Jones writes the next chapter, which is entitled “An Overview of
Hilt and Blade Classification”. Jones brings together the work on hilt types
of Petersen and Wheeler with that of later continental scholars such as Mikeal
Jakobsson and Alfred Geibig. To illuminate his comments he has included a
chronological chart of the hilt types, which is extremely useful.
Jones then turns his attention to blade types and has focused on blade
shape, length, thickness, presence or absence of a fuller and what all these
tell us about the date of the blade.
However, the bulk of the book is taken up with Ian Peirce’s detailed
look at a selection of more than sixty swords. The swords used in the book are
from all over northern Europe, from Finland in the north to France and Germany
in the south. Each sword, accompanied by at least one large photograph, gets a
commentary giving its present location, where it was found, its condition, and
statistics regarding length, point of balance and much else. As Peirce was able
to handle most, if not all, of the swords his notes clearly communicate his
pleasure in seeing and examining them. Where appropriate he has also referred to
other sword finds that could not be included in this generously illustrated
book.
The book ends with Lee A. Jones’s chapter about pattern welding once
again accompanied with useful illustrations, one particularly of a very complex
pattern welded sword found in Finland and dated to the Age of Migrations.
Eight colour plates of swords are included as a bonus.
The book is well produced, easy to read and to use and the enthusiasm of
all the contributors is evident. The bringing together of different approaches
to sword classification by a number of sword scholars is particularly
illuminating. The book, as stated above, is largely a catalogue of a selection
of Viking Age swords and does not really attempt a social history of northern
swords. As such a book has already been written by Hilda Ellis Davison with her
“The Sword in Anglo-Saxon England” that approach is probably unnecessary.
Although far from a corpus of Viking Age swords I cannot imagine that there will
be a better book published in English on this subject for a very long some time.
Paul
Mortimer