Reindeer Hunter Finds 1,100-year-old Viking Sword

[okie john]

http://nypost.com/2017/09/12/reindeer-hunter-stumbles-upon-1100-year-old-viking-sword/

Looks like some of the places where George hangs out.


Okie John

[s0nspark]

I don't think I'd care to be cut by that, then or now.!

[RevolverRob]

I'd really like to know more about the provenance of this artifact. It is dry and cold up there and that should promote preservation, but even still...that sword is in remarkable shape. Given that we don't usually see iron artifacts in that shape...

[TGS]

Pilø attributed the sword’s incredible preservation to the excellent quality of Viking iron

I was under the impression that they had fairly low quality, something to do with the uneven heating or something....

.....hence why Ulfberht swords were so remarkable, because they were made using foreign sourced materiel and methods....

[RevolverRob]

I was under the impression that they had fairly low quality, something to do with the uneven heating or something....

.....hence why Ulfberht swords were so remarkable, because they were made using foreign sourced materiel and methods....

You mean the Norwegian Archeologist might suggest that artifacts made in Scandinavia 1100 years ago were better than they were? :eek:

Actually, my understanding is that "Viking iron" varies considerably by forging location and age of artifact in question. Ulfberht swords are later swords, built with better metallurgy than earlier ones, the advantage of ~3-500 years of iron forging. Early viking swords are of pretty poor iron ore and pretty poor forging techniques, period. Remembering, of course, that iron forging technology was probably stolen ("borrowed") by raiding vikings and was likely originally carried out alongside bronze forging using bronze forges, with iron in place of copper. Bronze can forge well at much lower temperatures, whereas iron forged at those temps is soft and pretty terrible.

The real boon of Ulfberht swords, to my understanding, was the use of more tin to create some of the earliest iron-alloys.

[hufnagel]

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ancient/secrets-viking-sword.html

because any mention of Ulfberht deserves a link to the show. Also Mr. Furrer apparently still possesses the sword he made for that program.

[Tabasco]

There's a "Nova" program on an attempt to re-create the Ulfberht sword, I highly recommend it.

The problem with early carbon steel was the impurities left behind during the smelting process. A smelter design in northern Iran was able to get the ore to a higher temperature which burns off the slag in the steel. This was the steel used to make Ulfberht swords. The steel produced in the replica Persian smelter in the Nova program was pretty close to modern carbon steel in regards to impurities left behind. Almost zero. Forging can eliminate some of the slag, but not all (the sparks you see when someone is pounding on red hot steel is the slag being purged). The slag left behind in the steel creates weaknesses in the final product.

[Tabasco]

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ancient/secrets-viking-sword.html

because any mention of Ulfberht deserves a link to the show. Also Mr. Furrer apparently still possesses the sword he made for that program.

You beat me to it.

[hufnagel]

You beat me to it.

http://icons.iconarchive.com/icons/icons-land/flat-emoticons/256/Ninja-icon.png

[GyroF-16]

Okay- sitting at the hotel bar reading PF and learning about Medieval metallurgy.
As it relates to Viking swords.

Add it to the list of why Pistol Forum rocks.

Please - continue... I'll sip my IPA and listen....

Gyro

[Totem Polar]

The OP delivered with that post; very cool.

[SeriousStudent]

And when he pulled it out of the ground, he was immediately crowned King of Norway.

[Malamute]

Conversation piece related to the ancient found sword stories.

http://www.kultofathena.com/product.asp?item=500864&name=Ulfberht+Sword

[RevolverRob]

There was an Ulfberht sword in the Vikings Exhibit - http://www.vikingsexhibition.com/ - When it was at the Field Museum.

The exhibit is currently at the Natural History Museum of Utah in SLC - https://nhmu.utah.edu/special-exhibits

Awesome exhibit, I visited it six times when it was here.

[That Guy]

Um... I'm pretty sure one does not hunt reindeer over there. It would be kind of like hunting cattle in Arizona.

The idea of a sword just found like that is really neat, but when they begin the article like that I get kind of sceptical about how much truth is in the rest of it.

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[Maple Syrup Actual]

Um... I'm pretty sure one does not hunt reindeer over there. It would be kind of like hunting cattle in Arizona.

The idea of a sword just found like that is really neat, but when they begin the article like that I get kind of sceptical about how much truth is in the rest of it.

Sent from my Infernal Contraption using TapatalkGoogling "norway reindeer hunt" seems to indicate that reindeer hunting is indeed happening on a regular basis.

I would guess that it is a lot more like hunting caribou in Canada than cattle in Arizona.

Just a hunch, of course.

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[That Guy]

Huh. Apparently Norway still has a wild reindeer population in two of their national parks. The last remaining wild reindeer in the world. I did not know that, I thought they were all cattle animals.

Neat. :)

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[Trooper224]

There was very little, if any, blade production in the Nordic countries during the so called "Viking Age". (now more commonly referred to as the early middle ages by scholars) The majority of swords found in the Nordic countries used blades imported from the Rhineland area, which were then mounted in the local fashion. The video featuring Rick Furrer tends to spin me up a bit. Rick's a talented guy, but the video leads you to believe Ulfberht blades were made with some kind of super secret process that was lost to the ages and none of that is really true, at least not by the time that show was filmed. The information presented is good, but there's a lot of needless hype going on as well. The process of making crucible steel was being recreated and researched a full decade beforehand. "Ulfberht" was a smith whose name became a brand like Nike and blades bearing the name were manufactured for a century or more. Many of them are examples of ancient counterfeiting as the name will be misspelled. Neither the smith nor the customer would have usually been able to read, they just knew it as a mark of quality. Some Ulfberht blades are pretty good, some are crap, by the standards of their time.

This recent sword find is interesting. With the extremely cold and dry condition typical of the find sight it's very plausible. On the other hand, the level of corrosion on the weapon overall concerns me. The different parts of a sword will react differently and will corrode at different rates. The hilt fittings, usually made of straight iron, won't perish at the same rate as the higher carbon blade. This is why we often find hilts in relatively good condition with just a fragment of the blade remaining. The even rate of corrosion on the blade is also concerning. The blades fuller is by far the thinnest are of the blades geometry, as is the tip. Consequently, these areas will often be completely corroded away, whereas on this blade there is to be a very even level of corrosion throughout. If I came upon this sword at an auction I wouldn't dismiss it out of hand, but there are some red flags that would cause concern.