Hi Battara,
I think you're mostly right, although Gardiner was in Malaysia as a British colonial bureaucrat, not Indonesia, as Indonesia was a dutch colony, and Gardiner was British. Although I'm not Wiccan, I'm pretty sure this isn't a pagan blade. Something about all those crosses on the guard makes me think otherwise.
Hi Gonzalo,
I more-or-less agree with you, although I don't think there's anything overtly unchristian about this particular sword.
My critique was of this weapon in particular, not of wavy edges in general. To my eye, this sword has a bunch of problems as a weapon, and most of them stem from the width of the undulations. The problem with the depth of the waves is that they go all the way to the centerline (the line between hilt and tip), and that will make the blade try to behave like a spring in two dimensions when it stabs anything: it will bend across the flat (as all blades do), and it will try to collapse like a spring, because of those undulations. Whether the blade could survive such treatment is hard to tell.
While I'm not an expert martial artist, I believe that truly functional undulations are much shallower.
As for parrying? it's long and slow. If I was going to parry with it, I'd want another blade in my off hand to fight with, and in that case, this complex, expensive blade would be little better than a piece of firewood.
Cutting? The blade is sharp, so it could cut. However, it wouldn't take off someone's head, for instance, although it might cut a throat. It's just not a great design.
There's one other problem with those undulations: how do you sheathe this blade? The sheath would have to be 3-5" inches wide, and you'd have to spend a lot of time keeping the blade clean of rust, as the sheath couldn't possibly be made water-tight.
F