Thank you for making the images clearer and larger. I'm sure im wrong, but I saw somewhere that the characters that look like 'HE' may bear some similarity to the Japanese kanji characters for 'made by'. This would then indicate the following character(s) would be the smith's name.
Again, I'm probably wrong, and I appreciate the comment that these may be Vietnamese characters.
As for origin, they "feel" Asian to me, but that is hardly specific either in being an exact locale (i think Asia is kind of a large continent-lol), or being based on any objective measure.
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