Kalis with unusual Lamination

[kai]

Hello Charles,

I agree with you completely that the sword should not be darkened further. The way you have it now is more likely to be the way it was seen my Moros in its day. Though Battara has shown us some nice examples of heavily darkened Moro blades, I believe those are generally anomalies to lighter etching, more typically done by citric acids. I think your's is truer to form as is.

Setting aside taste and personal preferences, I believe this needs to be discussed/researched much more before we can reach any conclusions about long-gone traditions.

"Adeg" loosely translates into "hairs standing", or "hair standing on end" as allusion to the many straight lines found in the lamination pattern.

The main point being that the lamination kinda "stands up" from the plane of the blade (i.e. usually more or less vertical) which is true for twistcore and this kind of linear pattern.

As opposed to the mlumah construction where the layers of lamination are arranged more or less parallel to the plane of the blade (local "irregularities" notwithstanding). In also very rare cases (regarding Moro/Malay kris), it can be safely assumed this was intentionally done to create a specific/ornate/complex pattern while in the majority of cases the pamor seems more like "random" mottling. Still, it often can be seen that the panday was working with a obvious goal in his mind and in another good part of the blades, the pattern was used to obtain even more striking visual effects (usually a kind of contour effect like on topographical maps) which include variants with another kind of linear pattern.

I am not sure I agree with the assertion that the laminated blades are rarer than the twistcore examples...

I referred only to linear adeg vs twistcore adeg. Both are rare and there may be a sampling bias towards twistcore; still, I believe the difference in numbers is quite striking!

Regards,
Kai