Javanese machete??

[fearn]

Originally Posted by kronckew

i came across a reference to someone who actually made a gold sickle - 9 caret - and used it to cut mistletoe, they did say it worked, for a couple of cuts, before it deformed and needed resharpening & was in general not up to the job.

i do remember gathering mistletoe from my BIL guerney's farm in no. alabama a number of years ago. rather than a golden sickle, he used a browning 12ga. to shoot the infested branch off. we could easily peel it off the oak branch. the berries are rather gooey & sticky i recall.

one of the more constant threads in mythological and fantastic historical fiction is that iron poisons magic, and/or can weaken or kill magical creature like the fair folke (fairies) and elves. the more educated modern wiccans prefer bronze in their ceremonial items to avoid disturbing the magic.

iron IS strange and magical stuff.

Cool. A few years ago, a big "bush" of mistletoe came down near my house, and for the heck of it, I made a small knife with a mistletoe hilt. Mistletoe wood (this is North American mistletoe, not the European white mistletoe) is like brittle plastic. It's fairly easy to cut, but it tends to shatter, especially if one drills it. The knife is definitely an art piece, not a tool.

As for the iron myth, we do have to be careful. There were faery smiths after all (Wayland, etc.), and even within the Irish faery lore, one comes across stories where the faeries use iron--enchanting a plow into a horse, for instance (Meeting the Other Crowd, by Lenihan and Green). And there are certainly magical steel swords. Excalibur comes to mind. Conversely, I don't know of any stories of named bronze swords, even though bronze was always comparatively rarer than iron was.

Outside Europe, there are many iron-using fairies.

Best,

F

[kronckew]

the excalibur legend is so old, i suspect that it was actually based on a bronze sword, cast in a stone mold, hence the pulling of the sword from the stone. the legends just got converted to steel to fit the local technology as the ages pass. similarly the arthurian knights are generally shown in full plate armour in the medieval period tales, which was not an option at the post roman period arthur was supposed to inhabit....

throwing a sword into a lake, also part of the excalibur mythos, was a very bronze age thing to do. you were not judged on how many posessions you had, but on how many you gave away. the ultimate was to take a bronze sword, a very expensive and important named sword even better, and throw it in a lake or river as an offering to the gods. sometimes the sword would be 'killed', that is bent or broken, to ensure it could never be used again.

anyhow more on topic, the kudi/kujang, which is most definitely steel, is also a magical tool, more ceremonial these days.

[Henk]

Tunggulametung,

Thank you for these pictures. Now it is clear for me what i have.

It has become a very interesting thread. Thanks to all for their input.