Mysterious Medieval Sword

[David R]

Originally Posted by Philip

thanks for posting this article, about an exceptional sword.

Interesting that Ms Palermo gives no credit to the late Ewart Oakeshott, who covered the subject of esoteric religious inscriptions quite thoroughly in his 1960 book, The Archaeology of Weapons: Arms and Armour from Prehistory to the Age of Chivalry, p 215-19.

Happens a lot. Time passes, people forget and someone else claims the laurels.

[Jim McDougall]

Originally Posted by David R

Happens a lot. Time passes, people forget and someone else claims the laurels.

This is indeed an often occurrence in all fields of study as material and findings become firmly emplaced in the literature, and many do not reference the cited sources. Most serious students in particular fields are well aware of those who pioneered the key material
The use of mysterious inscriptions on sword blades such as those noted in this article and in numbers of other cases in medieval times were typically related to religious invocations and phrases. The fact that these seem often to be jumbled or indecipherable words may be that the combinations were not words at all, but acrostic representations of words in invocations or phrases.

The practice of using acrostics or repeated letter combinations became popular in Italy in later centuries, and in varying degree was used in many sword blade centers. Often certain 'magical' or 'talismanic; symbols or glyphs were interlaced among these letter groupings.