On the named swords, especially in the Icelandic sagas

A. G. DRACHMA"*

That a sword was given a name was not unusual during the earlier Middle Ages; king Arthur's Excalibur and Roland's Durendal are well known examples.

The student of the Icelandic sagas will soon find that swords with names crop up again and again to play a part in the sagas, nor is the custom of giving a name confined to swords; also spears and axes had names, and Harold Hardrada's coat of mail, Emmaz, was so renowned, that the king hardly figures in any saga without a reference to this exquisite garment, which reached his ankles, and on which no weapon could bite.

Hjalmar Falk, in a paper Nordische Waffenkunde', gives us 150 names of swords, not all of them from the sagas; I have found 131 names of weapons, of which 92 swords, 7 cutlasses (sax), 17 axes, 7 spears, 4 helmets, 1 shield and 3 coats of mail.

When we bear in mind that no man capable of bearing arms would leave his house without a weapon, it is clear that those named weapons were only a very small part of the total of weapons in use at the time. On the other hand, we very seldom hear of any remarkable feat of arms without learning the name of the weapon used. These named weapons had a great reputation.

From the point of view of the owner, they were heirlooms, highly priced possessions, which should be kept in the family. And they were much feared by those who had to fight against them.

Of the 12 berserks, Angantyr and his brothers, we are told that three had the swords Tyrfing, Hrotte and Misteltein, and the others also had good Single Combat Swords (h13lmsver6ir)'~.

Hdlmganga means Single Combat, which was part of the system of

* Svends All6 47, Lyngby, Denmark.

Centaurcis 1968: vol. 13, no. 1: pp. 29-36

30 A . G. Drachmann

laws brought to Iceland by the refugees from Norway who colonized the island. Almost any sort of legal strife could be settled if one of the parties challenged the other to Single Combat. The man challenged had the choice of yielding up his claim or risking his life. But if one of the parties owned a named sword, it was reckoned impossible to meet him without another weapon of similar quality. When Kormhk had chal- lenged Berse, who was the owner of the sword Hviting, he had to bor- row Skovnung from Midfjords-Skegge for the combat16. Skovnung, which Midfjords-Skegge took from the grave of Hrolf Krake”, was the best sword that ever came to I~eland’~; in Thord Hrede’s saga we read that whenever Midfjords-Skegge presented himself with Skovnung in his hand, it was generally understood that his will was respected. When Gisli Thorkelsson had to fight the Viking Bjorn the Dark, he bor- rowed the sword Greyside from the thrall Kol, “for he who wielded that sword would always have victory”’. He killed his adversary, but when he fought Kol for the possession of the sword, they were both killed, and the sword broke. From the pieces was made a spear, Grey- side, which plays a part in the sagag, and is heard of also in the Stur- lunga saga”.

Gisli Slirsson fought Holmgangs-Skegge on an islet, Saxas. “Skegge had the sword called War-Flame (Gunnlogi) and dealt Gisli

“a blow with it, so that it rang out loudly. He quoth:

“War-Flame rang out “Glad was Saxa.

“But Gisli dealt him a blow with a chopping-spear which took “off the tip of the shield and the foot of Skegge. Then he quoth:

“Corpse-Spear rushed out; “I cut Skegge.

“Skegge paid a ransome and afterwards used a wooden leg.” This episode, where a nameless chopping-spear conquers a named

sword, is so unusual, that some scholars contend that Gunnlogi is just a poetical circumlocution for a sword, and that the teller of the saga has misunderstood it, and regarded it as the proper name of the sword.

These examples should be enough to show in what high esteem these named weapons were held.

There seems to be no reason to doubt that such weapons really have

On the named swords, especially in the Icelaridic saj i~~.v 31

existed. In the historical sagas we hear of Harald Hardrada's mail-coat EmmaZ lo 20, Hakon Adelsteensfostri's sword Kvarnbitr" and Mag- nus the Good's axe Hell2, and many other named weapons, and they seem as historical as their owners. In the Zygissiigur, sagas that are pure fiction, some named swords are found with phantastic properties which we refuse to believe in; but in the fslendinga sogur, the sagas about single families, the named swords play a credible part in the tale; they cannot be left out, and there is no reason not to accept them as realities.

The problem now is if it is possible to find an acceptable explanation of the high repute of these weapons. To do this we can study what is told about the named weapons, disregarding the properties which we refuse to believe in, such as that they will always bring victory, will never rust, will never be broken, that they cannot be sheathed before they have killed a man, or at least have tasted blood, that they never fail to hit the target, that they shine in darkness. All this is either wishful thinking or bogies, fit for fairy-tales.

On the other hand, the description of fairy-tale swords may contain traits taken from real life. We cannot disregard descriptions that might be true of a real sword, since the teller of the fairy-tale naturally would provide his wonderful sword with all the traits belonging to the real swords of great repute.

What then do we learn? The named swords could be distinguished at sight from ordinary

swords. Ingemund wanted to buy the sword of his guest, a Norwegian merchant, because he saw that it was a good weapon25. He obtained it and called it "Family-Sword (Ettetangi).

The named swords were sharper and harder than the ordinary swords; we hear of bad swords that could not bite into bone.

The named swords were elastic, which the ordinary swords were not. When Kjartan fought with a sword other than his good sword, Konungs- nautr, it bent and had to be straitened with the foot'*. (The spear Grey- side also bent24; but it had been remade in Icelandg.)

The named swords gave out a special note when they were used. All these properties were inherent in the material from which 'they

were made, since it paid to reforge a broken sword. Moreover, as Hjalmar Falk has pointed out, no named sword is

known to have been made in Iceland4; they were all of them said to have come from abroad.

32 A . G. Drachmann

All this points clearly to a single conclusion: the named weapons were made of hardened and tempered steel, while the ordinary swords were made of wrought iron.

This hypothesis is confirmed by the sagas. Nj6l's son, Skarphedin, had an axe, Rimmegfgi; before he died in the burning house, he buried the axe by driving it into a balk, thus saving it from being destroyed by the fire". Nj5l's son in law, Kki , escaped from the burning house with his sword Fjorsvafnir; part of it had turned blue from the heat*'. When he was asked if it had not been spoilt, he answered 'that he would harden it in the blood of the incendiaries. This is more lyrics than technics, but it shows that there was a danger of the sword having been spoilt by the heat. But this applies only to hardened and tempered steel, not to wrought iron.

Skallagrim received a big, finely decorated axe from Erik Blood- Axe'. He looked at it, said nothing, and hung it up above his seat in the hall. In autumn, when he was killing some of his cattle, he cut through the necks of two oxen at one stroke with the axe, using a stone for a chopping-block. Both heads came off, but so did also the edge of the axe when it hit the stone. So he sent back the axe with an offensive message in verse, to the effect that there was evil deceit in the axe, which should never have reached Iceland. The steel edge had been badly welded on the blade, and Skallagrim, who was a good smith himself, had suspected it.

As a counterpart, we read in Fostbrodra saga6: "Bjarne made a broad axe for Thormod, and Thormod *told him how it should be: it was hammered out from above all the way to the edge; there was no steel edge welded on; it was an axe that bit." The real point of the construction is that the edge would not break off. This axe was made in Greenland, and it had no name; so Hjalmar Falk's remark that no named weapon is known to have been made in Iceland holds good, even if by a rather narrow margin.

The museums contain many weapons from the Viking time, but none of them are known to have been named. A metallurgical examination of swords found in Vimose in FunenI4 has shown that some of them were made of soft iron, some of wrought iron, some of steel, but not harden- ed, and some of hardened and tempered steel. In several swords steel edges were welded on to softer material. These swords date from about 600 A. D., several hundred years before the time of the sagas; but no

On the named swords, especially in the Icelandic sagas 33

great progress was made in the working of iron and steel from about 900 B. C. to 1850 A. D., so we can take the Vimose swords as typical for the whole of the Middle Ages in Northern Europe.

Another proof is to be found in the imitations of Damascene swords made in Northern E ~ r o p e ’ ~ . They consist of thin strips of steel of different hardness welded together and twisted and hammered till the polished surface shows a characteristic pattern. Only the middle of the blade is treated in this way; the edges are made of hardened steel.

The hardening of steel was known already in Homer’s time; see the Odyssey 9:391 sqq., where Odysseus bums out the eye of the Cyclope:

“As when a smith dips a big axe or adze “into cold water, where it yells out loudly, “to treat it, for that is the strength of iron . . .”

But if the process of hardening and tempering steel was known already in 900 B. C., why did not all men in 900 A. D. have swords of steel, in stead of being content with iron swords which were of a much poorer quality? To understand this we must know something of the metallurgy of steel and the history of technology.

Copper, which came into use before iron, is too soft for cutting tools; if tin is added, generally about 10 %, we get bronze, which can be made hard by hammering. It can also be melted and cast.

Iron, on‘the other hand, has so high a melting point, that it is necessary to build an oven, put in iron ore and charcoal in alternate layers, and blow on the fire with bellows; then the slag will run out and the iron be found as a spongy mass. If this mass, the bloom, is heated and hammered, some more impurities will be driven out.

Iron cannot be alloyed with other metals; but with carbon it forms iron carbide, which alloys itself with the pure iron and makes it harder. Pure iron is too soft to be used at all; with a content of 0.2-1.7 % of carbon it becomes useful. But if more carbon is added, it turns into casting iron which Antiquity did not use at all.

With a carbon content of 0.2-0.4 % we have wrought iron, which can be hammered to shape at red heat, and after cooling becomes harder than bronze. This was a great step forward. What we now call “iron” in tools, ustensils, nails and fittings and in many other things is wrought iron, if it is not cast iron.

If the carbon content rises above 0.4 96 and does not go beyond

3 CENTAURUS, VOL. xm

34 A . G . Drachmann

1.7 %, we have steel. It can be hammered to shape at red heat, like wrought iron, and if it is cooled slowly, it becomes harder than wrought iron. But it has another, very queer property. If it is made red hot and cooled suddenly, e.g. by being dipped into cold water, it becomes very much harder, but also very brittle. It is now said to be glass-hard, for it can cut glass, but it will also break as glass, if you hit it, or hit something with it. In this state it is not of any use, but if it is tempered by being heated to somewhere between 200" and 400" C, it will lose more and more of its hardness, but gain more and more in toughness, and some- where in this scale will be found the combination of hardness and strength that will be most useful for a given purpose.

In Antiquity it was not possible to measure temperatures, but iron has another queer property: if a piece of polished iron is heated, it changes colour, and the colours come in a fixed sequence: pale yellow, yellow, brown, violet, dark blue, cornflower blue, light blue, blue-grey, grey, where each colour indicates a certain degree of heat. Yellow indi- cates 225"-230", and cornflower blue 300" C.

Hjalmar Falk remarks3 about some green swords that are mentioned here and there in the sagas, that green is the tempering colour for 300" C , and that the colour shows that the green sword is hardened and tempered. But this is not correct. The tempering colour for 300" C is cornflower blue, which cannot be mistaken for grass green; moreover, the tempering colours are due to interference, and green cannot arise in this way; green, as will be noticed, is missing from the list. The explana- tion must be that the swords have been coloured on purpose, possibly by the addition af copper dust.

No colour can prove that the sword has been hardened, for soft iron will show the same colours as steel.

A file to bite in iron and steel must be very hard, but does not have to stand up to blows; a cold chisel, which has to be hammered into iron and steel, must be able to bear the hammer-blows, but then it has to be a little less hard than the file. A sword, which has to be elastic and un- breakable, cannot be as hard as the chisel, but it will be hard enough to cut through a helmet or a mail-coat that would turn aside a sword of wrought iron.

All this was known in Antiquity through practical experience, but it was not till .the middle of last century that chemical analysis and exami- nation by microscopy revealed the fact that the properties depended on

On the named swords, especially in the Icelandic sagas 35

the pro mille contents of carbon. Before this time it was necessary, as in Antiquity, to break a sample of the iron from the smelting oven and study the break, which will give a skilled smith quite a good idea about the properties of the material.

What was also not known, and could not be known, was that a very small addition of sulphur or phosphorus and other impurities that might occur in the iron ore are very harmful to the steel. Where the ore was free from these impurities, as in the Spanish mines, an excellent steel was produced. Philon of Byzantium mentions Spanish swords that could be bent into a half circle and would spring back without showing signs of having been bent23.

Where the ore was poorer, the steel might be bettered through long annealing and hammering, but without the guidance of the chemical analysis the work was done blindly, and the result was uncertain.

A good smith at the time of the sagas knew the difference between iron and steel, as we see by the analysis of the Vimose swords, but he could not know for sure what he was getting when he bought his material; he had to take what was available. But if he did get hold of a piece of fine steel, he knew to value it.

A sword made in one piece of good steel, hardened and properly tempered, was superior to all swords made of wrought iron. I t was a treasure to be cherished by the family; it won great renown, and well deserved having a name of its own.

This paper is a summary of a more detailed work in Danish: De navngivne Svaerd i Saga, Sagn og Folkevise. Studier fra Sprog- og Old- tidsforskning. Nr. 264. Bd. 77, Kgbenhavn 1967.

My best thanks are due to the Carlsberg Foundation for a grant that made it possible for me to undertake this investigation.

NOTES AND REFERENCES 1. Egils saga Skalla-Grimssonar 38. 2. Fagrskinna 58. 3. Fa&, Hjalmar: Altnordische Waffenkunde. Skrifter utgit av Videnskapsselskapet i

Kristiania 1914. 11. Historisk-filosofisk Klasse 6. 1915, p. 4. 4. The same p. 41.

39

36 A . G. Drachmann

5. The same p. 47. 6. FostbrgBra saga 23. 7. Gisla saga Sdrssonar 1. 8. The same 2. 9. The same 11.

10. Heimskringla. 191 1. Harald Hardrada 9 1. 11. The same: Harald the Fairhaired 41. 12. The same: Magnus the Good 28. 13. HervarBar saga ok Heidreks Kondngs 3. 14. Hgeg, E r i k Mikroskopiske Undersagelser af Virnosesvaxd. Aarbgger f. Nord.

Oldkyndighed 1952: 218-223. 15. Saga af Hr6lfi kondngi kraka ok koppum hans 45. 16. KormLks saga 9. 17. Landnirnabbk 3:221. 18. LaxdAa saga 49. 19. LiestGl, Aslak Blodrefill og mil. Viking 1951: 15: 71-98. 20. Morkinskinna 94, 118. 21. Nj& saga 130. 22. The same 132. 23. Philons Belopoiika. Abhandlungen d. preuss. Akad. d. Wiss. Jahrg. 1918. Phil.-

hist. Klasse Nr. 16. 1919, ch. 46. 24. Sturlunga saga 138 (143). 25. Vatnsdala saga 17.