The Serpent in the Sword: Pattern-welding in Early Medieval Swords

Abstract

From the time of its first appearance about 4,000 years ago, the sword soon became the pre-eminent weapon of personal defense and has been a preferred vehicle for technological and artistic expression even since its relatively recent decline. Within what at first seems to be merely a simple variation of that basic tool, the inclined plane, metallurgical studies have revealed complex piled structures in iron swords dating from as early as Celtic times (500 BC). Being composed of several rods welded together and running the length of the blade, such piled structures allowed the smith to localize desired properties by empirically joining together irons with differing properties owing to different origins and concentrations of trace elements. Additionally, small rods could be carburized to increase hardness by increasing carbon content. Ideally, steel (which is an alloy of iron with small amounts of carbon) would be chosen to provide hardness at the edge. However, since an increased carbon content concomitantly causes brittleness, softer and more malleable wrought iron or mild steel is better used for the remainder of the blade in order to impart resistance to fracture. Piled construction provides another advantage in that it averages the strengths and weaknesses of the individual components.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 3 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.