Now that I’m an author with a publisher again, and have achieved the heights of fortune and public adulation, what shall I do next?
I shall talk about swords. That’s a subject everyone’s interested in.
Every guy, anyway.
I suppose there are guys out there who don’t like swords. But I’ve never talked to one.
Feminists and psychologists—especially feminist psychologists—scoff at this. They make snide remarks about symbolism and compensation. They speak slightingly of swordfighting as a symbolic competition in virility.
You know what? Who cares? The only reason they sneer is because they can’t do it themselves.
I shall tell you all I know about swords. It will probably take a few posts to do that, and I’m not even an expert.
“Sverd I Fjell,” a monument to the Battle of Hafrsfjord in Stavanger, Norway.
Aside from Freudian piffle about symbolism, the sword has always had a very clear significance in almost every human society.
The sword is a sign of social prestige.
Swords have always been made of the best metal available in any society. First copper, then bronze, then iron, and finally steel (and long ago, in a galaxy far, far away, light). At each stage, up until very recent times, the favored metal has been a very expensive commodity. In the Viking Age, for instance, steel was worth about what we pay for silver today. Most swords, in fact, during the early centuries of that period, were made from a forged mixture of iron and steel, which made the object both cheaper and springier than pure steel would have been. Then a pure steel edge was welded on.
Even so, the expensive steel made the sword a very costly object. Worth about what a car is worth to us.
Which is why the average Viking didn’t own one.
The average Viking went to war with the tools he used on the farm or hunted with—his axe(s), his spear, his bow and arrows. He couldn’t afford to invest a lot of steel in an object like a sword, which he could only use in war. Even then, war wasn’t something most guys did every day, or even every year.
A sword, unlike the axe, the spear and the bow and arrows, has no other use than to kill a man.
It was a specialized tool, generally owned only by specialists. And by chieftains, who had to be specialists as part of their jobs.
Thus the sword has always had a mystique of nobility.
So owning a couple sword makes me… almost up to average.
I was just reading “The Council of Elrond” in Tolkien’s Fellowship of the Ring, one of the places in Tolkien’s writings that refers to particular weapons such as swords and spears as making a huge difference in battles involving great numbers of fighters. A little voice may query this idea – – how much difference can one such weapon in the hand of one fighter when so many are fighting? But I suppose that to some extent Tolkien is reflecting the mystique to which you refer.
I would guess that a sword indicates a professional warrior. An axe-bearer might or might not be a professional, but a sword-bearer is almost certainly one.
The guys I fight with are not at all sure that a sword in itself is more deadly than, say, an axe. Very likely less. But there’s a big difference between the skills of a farmer and a chieftain’s bodyguard.