One thing not generally known about swords, but cruelly understood by sword owners, is that the darn things are highly prone to injury and premature death.

This is probably another reason for the historical rarity of swords. Aside from being expensive and impractical for the average guy, swords are high maintenance.

One of the trials of being a Viking reenactor is that people come around and ask to look at your sword (or don’t ask, which is extremely irritating [and dangerous for them]), and then they unsheathe it and pick it up with both hands, one around the grip and the other grasping the blade.

The same blade which you have spent hours polishing with oil and steel wool, to get some previous idiot’s fingerprints off it.

There are companies out there who’ll sell you a stainless steel sword. Such swords are a hissing and a byword among real sword lovers, because a proper sword is supposed to be carbon steel. You can’t get a proper edge with stainless steel. And if you want a historical replica, get a replica made of the right stuff, for pete’s sake.

So that’s the first vulnerability of a good sword. It demands constant attention to its finish. There are fine products out there like Renaissance Wax and Museum Replicas’ Rust Blocker spray, and I use both and like them. But those pesky fingerprints, with their salt-laced body oils, still work their way through.

(Blood, by the way, is far worse than fingerprints. Blood is mostly salt, and the first thing you need to do after cutting a guy’s leg off is not to call 911, but to wipe the blood off your blade. Priorities are everything.)

Then there’s the issue of the cutting edge.

You know all those movies (The Vikings with Kirk Douglas comes to mind) where two guys go at each other with broadswords, smashing edge on edge?

That’s a wonderful way to turn an expensive possession (worth, as I mentioned yesterday, the price of a good farm) into a piece of scrap metal. Would you take your best kitchen knives and slam the edge of one against the edge of another? The same thing happens to the edges of broadswords.

That’s why the Vikings used shields for parrying. A nice wooden shield, with either leather edging or no edging at all, does no harm to your opponent’s blade, and his does none to yours.

This is in both your interests, because whoever wins the fight gets to keep both swords.

Moviemakers don’t like shields in fights. They block the camera view and keep the audience from seeing all the actors’ fancy moves.

Hollywood fencing methods are generally based on point-oriented foil or epee fencing, where stabbing is what it’s all about, and the edge is dull and meant to block the opponent’s blade.

Sometimes you do have to parry with your blade, for instance in a holmgang duel, where each participant gets three shields and no more (The Thirteenth Warrior featured a holmgang, which was pretty much the only authentic moment in the movie). If you’ve run out of shields and have to use your sword to parry, you use the flat of the blade. The flat works very nicely, and preserves your edge.

Another problem with swords is plain breakage, or bendage. In the Viking Age in particular, metallurgy was as much art as science. A smith had no scientific way of being sure what was going to come out of his forge. There’s a Norse proverb that says, “Praise no sword until it’s tried.” Yesterday I mentioned pattern-welded blades, forged from twisted rods of iron and steel. That was great method in theory, but in practice it often meant nasty surprises. There’s a story in the Icelandic sagas about a guy who comes home from a visit to Norway with a fancy new sword with a gold-inlaid hilt. He’s the envy of the neighborhood, but when he gets into a fight the thing keeps bending over, and he has to step on the blade to straighten it.

In the sagas, as C. S. Lewis noted in his inaugural lecture at Cambridge, it’s assumed that an old sword is better than a new sword.

A lesson to us all.

Especially to the ladies.