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Post by caferacer on Feb 24, 2011 21:30:56 GMT
I would like any opinions on this, what type of wood are original examples made of? historical accurate or historically plausible designs?, as they appear to be made primarily of wood I cant imagine many if any original examples surviving, leaving only the blade and a few carvings of soldiers to show what the hilt would have looked like, I have also read that many blade's found are hard if not impossible to tell apart from migration period blades, I can also assume with iron being scarce some spatha blades were re hilted in the migration period as such, is this known to have occurred? are there any surviving examples of this? I have a nice Albion spatha blade and I am unsure what to do with it so I am looking for ideas. thanks
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Post by Elheru Aran on Feb 24, 2011 22:25:00 GMT
Far as I understand it...
Spathae became quite common towards the end of the Roman Empire as it replaced the gladius. Wouldn't be surprised if many were re-hilted as Migration Period types, but it's not really possible to know for sure. If you want more historical information on this, I'd get on MyArmoury.
Type of wood probably doesn't matter too much; I would just use a good hardwood, maple for example. As long as it looks good I doubt anybody is going to care.
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Post by caferacer on Feb 24, 2011 22:58:41 GMT
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Greg
Senior Forumite
Posts: 1,800
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Post by Greg on Feb 25, 2011 4:46:38 GMT
For some reason I thought that a good number of Roman swords were gripped in bone. Perhaps these were the only examples that survived, which is why I keep coming across them.
But Elheru has a point. I'd say historically, there were more wooden cored hilts then there were bone. It seems that I saw a recent article on My Armory where someone used a cow bone to redo a grip.
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Post by Elheru Aran on Feb 25, 2011 14:30:42 GMT
Bone was a fairly common Roman grip, I agree. Wood is more easily obtainable and definitely easier to work with; not that bone is hard but it takes a little longer because you have to file it, you can't just carve away at it because you can split it that way.
Both materials are perishable given enough time, so it's no wonder we don't really know how most spathae were hilted. As a very general rule of thumb though, we can assume that: during the Republic and early to middle Empire, they probably used bone grips like the gladii. Towards the late Empire, wood hilts became more common because the western Empire was running down and out of money; good bone is a little more expensive than wood. Honestly, overall it doesn't matter too much though, you probably would be as likely to see a wood hilt as bone historically. Field repairs to a broken grip, if nothing else.
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