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Post by Gunnar Wolfgard on Jan 19, 2015 15:05:59 GMT
. Ulfberht It was a sword that dominated the battlefield across different regions in Europe, it was a sword a thousand years ahead of its time, built by mysterious craftsmen. Even though it was used by many nations it is a sword that was attributed to the Vikings and used from about 800 to 1100 AD, it was a masterpiece built from pure steel and that wasn’t seen again in Europe for at least a thousand years. It was the ultimate sword of its time and it was used by only a few select warriors. Why these swords have the inscription of Ulfberht is still a mystery as it does not appear in written texts from that time, it could have been the name of the place it was produced, or it could have been added to to sword to provide proof of authenticity. So far, a dozen of forty-four examined Ulfberht swords are proven to be made entirely of crucible steel, though some of the forgeries are of pretty good quality. The fact that Ulfberht swords appear for over two hundred years, proves that they were not produced by a single craftsmen. Dating showed that the swords were produced from 850 – 1100 AD which makes researchers believe that Ulfberht was in fact one of the most ancient trademarks, a sign of quality. In Ancient Times Iron Smith’s goal was steel that could strike a hard object and neither bend nor shatter, steel that could hold a sharp edge. Thousands of Ulfberht swords were found across Europe, most of them found in rivers or or excavated from Viking burials across Europe and Scandinavia but only around 170 Swords are proven to be the real Ulfberht swords. These ancient masterpieces of weaponry have been buried for centuries and are only corroded skeletons of what they where once. Smelted Iron was normally used to forge weapons and armor for thousands of years, Iron on its own it too soft to yield a strong weapon that why sword-makers would add carbon from coal or charcoal which hardens the metal and turns it into steal. Typical Viking age swords had low carbon in their characteristics and had a large amount of impurities or slag, a non metallic part of the ore which was not separated and which weakens the metal. Blacksmiths across Europe were not able to create Slag-free-steel because their fires were simply not hot enough to full liquefy the iron. Today we achieve that by heating the metal to over three thousand degrees which accurately removes slag and allows more carbon to be added. In the Viking age it was very hard to add coal to the iron so it was done incidentally through fire, and the only way to remove the slag from the metal was to try and hammer out impurities. Researchers believed that the thousands of swords found across the European continent were made from this inferior steel until Dr. Alan Williams, Consultant Archaeometallurgist at the Wallace Collection, analyzed the Ulfberht sword. Research showed incredible similarities between the steel of the Ulfberht and modern day objects made from steel with a carbon content of up to three times more that the average medieval steel. This places the Ulfberht sword at least a thousand years ahead of its time. The metal used in the Ulfberht swords is today known as crucible steel; a term that applies to steel made by two different methods in the modern era. It is made by melting iron and other materials in a crucible and pouring the molten metal into a mould. Crucible steel was produced in South and Central Asia during the medieval era. . At that time, when the Ulfberht sword were produced, no one in Europe knew how to melt Iron at extreme temperatures for centuries, in fact Crucible steel wasn’t around in Europe until the Industrial revolution in the 18th century, so how did the Vikings manage to get a hold of this advanced technology? The vikings were advanced in many ways, not only were they fearless warriors, they were highly skilled traders and navigators known to have reached the Americas and Asia Another example that Vikings were not only great warriors but equally skilled sword smiths, ship builders, navigators, craftsmen, traders and explorers.
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Post by JGonzalez on Jan 19, 2015 15:17:53 GMT
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Post by Gunnar Wolfgard on Jan 19, 2015 15:38:23 GMT
A great video, watched it several times. Remember the days when YouTube was just a place where idiots could show the world what idiots they are but they now have some great videos on it. I use it a lot.
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Post by Sir Thorfinn on Jan 19, 2015 16:48:53 GMT
Good stuff...
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Post by JGonzalez on Jan 20, 2015 15:39:22 GMT
While we're at it.
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Post by sonofarwyn on Jan 20, 2015 16:55:19 GMT
As a historian, the ironic part about history is that our so called "primitive" forebears have consistently proven that they were much more sophisticated then we gave them credit for. Crucible steel was supposedly a 18th Century European invention. Until they found these swords. And then realized that someone in India had figured this out seven hundred years before Europe did. Same thing with the use of copper in the Neolitic period. The discovery of Atzi in the Alps literally punched reset on the use of metal by humanity. Cool stuff.
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Post by Gunnar Wolfgard on Jan 20, 2015 17:15:05 GMT
I find it interesting that most documentaries about the Vikings are made by the British and they also have a large number of Viking reenactment groups there. When you consider the fact that they were the prime target for Viking raids, that would be like Native Americans celebrating the arrival of the white man to North America. Guess it just shows how fascinating the Vikings were.
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Post by Seth C on Jan 20, 2015 22:01:47 GMT
If you want to read a really good historical fiction series of vikings in England check out The Saxon Stories by Bernard Cornwell (starts with "The Last Kingdom"). He writes about 9th century Britain and the struggle between the Saxon Kingdoms and the Danes, Norse, and Swedes who very nearly conquered all of England.
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TomK
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Post by TomK on Jan 21, 2015 2:16:29 GMT
Cornwell wrote a lot of good stuff. I have read Agincourt and the Archer's Tale and a few others and all have been good. He wrote the Richard Sharpe series that got made into a fantastic series of movies staring Sean Bean. It's a great set of movies but kinda strange because Sean Bean doesn't die once
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Post by Seth C on Jan 21, 2015 16:07:09 GMT
I enjoyed Agincourt and the Archer's Tale too. (1356 is a great sequel to the Archer's Tale and revolves around the battle of Poitiers). I have mainly read his medieval period books, but I haven't read the Sharpe series. I have a budding interest in the Napoleonic era so I'll check out the books along with the movies. Thanks for the suggestion. It will be a unique experience to see Sean Bean survive a movie.
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Post by birdman on Jan 24, 2015 19:50:33 GMT
I find it interesting that most documentaries about the Vikings are made by the British and they also have a large number of Viking reenactment groups there. When you consider the fact that they were the prime target for Viking raids, that would be like Native Americans celebrating the arrival of the white man to North America. Guess it just shows how fascinating the Vikings were. Maybe a 1,000 year delayed case of "Stockholm syndrome"...?
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Post by Suho on Feb 5, 2015 16:53:43 GMT
One detail strikes me as a bit odd; how do they determine that only 170 of the swords (out of thousands) are "real" ULFBERHT swords while the rest are forgeries? I am curious about what the basis for this determination is. Simply the steel content? I would venture that not every sword made under that name was made of crucible steel.
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Luka
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Post by Luka on Feb 5, 2015 17:12:07 GMT
Some info in this thread: sbg-sword-forum.forums.net/thread/43471/japanese-metalurgical-questionMaybe I'm a bit subjective about this issue, but so are the people of media who spread this info around. I just see it as a continuation of a well known theory that anything medieval european is crap and medieval asian is super cool and best ever, so viking swords must have been crap unless they are made of misterious Asian super steel.
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Post by sonofarwyn on Feb 5, 2015 17:31:33 GMT
Some info in this thread: sbg-sword-forum.forums.net/thread/43471/japanese-metalurgical-questionMaybe I'm a bit subjective about this issue, but so are the people of media who spread this info around. I just see it as a continuation of a well known theory that anything medieval european is crap and medieval asian is super cool and best ever, so viking swords must have been crap unless they are made of misterious Asian super steel. No, your not been too subjective. There has been a fairly long established academic trend in both history and literature that is strongly anti-western. Its pretty politically driven, so I wont touch on that, but the summation is that since academic circles require a "publish or perish" mentality, its very easy to take a deconstructionist view of someones previous works on the subject and attempt to discredit their premise and findings. Of course, the ironic part is that the "new" history folks are often just as wrong. The whole theory on the Maya blew up in their faces over the last 20 years, for example. The flip side is that newer, more scientifically driven analysis of previous findings is playing hell with a lot of academic assumptions of history. Otzi the Iceman, for example, completely turned the entire timeline of the late neolithic on is collective ear. Unfortunately, history, like news reporting, is subject to a great deal of "interpretation" right now.
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Post by Gunnar Wolfgard on Feb 5, 2015 19:04:38 GMT
As always man is never as smart as he thinks he is. We keep proving that over and over again. It also cracks me up how we think that without modern technology everything back then was crude. I would like to know how the Romans built bridges that are still being used today and survived two world wars and now we can't build anything that can last more then fifty years.
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Post by Timo Nieminen on Feb 5, 2015 21:08:36 GMT
One detail strikes me as a bit odd; how do they determine that only 170 of the swords (out of thousands) are "real" ULFBERHT swords while the rest are forgeries? I am curious about what the basis for this determination is. Simply the steel content? I would venture that not every sword made under that name was made of crucible steel. Because they say "Ulfbehrt". It isn't that 170 out of thousands are "real" Ulfberht swords while the rest are forgeries, it that 170 out of thousands are Ulfberht swords, while the rest aren't Ulfberht swords. The "thousands" is just the total number of "Viking" swords (including non-Viking finds of them). That 170 Ulfberht swords includes all the different spellings, the probably-crucible-steel ones, the pattern-welded ones, all of them. About 50 of the 170 are the "real" Ulfberhts (+VLFBERH+T), and are mostly crucible steel. Why "real"? It isn't just the steel, but some of the others are mis-spelled (missing letters, upside-down letters, etc.). One of the journalistic quotes notes that the "fakes" might have shattered like glass: "It must have been an appalling moment when a Viking realised he had paid two cows for a fake designer sword; a clash of blade on blade in battle would have led to his sword, still sharp enough to slice through bone, shattering like glass." The funny thing is that it's the crucible steel ones that would have broken like glass, not the "fakes". Some of the non-crucible-steel ones have the inscription spelled consistently, and since we don't know what "ulfberht" really means, we don't know which spelling is correct, or even if there is a "correct" spelling.
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Post by Suho on Feb 5, 2015 21:24:47 GMT
As always man is never as smart as he thinks he is. We keep proving that over and over again. It also cracks me up how we think that without modern technology everything back then was crude. I would like to know how the Romans built bridges that are still being used today and survived two world wars and now we can't build anything that can last more then fifty years. I agree. I would bet that a lot of the bias about the technology is owed at least in part to the fact that much of Europe was illiterate during the Dark Ages. The point to be had is that illiterate is not the same thing as unintelligent.
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Luka
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Post by Luka on Feb 5, 2015 23:06:01 GMT
One detail strikes me as a bit odd; how do they determine that only 170 of the swords (out of thousands) are "real" ULFBERHT swords while the rest are forgeries? I am curious about what the basis for this determination is. Simply the steel content? I would venture that not every sword made under that name was made of crucible steel. Because they say "Ulfbehrt". It isn't that 170 out of thousands are "real" Ulfberht swords while the rest are forgeries, it that 170 out of thousands are Ulfberht swords, while the rest aren't Ulfberht swords. The "thousands" is just the total number of "Viking" swords (including non-Viking finds of them). That 170 Ulfberht swords includes all the different spellings, the probably-crucible-steel ones, the pattern-welded ones, all of them. About 50 of the 170 are the "real" Ulfberhts (+VLFBERH+T), and are mostly crucible steel. Why "real"? It isn't just the steel, but some of the others are mis-spelled (missing letters, upside-down letters, etc.). One of the journalistic quotes notes that the "fakes" might have shattered like glass: "It must have been an appalling moment when a Viking realised he had paid two cows for a fake designer sword; a clash of blade on blade in battle would have led to his sword, still sharp enough to slice through bone, shattering like glass." The funny thing is that it's the crucible steel ones that would have broken like glass, not the "fakes". Some of the non-crucible-steel ones have the inscription spelled consistently, and since we don't know what "ulfberht" really means, we don't know which spelling is correct, or even if there is a "correct" spelling.
The problem is that +VLFBERH+T swords can't be "the original Ulfberhts" because they are YOUNGER. All of them I have seen have hilts of newer types than Ulfberhts spelled +VLFBERHT+. And even without that, we really can't know if all Ulfberhts spelled the same way are from the same workshop and if it really was a maker's mark at all. There is no proof for that. All that we know is that a few swords spelled +VLFBERH+T are probably made of crucible steel. I know at least one +VLFBERH+T has been tested and it was not crucible steel but piled iron core and silicone steel edges. INGELRII swords tested have piled iron cores and welded edges of similar structure to crucible steel in +VLFBERH+T's. So +VLFBERH+T's weren't unique even in that department...
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Post by Timo Nieminen on Feb 6, 2015 1:40:42 GMT
Yes, the +VLFBERHT+ swords look older than the +VLFBERH+T. They're also usually well-made pattern-welded swords with hardened high-carbon steel edges. Considering the variation in working and heat-treatment of the crucible steel +VLFBERH+T swords, they're perhaps the better-made and better-quality ones. The various miscellaneous spelling Ulfberhts - including the low-carbon steel ones and iron ones - might be fakes. Unless there's a sampling bias for the ones in Williams' study, dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=3081798 , the majority of the +VLFBERH+T swords are crucible steel. (The study includes over 1/3 of the total number of +VLFBERH+T swords, so not a small sample.) The +VLFBERHT+ swords have harder edges (typically about 450VPH) than the +VLFBERH+T swords (typically about 300VPH) - the +VLFBERHT+ swords are quench-hardened and the +VLFBERH+T swords aren't quenched (because they're crucible steel and will be too brittle if quenched). (You can divide those mid-range Vicker's hardnesses by 10 to get Rockwell C. That's about 30HRC for the crucible steel Ulfberhts, and about 45HRC for the edges of the hard-edge pattern welded Ulfberhts. And even at that 30HRC, the crucible steel ones can be brittle. That's the joy of crucible steel with really high carbon content (e.g., 2%). Still think crucible steel is a super-steel?)
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