Craig Peters wrote: | ||
JD, I have a question. When do the pommel types B1 and B first begin to appear on swords? The reason I ask is that it's not totally clear to me that the B type pommels predate the "A" type. I know for certain that we start to see Type "A"s at least as early as the 10th century. Is there clear evidence that B pommels are older than this? |
Craig, you're abolutely right that I have simplified things to make a good story. I'm glad you asked this question so politely before trashing the whole theory. B, B1, and A did co-exist for many years; B1 even apears in sculptures as late as 1220. However B1 is thought to have arisen from earlier Viking forms. This is shown nicely on page 18 of Pierce's 'Swords of the Viking Age'. Here, what Oakeshott would call B1 is a late simplified form of Petersen's type X, which started in the 9th century. The same figure shows the classic Brazil Nut 'type A' arising about a century after type X, along side those late X (B1) forms. On the other end, I tend to believe that type A pommels with a stronger outward curvature (such as in Sword of St. Maurice Turin) survived more frequently in actual high medieval swords and transitioned to type N. Details like that are highly speculative (given the problems with dating swords and the number of surviving examples), but I would argue that the overall trend from Viking age Brazil Nut predecessors, thorugh early medieval B and A, to high medieval N and O, is likely real. -JD