Dear members of myArmoury,
first, thank you for all the valuable information I found lurking here for months.

In the end I decided to register and open this thread regarding a sword I had the fortune to examine with my own hands thanks to a reasonable curator of a small museum in Northern Italy.

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As you can see it's a broken sword that was found in the 60s while they were making a new road. If it was broken when the TLB hit the burial or at the time of the death of the owner they don't know, for sure the body was destroyed in the process and what was left behind is this rump and a complete scramasax

It was quickly identified as Langobardic because of the other blade (for some strange reasons they thought the scramasax was a weapons used just by that tribe) but personally speaking all the Langobard swords I've seen in Italian museums (those found int he necropolis of Trezzo d'Adda and Nocera Umbra) were ring-hilted like many Scandinavian and Saxon swords of that era. This is the particular of the hilt:

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As you can see it seems that the hilt was hammered directly from an extension of the tang (it was not removable like in many ME swords of the with and VIIth century) so I would say it's a pretty advanced feature that I would expect from a much later Viking era sword...that intrigues me a lot and I would like to know the opinion of the knowledgeable people here.

I and the archeologist in charge of the museum draw a scheme of the sword and we took all the measurements (well, most of them at least), the rump is about 400 mm long, the blade is initially 50 mm large and tapers to 45 mm at the fracture, so it feels long and slender. The tang is 125 mm long, the hilt is 56 mm wide and 22 mm wide...the decorations feels to me very Nordic, they're different from one side to the other, and looks like they were carved directly in the steel and then covered with a thick layer of silver hammered on the base metal.

Being the sword broken, we estimated a length between 770 to 810 mm due to the low taper, relative thickness and the comparison with complete swords I know.

According to the Behmer's chart that I shamefully downloaded from this side it looks like...a Type VIII sword?

Many thanks in advance to those who will shed some light on this interesting finding.

I'm not an expert by any means and could be completely wrong but that looks like a straight up type X to me.

Really interesting pommel too, they really put in a lot of customization on pommels it seems. And that almost looks like a hand and a half length grip, that's really long for 1 hand.

Calling all swordsmiths...Calling all swordsmiths ! We need a replica here! :D .......McM

EDIT: Removed for inaccuracy.

Ehm, perhaps it wasn't clear, the total "free length" between the end of the blade and the silver inlayed hilt is 125mm, and guessing a 12 mm thickness for the compound upper and lower guards the "usable length" of the organic grip should have been 101 mm, that would be about 4", that would be just right for a large hand with thick gloves, unless of course we presume that in the rare cases these swords weren't use with a shield the warrior could place the weak hand on the hilt itself.

That is of course if I did the math correctly on the crossguards: on the drawings I imagined a reconstruction with two "slices" of silver or brass about 2 mm thick and a wooden or horn spacer about 8 mm...are these numbers realistic? Or in the case it's a type VIII sword, should I consider a pancake of three layers 4 mm each? :confused:

Nice pommel! So, is the pommel somehow attached to the tang or peened on the top? I see no rivet holes...

Not peened as far as I could see. It looks like one piece with the tang....if it's possible to do it,

I wonder how they made it, do usual ME sword have peened hilts?

The usual way would be to peen the tang over the upper guard of sandwiched materials and pommel riveted to the upper guard with 2 rivets. If this is one piece with the tang, I don't know how upper guard was put on?

I have seen many examples of lombard swords from Brescia and Leno (Northern italy), in all cases there were no remains of any guard, and a small triangular pommel.

I do not think this sword was any different from them, in that it most likely had an entirely organic hilt and guard. If it were otherwise some remains of a cross would have resisted on at least a few specimens.

This one just shows a more elaborate pommel, with inserts of typical lombard fashion.

Some of the brescian blades are pattern welded as well. They have interesting patterns, but I have likely lost all my pics.

The pommel of the blade of this topic is engraved in a way that is very similar to that of the engravings present on some of the Montichiari museum finds (again brescian area).