[Bastiaan van B]

Hello everyone.

I was offered this falchion (at least that is what I think it is). The seller says its from a ex german collector who passed away and the family hired her to sell on the various items left over. Now original antiques, especially from this period, are a minefield so I was hoping some of you more experienced collectors might shed some light on its authenticity. Pictures are attached.

Any help is much appreciated.

Kind regards.

Bastiaan

[JG Elmslie]

as single-edged arms are my field of academic research, I'd be very interested in this - even if you decide not to, I'd like to know where it goes for possible study, if your seller could be kind enough to assist the work I'm doing there, I would be very grateful indeed. I would very much prefer to get to look at it and decide its a fake, than lose track of it, and know its somewhere out there, hiding from me!


That said, I'm more than a little cautious.
Its difficult to tell from photography - almost impossible to tell provenance accurately with good pictures, and those photos are distorted to hell, which makes them even worse to tell.

but there appears to be some sort of marking on the blade, about 2cm from the cross, that strikes me as really odd. Might just be my imagination, but something strange going on there.

Corrosion seems unusually uniform over the entire blade and hilt, and I see no artefacts of iron structure in the cross or pommel. Both those details are odd, but not necessarily damning evidence - especially going by photos.

the blade width appears to be a little too narrow for the average of the type. Accurate photography would help confirm or deny that, what is most important there is measurement of sectional profiles and thickness, along with profile widths. Combine the two and you've got a good baseline which can eliminate a few fakes. Again, odd, but not damning on its own.


My gut instinct says its unlikely to be an original. There are details in the shape that I feel are very unlikely to be those of an original. But I could easily be wrong - we have such a small body of examples that each one is quite unique in some ways. but it does seem to have too many odd details for me to be comfortable saying its undoubtedly original.

[Bastiaan van B]

Hello.

Thank you very much for the reply. The seller has a weird way of photographing items, she uses a lot of light which distort the colors making everything seem more uniform a brighter than it is in reality. I do agree that the level of corrosion is pretty uniform all over, I'd expect certain areas to be in worse shape than others. However she has stated that the sword was cleaned and and conserved at one point. I don't know if that has an effect on it.

I uploaded the pics to photobucket. I had to resize the images for the forum causing them to get rather squished. I have requested additional pics of the spine of the blade.

The markings you mentioned are just corrosion, as far as I can tell, where part of the metal has been eaten away a bit more, probably not the technical term for it.

Ofcourse I agree the chances of such an item being real are very slim. She sates the total length is 76 cm which seems a bit long for this type.

The link below should lead to a photobucket album with higher res pictures.
Password: 123456789


http://s1126.photobucket.com/user/lupara1987/library/Sword

[Casey S.]

Run! Modern fake. The blade even looks like it came from a modern machete.