Why change to the Spatha?

[Endre Fodstad]

What use is a badly balanced one?

If it still hurts your enemy, incredibly useful. I'm asking, are we transplanting modern quality onto the ancients, where it's well known that even the Vikings had to, on occasion during battle, step away from the fight to find a rock so they could straighten their sword again. And the Viking sword was basically a spatha. The exceptions cost the modern equivalent of at least £150,000.

I think you are confusing the saga description of swords having to be replaced (during battle of Svolder, for example) because they had become dull (which must be taken with a grain of salt anyway unless the other side were really heavily armoured) with the roman tale of gauls straightening swords out during battle (which I've also taken with a grain of salt). I've never heard of such things from medieval literature on the vikings. The most common viking age weapons were axes and spears anyway, despite the relatively large number of swords we've excavated.

They did sometimes destroy their blades before burial, though; resmithing them and ruining the hardening and normalization they had gone through. Some examples have even been "rolled up" through this process and look like a giant snail with a head shaped like a sword hilt when they are excavated due to all the corrosion products.