10-27-2007, 10:30 AM
Quote:J. Kim Siddorn, Viking Weapons & Warfare, Tempus Publishing. The reason old swords were valued so highly was precisely because they managed to survive intact for so long. He puts the modern equivalent price of some swords at £250,000 to be made. Kormak had to fight a duel with Bersi... "He had an iron sword of his own, but thought he would have a better chance if he didn't have to stop and straighten it under his foot every third blow (!)." He then goes to find Skeggi to borrow the sword Skofnung.
Ah. Siddorn. Well, let's put it this way; Siddorn, while being one of the great-beards of the Regio Anglorum, gets quite a lot of his facts wrong (he credits the german WW2 pilot's helmet found near Kiev as a viking helmet, for example, an old tale spread in reenactor's circles) and has a tendency to take the more unreliable sagas a bit too literally, to put it mildly (good pictures, though). Kormak's saga is one of the oldest icelandic sagas and contains quite a few literary set-ups that have to be taken with a grain of salt, such as the entire process that gets Kormak Skofnung - you see, that blade has a lively "history" dating back to the iron age and the legendary king Rolf Krake: a magical possessed blade that survives burial and being dug up by Skeggi three hundred years later, not to mention also making an appearance in the Laxdoalasaga, surviving a shipwreck or two, et cetera. I think one will be hard-pressed to find any such examples from the historical sagas.
