Tinning my Pugio

[Peroni]

Ugh...so tinning them would not be correct?

I will look at my Obmann book on pugios tonight, but from memory, (Crispvs will correct me, he is the specialist on daggers on this forum) the grip was either made of iron plates, bone or wood.

Nearly all of the iron grip plates found from type A and B pugios have inlaid decoration of silver wire.

If the iron were to be tinned, then the contrast between the darker iron and the lighter silver would be lost.

We know the Roman military loved to tin items of equipment. Tinning and niello/enamel inlay would work.

[Crispvs]

Ah yes, Len's brass hilt plates. I have given him several hundred pages of information on daggers over the last few years and he has improved a number of things but the brass hilt plates still keep turning up. Probably because they are easier to have cast in the moulds he has been using for years than to have to be cut and filed from steel plate.

I am not sure about tinned dagger handles. The Romans certainly had the capacity to do this but whether or not they did is another matter. There are certainly a lot more apparently plain handles surviving than plain sheaths (which can be counted on two hands) so tinning would possibly be a way of tarting up the handle to make it suit a decorated sheath. Unfortunately the only page I can read in Obmann's book with any clarity is the summary page, because it is in English. It takes me a lot longer to plough through the rest of it as my German is not very good and I lack a good quality English-German dictionary. However, I will look at it when I get home to see if I can find any references to 'zinn' in the discussion on hand grips. I'll hopefully be able to get back to you about it tomorrow. Of course, there are also German speaking members of this forum who may be able to read Obmann's chapter on hand grips more easily than me.
To add to my difficulty in reading what Obmann has to say, unfortunately a number of the museums I have written to to find out more about daggers in their collections have been less then helpful with the result that my resouces are not as complete as I would like. Anyway, I'll see what I can do. Sorry if I seemed a bit sharp before - I have a baby on the way and am getting less sleep than I would like.

Peronis, thanks for the compliment. There is a surviving bone hilt plate from Heddernheim which appears to have formed the outer surface of a handle, but it appears that bone and wood, like horn, were normally used to make the layers which flanked the tang and were themselves covered by forged (often inlaid) iron plates or a thin embossed iron outer layer. Of course, the surviving sample may be heavily biased, and it may be that bone and wooden handles were much more common than we generally suppose but for the time being the evidence is lacking.

Crispvs