It's very hard to tell when a knife becomes a sword. Apart from a sword only being useful in fighting, not for actually doing stuff like eating or whittling, I suspect it's at the stage when you'd prefer to say "What, you only have a knife? *I've* got a *sword*", rather than just "my knife is bigger than yours" - as long as it's big enough that people don't start making jokes about how short and inadequate your weapon is, of course.
The saex in particular seems to go from an eating knife a few inches long to a three-foot weapon, and I think everything in between.
I don't know why there are all these knives, but it might be that people find things which are obviously the hilts of something knifelike, but as the blade has gone you can't tell how long it was. As a hand (and therefore a grip) is much the same size regardless of the length of blade, people might be playing it safe and saying "knife" when they aren't sure. Some of the Migration Era swords have grips which seem too small for a hand to fit (some people have suggested you held the pommel in your palm), and I think some saexes have teeny grips too, which might well make them look like knives.
Or it might be that swords are associated with knights, and obviously the Dark Ages (OMT) being pre-mediaeval they didn't have cool things like knights, so couldn't have had many swords either - QED ;-)
The typical weapon is supposed to have been the spear, pretty much throughout the period when swords were popular. You can make a spearhead and a dagger much more cheaply and easily than a sword, and then you can poke the swordsman before he can get close to you.
But I think swords weren't all that uncommon - in a warrior culture, everyone wants to look like a hero even if it means having the sort of cheap sword that bends when you hit people too hard (see some of the sagas). I do like the swords they've found that have "Ingelrii" written on one side of the blade and "Ulfbert" on the other. You don't get that with rare high-status things, you get it with fairly common status symbols - like having a pair of trainers with "Nike" on the left foot and "Adidas" on the right... :-D Although those are rather after your period, to be fair.
Aha, now there's something that I thought interesting : apparently there are practically no spear-heads of the period?
Though apparently a type of spearhead which has been identified as Anglo-Saxon is an awful lot like the pre-Roman British spearhead, and so possibly in some 4th-century contexts is being misidentified...
Thank you for the sword-thoughts, they sound convincing to me!
Mind you, if there are no swords and no knives and no spearheads, it's no wonder they had to invite Hengist and Horsa in :-)
I'd reckon that either the spearheads are being misidentified, as you say; or else that the iron spearhead rusts away and the wooden shaft rots, and you have nothing else left to suggest the presence of the spear in the way that a brass-bound bone grip would tell you there was once a knife around.
The saex in particular seems to go from an eating knife a few inches long to a three-foot weapon, and I think everything in between.
I don't know why there are all these knives, but it might be that people find things which are obviously the hilts of something knifelike, but as the blade has gone you can't tell how long it was. As a hand (and therefore a grip) is much the same size regardless of the length of blade, people might be playing it safe and saying "knife" when they aren't sure. Some of the Migration Era swords have grips which seem too small for a hand to fit (some people have suggested you held the pommel in your palm), and I think some saexes have teeny grips too, which might well make them look like knives.
Or it might be that swords are associated with knights, and obviously the Dark Ages (OMT) being pre-mediaeval they didn't have cool things like knights, so couldn't have had many swords either - QED ;-)
The typical weapon is supposed to have been the spear, pretty much throughout the period when swords were popular. You can make a spearhead and a dagger much more cheaply and easily than a sword, and then you can poke the swordsman before he can get close to you.
But I think swords weren't all that uncommon - in a warrior culture, everyone wants to look like a hero even if it means having the sort of cheap sword that bends when you hit people too hard (see some of the sagas). I do like the swords they've found that have "Ingelrii" written on one side of the blade and "Ulfbert" on the other. You don't get that with rare high-status things, you get it with fairly common status symbols - like having a pair of trainers with "Nike" on the left foot and "Adidas" on the right... :-D Although those are rather after your period, to be fair.
Um... [insert coherent conclusion here]
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Though apparently a type of spearhead which has been identified as Anglo-Saxon is an awful lot like the pre-Roman British spearhead, and so possibly in some 4th-century contexts is being misidentified...
Thank you for the sword-thoughts, they sound convincing to me!
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Mind you, if there are no swords and no knives and no spearheads, it's no wonder they had to invite Hengist and Horsa in :-)
I'd reckon that either the spearheads are being misidentified, as you say; or else that the iron spearhead rusts away and the wooden shaft rots, and you have nothing else left to suggest the presence of the spear in the way that a brass-bound bone grip would tell you there was once a knife around.
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It struck me as odd too. I have another book by the same author about this period, will see if that adds any further details.
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