[tom hyle]

Actually, the estimate I read was based on the price of an automobile, and I think with a similar concentration of (expert) labour. The amount of wood alone that went into making charcoal for smelting and then for steeling iron was enormous, before the making of "coke" came in, and is, sometimes more than farming, creditted with deforesting much of Europe (and largely for weapons for war, no doubt; war drives technology; that it does, still.). The charcoal burners were very low-caste. Very very, actually probably outcaste would not be an inappropriate term for the view townspeople had of them. But the smiths were another matter; they were high end professionals; the mechanics or computer programmers of their day, and only the best of them specialized in longswords. In a way, there are these different worlds, though, as you say, so what's worth a year's wages in a poor country may be less than two weeks even for a semidisabled low-end craftsman/labourer like me in a rich country. But the cost of the steel is sooo different; AFAIK by now in India, PI, and China, to name a few we regularly see things from, they are now using industrial steel for cutlery, including swords (Some of the Phillipinos are working with sawsteel, and if it's recycled, it'd have to be folded "up" for the thicknesses I've seen, but I know it comes in round rods, too.....good stuff, sawsteel.....), and it is so very very much cheaper than handmade steel; if you had to buy 3 or 4 pounds of handmade steel now.....I don't even know what it'd cost; a lot, even if the craftsman paid himself poorly for his time (and many do). Even steel hand folded from industrial sheet/stock is very expensive to have produced in US. A few people make wootz; would it be OK for them or people who know about them to give a price idea? A guy in an iron age recreation science/tourist/museum-village in Scandinavia was making his own iron out of bog mud; maybe he still is; he was making knives from it and selling them etched; I don't know if or how many of them were/are steel. I'm sure there are others. The point is that it is a lot of work, and much of it expert, so while it certainly wasn't like only a very wealthy medieval German could own a sword, it was a thing for the professional class and the nobility, though poorer people did have saxes and later hangers and langenmessers, and sometimes longer swords made by blacksmiths who weren't swordsmiths per se, somewhat as we now have a Hyundai, or a beat up old '76 Ford.......fond memories there.....Holy Toledo; I'm getting something about pigs here........Pigs were part of the forest economy........I'm going to let that trail off and let it work on the back of my mind......