[A. G. Maisey]

Actually Seerp, both stylistically and in terms of motif, everything in this keris is well established, nothing new here, except of course the entire concept, which is a beautiful piece of extremely clever modern keris art.

But this pamor motif is something that is very seldom encountered, in fact, in spite of my more than 60 years of contact with the keris, and very lengthy periods spent in Jawa and Bali, I have not yet handled a keris with this pamor motif. Whoever welded this pattern is a great master of the art.

The name of the motif is Tamarind Fibre ( Jarot Asem). I have not ever heard a talismanic value given to this motif by anybody I have ever known, but in recent literature it seems to be accepted as expressing a hope of dependability, determination, resoluteness --- certainly, whoever made such a difficult pamor would need all these qualities, and whoever had the money to pay for such work also needed these qualities in order to put together the wherewithal to foot the bill .

The extreme difficulty and complexity of production would seem to indicate that this motif is a fairly recent development, my guess is that it did not exist before European forge methods had already penetrated Javanese, or more likely Madurese, work practices, so perhaps it did not exist prior to the last quarter of the 19th century (ie, after 1875). Such a recent appearance would also explain the apparent lack of an established talismanic value.

Interestingly, this pamor appears not to have been known to Empu Djeno Harumbrojo.

The Singo Barong is not a Javanese form, nor is it Balinese. Frankly, I do not know what area the Singo Barong in this keris has been borrowed from:- Thai? Laos? Cambodia? China? it seems that the artist has taken various characteristics and combined them into a pleasing, but culturally inadequate whole. Because of this it is very difficult to attribute a value to the Singo Barong in this keris.

In Balinese iconography, and almost certainly in Pre-Islamic Javanese iconography the lion was associated with the K'satriya class, so a Singo Barong could be interpreted as indicative of warrior status, but when we apply the iconography of other places that draw on Chinese roots as shi, the iconography encapsulates protective values, as in "Guardian Lions". One thing is certain, if this keris is intended to be a Javanese keris, the Singo Barong on it is very wrong, and places it di luar pakem. But it is very pleasing sculpting.

If we look closely at the ron dha and sosoran of this keris, the appraisal of craftsmanship becomes quite difficult:- on the one hand the sculpting of the Singo Barong appears to be very good, but this artist seems not to have been able to cut a consistent ron dha of any recognisable form. Similarly, the proportions of the blumbangan do not fit comfortably into either Surakarta or Mataram form. Given, it is always difficult to read a blumbangan in a "picture keris", ie, a keris with a figure at the gandhik, and maybe this blumbangan would look better proportioned in hand than in a picture.

Taking into consideration the variation in the quality and consistency of the garap applied to this keris, I am inclined to think that we could be looking at a group effort. Certainly the forge work would not have been done by the same hands that did the bench work, but I feel that more than one pair of hands was involved in the bench work --- yes, I could be wrong about this, I was not there looking over the workers' shoulders, but my perception is that there is too much variation in proficiency for the bench work of this keris to be the work of one person.

The kinatah motif is unremarkable and fits comfortably into a Javanese context, however, the quality of the actual kinatah application is very, very ordinary, lower quality work, and not well done. I would guess probably done in Surabaya, certainly not top drawer Jawa Tengah work. This is a pity, because in spite of the obvious deficiencies in basic forms, this is really quite a beautiful piece of keris art, and it deserves much better kinatah work.

Although the overall form of the keris appears to be intended as Javanese , I am not able to comment on pawakan because there is no photograph of the complete keris, only close-ups of sections of the keris.

In summary, a very nice piece of modern keris art, it must be classified as Kemardikan, and is very far from any classical tradition.