Jean, a few years ago I published an article titled "An Interpretation of the Pre-Islamic Javanese Keris". It received a lot of favourable comment, especially in respect of the photographs. In fact it received some very unexpected favourable comment from people whom I would not have thought would ever read something with "keris" in the title. However, I most sincerely doubt if many people truly understood what I wrote --- except perhaps the very few , maybe no more than 2 or 3, who are totally outside the area of keris interest. This lack of understanding does not really surprise me, it took me more than 30 years to understand information contained in this article, information I had possessed since about 1980.
In this article I have put forward an hypothesis that addresses your question.
If I can ever get around to putting my notes in order, another article will be written that addresses what happened after Islam gained domination of the political structure of Jawa. It seems very unlikely that this future article will be understood any better than my previous one.
In fact Jean, the answers to almost everything that we wish to understand about keris are already available, its just that people try to learn about the keris by "researching" the keris. They are going in the wrong direction.
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