Ethnographic Arms & Armour - View Single Post

BluErf · 15th March 2006, 01:51 PM

Hi BSMStar,

Ok, I see where you are coming from. We'll call your hilt a "coteng-styled keris hilt" in the future then.

At any rate, it certainly is not junk. The maker had a good measure of ability to make something 3 dimensional like this and cover it in repoussed motifs which are neat and consistent.

The world of keris is always evolving, even now. When we look at the keris hilts from the different regions, sometimes we can see that they obviously came from the same older form. Some hilts look like a distorted form of another (take the central Javanese 7-planar hilts and the variants from east Java). And we have seen how the tajong resembles the coteng, which also resembles the Tegal hilt, which in turn resembles the regular rashaksa (putri satu) hilts. And even amongst the rashaksa hilts, there are variations which have heads which look like bulging-eyed aliens (Adni has a couple of examples which I had wanted to acquire).

So how did all of that variety happen? Through cross-fertilization of ideas, outright (imperfect) copying, and variations due to the sense of aesthetics of people from a region. There are other contributing factors for sure, like trade and war and their knock-on effects on keris styles in affected areas. It is not far fetched to imagine that when traders and migrants moved from island to island in the S.E.A. archipelago, they would have brought their kerises, and when locals saw it, they wanted something similar too. With the 'real McCoy' in short supply, some local craftsmen could have made their own versions of the keris/keris part, and slowly it caught on and started evolving.

15th March 2006, 01:51 PM	#33
BluErf Member Join Date: Dec 2004 Location: Singapore Posts: 1,180	Hi BSMStar, Ok, I see where you are coming from. We'll call your hilt a "coteng-styled keris hilt" in the future then. At any rate, it certainly is not junk. The maker had a good measure of ability to make something 3 dimensional like this and cover it in repoussed motifs which are neat and consistent. The world of keris is always evolving, even now. When we look at the keris hilts from the different regions, sometimes we can see that they obviously came from the same older form. Some hilts look like a distorted form of another (take the central Javanese 7-planar hilts and the variants from east Java). And we have seen how the tajong resembles the coteng, which also resembles the Tegal hilt, which in turn resembles the regular rashaksa (putri satu) hilts. And even amongst the rashaksa hilts, there are variations which have heads which look like bulging-eyed aliens (Adni has a couple of examples which I had wanted to acquire). So how did all of that variety happen? Through cross-fertilization of ideas, outright (imperfect) copying, and variations due to the sense of aesthetics of people from a region. There are other contributing factors for sure, like trade and war and their knock-on effects on keris styles in affected areas. It is not far fetched to imagine that when traders and migrants moved from island to island in the S.E.A. archipelago, they would have brought their kerises, and when locals saw it, they wanted something similar too. With the 'real McCoy' in short supply, some local craftsmen could have made their own versions of the keris/keris part, and slowly it caught on and started evolving.