[A. G. Maisey]

My thoughts?

However much I write in response to this question, the answer will be inconclusive, and insufficient to satisfy anybody who is a part of a keris network or group in Indonesia, and probably Malaysia. But I will respond.
Let us consider the question of "layers".

2048> 1024> 512 > 256 > 128 > 64 > 32 > 16 > 8 >4 >2 = 11 folds, 11 welds, if I start with only two pieces of material.

Working by myself, using a 10 pound and a 4 pound hammer, this is about one day's work for me. If I have a striker, or better, two strikers, or better again some sort of mechanical hammer, the time is correspondingly less. If I have a striker I will not start with a stack of two pieces , I will start with four pieces, or more, depending on the thickness of the material.

Now, as I work that material, and subject it to stretching, folding and welding, I will lose some material, by the time I finish those 11 welds I will not have 2048 layers in the billet, I will have less, I do not know how many less, but definitely less layers than 2048, the rest are laying on the floor of the workshop as scale.

Let us say I then take that billet, forge it to shape, take it to the bench and make a something from it.

I have lost even more material.

How many layers of material do I have left?

Short of putting a saw through the thickest part of the finished job and then subjecting it to microscopic examination, I have no idea how many layers are left in the completed product.

So when we start talking "layers of material" the reality is that we simply do not know how many layers of material remain after the forging/welding process, and the cold work process.

But we are talking keris. This much is certain, however many layers of material remain after the billet is turned into some sort of product, after a few hundred years of use, neglect and cleaning, there will be less than there were when I finished work on the product, be it a keris or something else.

Lets get back to numbers of layers. If I had folded that little stack of two layers one more time, that is 12 folds, I would have 2048 X 2 = 4096. Frankly, to get a nominal 4098 layers I would need to sit down with a calculator and work out exactly how to do this.

This mystique of the number of layers is myth. It is a myth that some smiths like to perpetuate because for somebody who does not understand forge work it sounds pretty impressive. Another thing:- those final few welds are very easy to take, and to take perfectly. The most difficult welds are the first few, if the material is hot short as well as dirty, it can be exceedingly difficult to take the first few welds. So, why stop at even 12 welds, we can very easily raise the number of layers to stratospheric numbers with only a few more welds.

Now let us look at keris again. In truly old keris, and I guess in some younger ones too, if we look closely at the edge of the gandhik we can count the number of layers remaining, and it never comes anywhere near the thousands.

But then there is the washing process that we need to use to process dirty iron before it can be used. In the days when most Javanese iron was coming from China, some was coming from Borneo, and nickelous iron was coming from Luwu, that cleaning process could well have used many more folds & welds than became necessary later. In my experience it takes about 7 or 8 welds to get good quality European wrought iron clean enough to use for a blade skin, going back to when iron was coming out of China it would have taken many more welds to get the iron clean, because although that Chinese iron was cheap, it was also very dirty and required a lot of additional processing.

As to the appearance of old keris. It is close to totally useless to try to visualise what a keris that is several hundred years old, and that has never left Jawa looked like when it was new, that is, one day old, off the bench yesterday.

In 2012 I was fortunate to have the opportunity to handle a great number of very old keris in several European museums. The oldest of those keris were pre-1600. They looked as if they had been made yesterday. If they had been stripped of fittings, cleaned and stained, and then mixed with other keris made in the current era, I doubt very much that I could distinguish the pre-1600 keris from the post-1980 keris.

We cannot tell how old a blade is based upon appearance of material alone.

So, before modern mild steel became available, and most forge work was carried out with varying qualities of iron from various sources, it can be taken as read that extensive working of that iron was necessary in order to produce material of weapon or tool quality.

When we see an old blade with close grain material, it indicates that the iron was thoroughly worked, and thoroughly packed. When we see an old blade where the iron displays an open grain that may or may not be more or less porous, it indicates that the smith did not work the material sufficiently well.

Why did he cut short the cleaning process? For the simple reason of cost, not only do more welds cost more time and fuel, you also lose more material, so if you need to work to a price, rather than work to a quality, you do the bare minimum necessary to produce a product that is saleable.

There is no mystery about any of this, if we go to the old textbooks on blacksmithing, it is all there. I learnt from hands on experience, not because I wanted to be a blacksmith, nor a maker of keris, but so that I could better understand exactly how a keris was made. I began amateur forge work in the late 1970's, then I was taught by a working, traditional blacksmith, Mr Gordon Blackwell, from 1980, and I worked with Empu Suparman from 1982. After I had this practical experience I found out about the re-prints of old blacksmithing text books.

We do not learn about keris by reading keris books, we need to widen our horizons to encompass many more fields than just the object of our interest.

Now we come back to "pulen" again.

GC, the best advice I can give you in this respect is to learn well what the members of your keris community regard as "pulen", if you vary from what these people believe to be so, you will never be regarded as knowledgeable. To be a member of the group you must learn the same beliefs as the group. It is that simple.

If your group regards wesi pulen as an indicator of quality, then you must also, but bear in mind, this indicator of quality refers only to one part of the material, if we are to consider the entire wilah, we must introduce other indicators of quality. Again, you must learn what the members of your group believe, and follow those beliefs.

Is the presence of wesi pulen an indicator of quality?

Well, I do not think in terms of the old Javanese names applied to various visual presentations of ferric material, but if I see tightly grained, smooth iron in an old blade that has been subjected to some degree of erosion, I consider that material to have been properly worked, and thus, the blade that it is in was very likely forged by a competent smith.

It goes without saying that wesi pulen will never be identified in any blade other than one that appears to be old.

Why?

Because everybody knows that wesi pulen is old material, if the blade presents as recent, how can it possibly be named as wesi pulen?

There is more than a little circular reasoning in Javanese keris belief, as well as a very large dose of emotion.

For keris there is no universal standard, depending on where you are, and who you are with, and what sort of impression you wish to make, you adjust your self-presentation to suit.

Want to be a member of a Javanese keris group?
Identify the top man and agree with him, no matter what you may think.
It is all about belief and fitting in with the group, it has very little to do with reality.