Quote:
Originally Posted by Lee
Having had the privilege of handling a number of medieval swords, authentic and not, I must concur with cornelistromp's statement above. Though the statistics strongly point in the unfortunate direction whenever the question is asked, as a practical matter I almost never can decide authenticity with adequate certainty from images alone and I do not wish to risk condemning the authentic with a 'knee-jerk' denunciation based on statistical probabilities. My own collecting days are probably over owing to old age and those discouraging statistics. The reproductions these days may be so proficiently prepared that I expect, more and more, old publicly published evidence of provenance, preferably with illustration, will become increasingly critical in setting a comfort level.
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I totally concur with Jasper and Lee, the odds of this being genuine are profoundly slim and the industrious 'charlatans' who manufacture 'copies' have become too good.
This has confounded the efforts of those of us who wish to study the history of these weapons, and taken away the potential for true scholars and collectors to own the actual weapons from those times.
Lee, I am with you on collecting days being over, with old age and diminished resources that may be gone, but research and learning never stops
Fortunately you had the wonderful experiences of collecting and actually knowing Mr. Oakeshott personally, which gave us the amazing resource you, he and Mr.Pierce produced, "Swords in the Viking Age".
With these references we can still learn on these swords.,