Hi James. Do you want the good news or the bad first?
OK, the bad first then. Frankly, the part you just could not pass up on this keris is probably the worst part of your ensemble. This type of dress is often associated with the infamous "Bali tourist keris", a beast which isn't truly a keris at all as it is made from a cutout blank (not pattern welded) and has pamor pattern lines painted onto it. The good news is that your blade is
not one of these tourist blades. Yours looks genuine and it appears to have some age. Unfortunately it appears that at some time well after this keris was forged someone got it in there head that it would be more valuable if it had more features (ricikan) and added what are called sogokan, the two grooves on each side at the base of the blade that look like blood grooves. More unfortunately, they did a really poor job of it as well and it kind of ruins the blade for me. I am alway confused as to why people can't just leave well enough alone and not attempt to modify these things after the fact. While this was never a masterful blade it was at least an honest one before the alteration.
As wood carvings go, for this part of the world this dress is rather mediocre (though i have seen worse) and are turned out rather quickly. This may have come from somebody's Uncle who had been in the Philippines, but the keris is Balinese and an Indonesian form, not like the Moro kris swords of the Philippines. It certainly came here "after WWII", but also just as certainly it was waaaaay after WWII. This style of dress didn't really develop until much later, maybe the 1960s at the earliest and i would judge this dress later than that. We do regularly see old blades (instead of the tourist "keris like objects") dressed in this style as dealers find old blades w/o sheaths and need to dress them cheaply for sale.
I realize that was probably not what you were hoping to hear, but if you didn't spend too much on this you could have done much worse for your first keris. Many of us have.
