Help with the Moro Kris/Kalis/Sundang

[Interested Party]

Originally Posted by Ian

Hi IP,

I'm occupied with family issues at the moment and will be for a few days. Your questions deserve considered answers....


Just a few quick observations. Cato describes the characteristics of blades, specifically the "elephant trunk area," that might be attributed to specific Moro tribal groups....


This is probably helpful in identifying the origin of the blade. However, as Xasterix has discussed here on the Forum, within Moro culture the tribal attribution of a kris depends on who the last owner was. This is identified by the "dress" of the kris—that is, by the style of the hilt/pommel, the number and style of the asang asang, and the scabbard features.


More to come when I have time to sit down and write a detailed response that includes comments on your examples.

Thanks Ian that is very much appreciated. I hope everything is okay at home.

Some issues I hope to clarify in this thread are: Is Cato still considered accurate? It is hard to find other written sources outside of this forum. I have read a good bit of Xastrerix (Ray's) thoughts on the kris, including his most recent article. This helped me to understand Cato better in that some of his examples were hybrids. During my first read of Cato's book this made things confusing. The other larger issues are age and attribution of individual features of a kris and how to classify the whole.

It took a while to figure out a format to ask these questions in. Finally I settled on the above format where I broke it down into overall impression, blade via elephant trunk area and ganja, handle and pommel, and finally sheath. Knowing that each one could be a different age and tribal identity. I would have liked to have broken each category mentioned down into separate posts for the most detail, but I thought the discussion would most likely wander and that the current format would be more effective due to the stream of consciousness nature of the forum. My goal is to collect as much concrete information as possible in one thread with comparative examples of similar kris to help my understanding and others with similar comprehension issues. The kris are all straight though the forward angle of the blade differs and although each has two asang asang I am not convinced on a Sulu attribution for them.

I also hoped Ray could give some insights on performance of each design. I am sad I do not have detailed information on weight and cross section of the individual examples. I would expect the white metal design was not meant for hard use as the rings do not look soldered and would shift in the hand, especially as the wood beneath them shrank.

Once again, many thanks in advance to anyone willing to help in this project.
-IP