Talk:River Witham sword

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For some reason this was picked up by the daily press. The source is this blog post. The post is interesting, and a nice basis to begin work on a "blade inscription" article, but as usual the journalists made a dog's breakfast of it. This is why we should never use journalistic sources for academic topics (or at all, if it can be helped). As it turns out, ru-wiki has an already quite well-developed coverage of the topic, here. Work on en-wiki would do well to start out by basing itself off of this.

Regarding the River Witham sword inscription, as the blog post itself points out, it is a nice but fairly typical example of a 12th-century German fashion of "letter salad" blade inscriptions (continued into the 13th century; I do not know why this sword should date to after 1250, but these dates are rough estimates, give or take a century or so, anyway). They cite an even more extreme example ("sword of Alphen"), as +BENEDOXOFTISSCSDRRISCDICECMTINIUSCSDNI+ / +DIOXMTINIUSESDIOMTINIUSCSDICCCMTDICIIZISI+ — this is probably the most extreme one there is, but it is easy to cite dozens of others, such as NNSDICNRCAESDICNESDICNNDIEDIE, NESDICNNNESDICOSNSDIGSNCNNLACN, NEDRINFNSDRNFNCGDXOSANSDRIFNSDRIH etc. (I took these from Wegeli 1904). These are emphatically not Latin acrophonic abbreviations. They are a weird fashion of 12th century Germany. I like to compare it to "terrible tattoo" fashions today, people could consult somebody literate (in e.g. Chinese or Devanagari) before getting a message in a script they cannot read permanently inked on their skin, but for some reason they won't. Apparently part of the trend. --dab (𒁳) 16:06, 26 August 2015 (UTC)

After some more research, I find that the 10th century "River Witham sword" may actually be rather notable, at least if we take the judgement of Peirce (1990) ("breath-taking", "one of the most splendid", etc.) at face value. --dab (𒁳) 10:57, 27 August 2015 (UTC)

After consulting the source, I feel the "breath-taking" quote from Pierce is a bit out of context. He's actually specifically discussing the proportions of the sword, rather than an overall impression. The sentence continues: "it totally fits Ewart Oakeshott's criterion that blade, guard and pommel should form an harmonious whole" ~2026-37582-45 (talk) 19:17, 29 June 2026 (UTC)

simple addition

The dimensions of the Witham "knightly" sword add up to 980mm, or 98 cm, not the figures shown. And why is one sword described in mm, while the previous is in cm? They are not that far different in length, if the same unit is used. I understood that our consensus mandate was to be easily read and understood, not obfuscation. rags (talk) 15:33, 26 November 2018 (UTC)

An interpretation for +NDXOXCHWDRGHDXORVI+

The idea is to have X as word boundaries. Now, conceptually mainly vocals are to be added to have complete Middle High German words. A possible solution might then be:

"unde ô schwerdicheit urveide" (and yea [despite all] burden - a sworn peace)

This is theory finding! Theory findings may not be part of the lemmas text. Still here in discussion feel free to add other possible solutions. Vollbracht (talk) 14:56, 26 March 2026 (UTC)