The Anglo Saxon Pattern Welded Swords

The Anglo Saxon considered a good sword to be light, strong and flexible; this can be explained by the fact that the Roman Britain was scarce of iron ore and faced with constant wars; the weapon smiths of the time came up with the technique known as pattern wielding, which was meant to enhance the flexibility and strength of their swords.

Pattern wielding is simply the art of hammering then twisting and continued hammering of iron layers (mostly pieces of varied strength) while heating them in red hot charcoal which also increased flexibility of the sword due to the carbon factor. This technique may have resulted from the losses incurred in war as a result of brittle swords.

Pattern welded swords show a distinctive interwoven figuring in the steel that imparted particular beauty and visual liveliness to the blade. Twisting, heating, and hammering drives the crystalline structure of the steel to form the wavy, watery pattern which the technique produces.

Shaping and grinding the rough blade into finished shape reveals differing levels of the respective layers. Weapon-smiths further emphasized this figuring by acid etching. Some of the materials weapon-smiths had at their disposal for this purpose were tannic acid, vinegar-produced acetic acid, urine (that indispensable by-product which found its way into so much early manufacture), sour beer, and various acidic fruit juices.

Tannic acid would have given a blade a dramatic blue-black coloring, and helped protect it from rust. At the end of the 5th century Cassiodorus described pattern welded sword made by the Teutonic Warne tribe: The central part of their blades, cunningly hollowed out, appears to be grained with tiny snakes, and here such varied shadows play that you would believe the shining metal to be interwoven with many colors.

The snake-like pattern that so impressed Cassiodorus is made by viewing the hammered, twisted layers of steel on edge, as it were. As in the excerpt from the poem Elene, in which the poet speaks of the blade's changing hues, Cassiodorus takes delight in the swords "many colors".

Pattern wielding is actually a modern term coined by researcher Herbert Maryon in 1947 after comprehensive study of the Anglo Saxon swords that were recovered from a heathen burial in Ely. He also reported to be the one who established that sword blade inscriptions were made by inserting narrow iron rods into a heated blade. The inlaid inscription was hammered into the sword surface after reheating the sword.

This process was very ancient and it's often thought that the Celts may have designed swords using pattern welding as early as the 8th century BCE, the Vikings and Anglo Saxons then adopted and extensively used the technique into the end of the 9 Th century CE. Due to the fact that hammered and intertwined layers of harder and softer iron had different cutting capability, high carbon steel edge was welded and hammered on an almost completed sword blade that resulted to the formation of consistent sharp edge that was ground along the sword length.