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the Wallace sword, and it has the advantage in that, inlaid in iron lctters in the blade is the invo-cation NINOMINEDOMINI. Tliere is no means of knowing where either of these beautiful weapons was found, but it doesn't really matter. Both are of a universal type used everywhere from Finland to Spain and from Donegal to the Caucasus.

Perhaps the most significant aspect of the examination and publication of these Finnish

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Figurę 46. Inscription inlaid in iron on the blade ofFig. 45 - +NINOMINEDOMINI+ swords is that (a) the "old" iron inlays of ULFBERH+T and INGELRII are found in the same cemeteries as the fine, elegant lettering inlaid in silver with Christian invocations of the "new" style and (b) when these silver inscriptions are compared with others in museums all over Europę and America, it becomes obvious that individual handwritings can be identified. In Fig. 47, I show a sword from the National Museum of Denmark, in Copenhagen, together with an enlarged section of one of its inscriptions; Fig. 48 shows a drawing of the differing inscriptions on each side of this sword. These may be compared with Fig. 49, a silver inlay from a Finnish-found blade. The hilt of this broken sword, incidentally, is the one with the faceted wheel-pom-mel, Fig. 50.

It may secm preposterous to assert that, in these blade inscriptions, handwriting may be identified. How can it be said that letters hammered into a Steel blade by a smith constitute handwriting? The point is that, though the iron letters were indeed hammered into blades by illiterate smiths, the silver-inlaid ones were applied by skilled craftsmen using a totally different technicjue. Let me clarify this a little. To inlay a Steel blade with iron letters, the smith had to cut his letters with a cold chisel into the untempered blade, in some cases using a pattern obtained from a source where letters were understood-- in the lOth-llth centurics, this meant, almost without exception, a monastery - and probably in others relying on his own memory of

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Figurę 48. Inscriptions inlaid in silvcr on the blade ofFig. 47

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Figurę 49. Inscription, similar to Fig. 48, on the blade of a sword from a Viking grave at Kangasalain, S. Finland, c. 1050-1100.