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were madę of a softer, less carbonized metal. This part was scarf-welded onto the main, tempered, business part of the blade, making it less liable to

fracture at the hilt. This scarf weld mav often be

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seen on blades, though it depends upon the kind of etching effect which mud or earth or atmos-phere has had upon a blade.

The most significant exposure of blade inscriptions of this century, so far, with the most far-reaehing effects which are only just beginning to be felt, is in the posthumously published work of Dr. Jorma Leppaaho of Helsinki University. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, he cleared a num-ber of graves of the late Viking period, in Southern Finland. I had the good fortunę to be in persona] corrcspondence with him whilc the swords which he found were coming to light, and the first surprising fact which he noted (and told me of) was that on many of these swords, the pommels were not of the usual "Vildng" styles, but were of the thick disc form always previously associated only with the 13th, 14th, and I5th cen-turies. Now herc they were, indisputably of the 1 lth! Sonie were of plain disc form, others of what has come to be called the "wheel" form, where the disc is very thick with the edges strong-

ly beveled to leave a circular boss in the centre of

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the disc, like the nave of a wheel. One of these wheel pommels was facetted, in a way often seen in German sculpture of the later 14th century. There are many surviving swords with this kind of pommel, which have always been considered by students of arms - myself among them - to be no earlier than circa 1325. Now we have to reconsid-er one of our verdicts upon them, for they may turn out to be two centuries earlier than we thought. Among these wheel pommels, however, there was nonę having the central boss rccessed, nor with the beveled edges of a concave section.

The most startling and significant discover-ies, however, did not come until the blades of these swords - sonie only fragments - were exam-ined by the applications of chemistry and by taking x-ray photographs. These experiments showed that, along with the "old" iron inlaid inscriptions, as sliown herc in Fig. 36, were others of a quite different kind, inlaid in gold, silver, or brass (lat-ten) wires, as in Fig. 41. As with the wheel pom-

Figure 40. LEUFRIT sword, c. 900, from Southern Russia. This is by rhe same smith as

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the sword from Lincoln, England, shown in Fig. 1. This photograph does not clearly show the fuller, but it is rather narrower than that upon the Lincoln blade.