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Flaws in Viking swords found

“You really didn’t want to have that happen,” said Dr. Alan Williams, an archaeometallurgist and consultant to the Wallace Collection in London. He and Tony Fry, a senior researcher at the National Physical Laboratory(NPL) in Teddington, south-west London, have solved a riddle that the Viking swordsmiths may have sensed but didn’t quite understand. Some Viking swords were among the best ever made, still fearsome weapons after a millennium.

The legendary swords found at Viking sites across northern Europe bear the maker’s name, Ulfberth, in raised letters at the hilt end. The Vikings would have found it impossible to tell the difference when they bought a newly forged sword: both would have looked identical, and had razor sharp blades. The difference would have only emerged in use, often fatally. Dr. Williams began to test the Ulfberth blades and found they varied wildly. The tests at the NPL have proved that the inferior swords were forged in northern Europe from locally worked iron. But the genuine ones were made from ingots of crucible steel, which the Vikings brought back from furnaces thousands of miles away in modern Afghanistan and Iran.

The tests proved the genuine Ulfberth swords had a high carbon content, three times that of the fakes, and half again that of modern carbon steel. The contemporary fake Ulfberths used the best northern metal working techniques, which hardened the metal by quenching, plunging the red-hot blade into cold water.

It enabled them to give the blade a keen edge, but made it fatally brittle. The genuine Ulfberths have mostly been found in rivers. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2008

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