Comments on the Djurhamn Sword

(response to a request from Martin Rundkvist https://archaeo.social/@mrundkvist)

A complex-hilted sword was found in 2007 at Djurhamn on an island in the Stockholm Archipelago. In the middle ages and early modern period the island was very important for merchant and royal ships, but post-glacial rebound has shrunk the nearby harbour. The find spot was just below a line of boulders marking the Late Medieval shoreline, as if it was dropped off a later dock or wharf.

Latin Christian Europe from 1000 to 1450 had strict and austere ideas of what a sword should be: straight, two-edged, with a crossguard, a pommel, and minimal decoration. Swords were understood as Christian crosses, and clearly distinguished from other long bladed weapons like sabres and falchions. In the fifteenth century and especially the sixteenth century these rules began to be broken, and it becomes hard to make general statements and create categories. As it became common to wear swords again, their role as male jewelry came to the forefront, and the hilts and pommels started to receive more ornament.

Unfortunately, there is no profession that gets paid to research swords from armouries and stately homes, like archaeologists get paid to study swords from graves. Most research on swords after the Viking Age is by amateurs like Ewart Oakeshott, James G. Elmslie (Facebook), Peter Johnsson, and Maciej Kopciuch, with the occasional curator like A.V.B. Norman (Wikipedia), Marko Aleksić (Serbian Wikipedia), or Alfred Geibig (German Wikipedia). With limited resources, most have not tried to create typologies, just studied groups of similar swords like British backswords or the swords of the Munich town guard. Its necessary to combine typologies of the medieval sword such as Ewart Oakeshott’s with Norman’s typology of complex hilts.

The following comments are based on a photo gallery, the museum catalogue page, and the Swedish Wikipedia page for the sword. I don’t have a paper copy of Norman’s book and the nearest copy is in Calgary but it can be borrowed from the Internet Archive. There are measurements of the sword in an academic article from 2009.

General Remarks

Functionally a sword like this is good for chopping up people at close quarters, but not stabbing at armour or pushing someone out of the saddle. The rounded point won’t stick in the rings of mail and the broad flat blade will bend like a spring.

A date around the 16th century seems reasonable.  This sword would have been the latest thing in the late 15th century, by the late 16th century broad cutting blades were falling out of fashion and narrow stiff blades were becoming admired.  By the early 17th century it would have been definitely old-fashioned.

Up to about 1540, broad swords with complex hilts were often worn by lightly-armoured infantry and men in civil dress. There was an old tradition that an honest man should not wear stabbing weapons in peacetime because they killed too easily.¹ Around 1540 the first cutler mounted a complex hilt on a narrow stiff blade, creating what we now think of as a rapier. Two of the oldest surviving examples are the sword of Gustav Vasa (Statens Historiska Museer, Stockholm, object 13502_LRK) and Francesco Negroli’s sword for Emperor Charles V (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, object 04.3.21). After 1540, broad swords with relatively simple hilts are increasingly worn to war by men who want to look like the knights of old, while people at court or in town preferred narrower swords with better hand protection. A good example of a modest military hilt is the Saxon Military Sword by Arms & Armour of Minnesota, but many hand-and-a-half swords with blades like the Djurhamn Sword and complex hilts survive in the Rüstkammer in Dresden.

Three of the four nicks in the edge are all in the half of the blade towards the tip, and the fourth is approximately in the middle. This suggests that it was damaged while striking, since fencers usually strike with the half of the blade towards the point (the weak or debole) and parry with the half of the blade towards the guard (the strong or forte).

Blade

Swords with broad flat parallel-sided blades appear in most societies with metalworking. In 15th-17th century western Europe they tend to have short fullers and be hexagonal in section, wheres swords of the high middle ages tend to have fullers that extend past the midpoint of the blade and often have a lenticular cross-section². This sword appears to have a shallow fuller near the base of the blade which is about 1/3 or 1/4 as wide as the blade. Martin Rundkvist did not notice one when he examined the sword in 2007 and 2008, but a shallow fuller seems visible in the photographs above. The ricasso (blunt area at the base of the blade) is also characteristic of swords after the year 1300 with finger rings. Overall the blade fits into Oakeshott’s type XIX which was used from the 14th century onwards. The sword from the Alexandria Arsenal below is a good example, as are Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, object 930.26.43 and Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts, object 2014.95.

The blade is 77.1 cm long and 4 cm wide. These are typical measurements for a single-handed sword of the period. Type XIX tends to be somewhat narrower than earlier types. The maximum thickness of the blade is relatively high at 5 mm (stiff thrusting swords are often twice as thick at the base).³ Knowing the length of the fuller would be useful.

Hilt

Hilts with down-turned crossguards and two finger rings first became popular in fifteenth-century Iberia and can be seen in the Pastrana Tapestries from 1471. They had reached the southern fringe of Germany by around 1500. An early depiction is a crucifixion from Cologne (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, object 12.169a-e). A finger ring both protects the pointer finger when it is bent over the crossguard, and stops weapons which are sliding down the blade before they endanger the top of the hand. The earliest art with finger rings shows them just on one side of the blade, the side towards the knuckles (like one of the swords from the Mamluke arsenal at Alexandria, Royal Armouries, Leeds, object IX.950). While in theory a sword can be turned in the hand so that either edge is towards the knuckles, in practice the second finger ring is probably for symmetry and visual balance.

Oakeshott does not cover hilts with more than a simple crossguard in his typology, but this would be a Norman hilt 15 like the sword of Admiral Jacob van Heemskerck (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, object NG-KOG-987-2-1). This type seems to have been most common from 1465 to 1520, but came back into fashion around the year 1600. Several swords of this type from the early 17th century are said to be in the War Museum in Copenhagen. That collection is not online, but the example in the Wallace Collection is, and that sword has a stiff four-sided blade (object A539). The shape of the broad flat hilt feels early to me, but the pommel is typical of later swords, so it could be from the heyday of the harbour c. 1500 or the declining days in the early 17th century.

A common variant added a U-shaped ‘staple’ or ‘post’ joining the two rings perpendicular to the sword blade. This provided additional protection to the top of the hand as weapons slid down the blade, and reinforced the rings. Norman called this hilt 16.

Pommel

Whereas the pommels of knightly swords are usually broad and flat, the pommels of sixteenth-century swords tend to be long, narrow, and equally thick in all directions like a cherry or a pear. This shape would probably belong somewhere in Oakeshott’s Type T if he had continued into the 16th century. While the long rounded pommels give more freedom to the wrist, and the wide pommels help keep the sword from being dragged out of the hand as it cuts something, the change was probably driven by changing taste more than any practical concerns. All types of blades tend to receive the new pommels.

The single incised line at the base and decorative nut are modest ornaments. Arms and armour of the 16th century often have lines cut into them, perhaps with a spinning wheel.

A.V.B. Norman would have called this pommel 16 or pommel 18 (he does not define his types clearly). He cites parallels like a Saints Peter and Paul in Palermo and a Madonna and saints in the Berliner Gemäldegalerie). The saints’ swords don’t have buttons on the ends of the pommels. Pommel 16 appears as early as 1470, but the nut or button is more typical of the sixteenth century. As the team at Arms & Armor explain, the nut makes it easier to file off the peened end of the tang to remove the hilt without scratching the pommel, so it became more useful as hilts became more ornate. Hilts were often swapped onto a new blade, favourite blades were often remounted with the latest hilt, and heavily used swords often start to rattle and will look and sound tidier if they are taken apart and rebuilt. Some medieval swords have pommel nuts (eg. Wallace Collection, London, object A460), but they become more popular in the sixteenth century.

Chronology

Stylistically this sword best fits the periods 1470-1520 and 1600-1650. The earlier date is most consistent with the archaeological context although a sword could be buried in a pit near the seventeenth-century shore as well as dropped or thrown off a fifteenth-century dock. The earlier date would make it roughly contemporary with the Gribshunden, a caravel-built ship armed with breechloading guns for King Hans of Denmark. Princes in the Baltic brought the latest style of ship from warmer parts of Europe, and humbler men could have brought the latest type of sword.

It would be useful to know if Swedes imported broad straight two-edged swords with single-handed grips like they imported single-edged curved dussacks in the sixteenth century. The relatively simple hilt and flat blade was a very common combination around the year 1500, and less common by the seventeenth century. At that time, the flexible cutting blades tend to be mounted on hilts with as much hand protection as possible. Admiral van Heemskerck wore a very similar sword in the seventeenth century, but he probably did not expect to use it as often as the musketeers on his flagship drew their swords.

You can relive the excitement of the original blogging boom (without the original pictures) at https://aardvarchaeology.wordpress.com/?s=sword

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Further Reading

Martin Rundkvist, “Landarkeologi vid Djurhamn 2007–2008,” in K. Schoerner (ed.), Skärgård och örlog. Nedslag i Stockholms skärgårds tidiga historia. Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, Conferences 71 (Stockholm 2009) pp. 139-148

Appendix: Dimensions of the Djurhamn Sword (after Rundkvist 2009: 148)

Measurements taken September 5, 2008 after the sword was conserved.

Total length: 926 mm
Greatest width over the guard: 184 mm
Greatest width of the blade: 40 mm
Width of the ricasso: 30 mm
Greatest width of the tang: 13 mm
Minimum width of the tang: 10 mm
Length of the tang: 82 mm
Hilt length: 155 mm
Blade length: 771 mm
Length of the pommel: 63 mm
Diameter of the pommel: 36 mm
Weight: 829 g
Thickness of the guard at the center: 22 mm
Thickness of the guard at the end: 6 mm
Thickness of the blade near the base: 5 mm
Location of the nicks in the edge, measured from the tip: 64, 163, 285, 390 mm

Edit 2025-11-08: s/in 2017/in 2007;

Edit 2025-11-10: added Aleksić as a curator

Edit 2025-11-13: cite 1599 Künstbuchlein

(scheduled 5 November, based on an email sent 3 November)

1. This can be seen in medieval laws and in the sixteenth-century Central European sources collected by B. Ann Tlusty ↩︎
2. A good example of the difference is the sword-blade of Ottokar II of Bohemia, captured at the Battle on the Marchfeld in 1278. It has a very similar blade to the Djurhamn sword, but a long fuller (and is generally larger and heavier). ↩︎
3. The thickness of medieval swords is rarely published, because the people who measure them are usually swordmakers who can’t afford to share research with their competitors. In addition, many swords have expanded from rusting, or lost metal from being aggressively polished and chemically cleaned. Trusting the measurements of modern swords is dangerous because modern swords are built around standard thicknesses of sheet steel and an economy where grinding steel away is cheap and forging it thicker is expensive. A rare collection of measurements is Nathan Clough’s video How Thick Were Medieval Swords? ↩︎