Ulfberht swords

[Brian G Turner]

This is a fascinating topic, not least because some Vikings were using swords whose strength and purity of steel would not be seen in Europe again until the industrial period.

Research has the Vikings sourcing iron ingots from India, which happened to contain Vanadium and other trace elements which provided additional strength.

There is also a further unique process some Viking smiths used to reduce impurities, and they marked their swords with the word Ulfberht.

These weapons must have had a high reputation, because archaeologists have found weaker copies that misspelled the name.

Anyway, just a few references for anyone else wanting to look moe closely into this aspect of sword forging:

Ulfberht - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Wootz steel - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Key Role of Impurities in Ancient Damascus Steel Blades

And here's a really interesting program on Youtube about it:

 

[Wizraban]

I watched a TV report on these Ulfberht swords some time ago. Then I looked what Wikipedia had to say. It was quite interesting to see how different the information in different Wikipedias was. While the English one replicated the report, the German version debunked it as nonsense.

It seems quite obvious to me that the swords weren't made by Vikings. The signature is written in Latin letters rather than runes, and it contains Christian symbols, not pagan ones.

 

[thaddeus6th]

Ulfberht swords were mentioned in the Viking Unofficial Manual as being excellent.

This also reminds me of a Lindy Beige video where he had a go at the katana's mighty reputation and suggested Viking swords (no brand mentioned) were better, but, better still, were even older Celtic swords.

Edited extra bit: I knew I'd read something relevant earlier today. It's about vanadium, mostly to do with battery power, but there's a little about steel blades:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-27829874