Pretty much. Steel is much better than it was then if you want quality. Whatever traits you’re seeking there is a modern steel that can do it and do it better than historical steel.
Again, I don’t think anyone would dispute that, but the question was about individuals forging blades, and from what I’ve read it seems that the stuff people can forge by hand today isn’t necessarily better than that which was hand-forged centuries ago. We don’t make machine-made, super high tech swords for combat these days, or at least, not in any quantities; I guess there are some somewhere.
Oh yeah, I don’t think that’s disputed. It’s a matter of resources. Centuries ago there was a lot of interest and focus on making swords because they were a premier weapon. Nowadays it’s just a few folks cranking them out for nostalgia and hobby purposes. Of course the hand made stuff isn’t better today than it was centuries ago.
If someone invented a magic bullet nullifier tomorrow and suddenly we had to go back to edged weapon combat, then things would be different. We would have reason to bring the full force of our modern metallurgy, engineering, and industrial expertise to bear on the problem. I’m betting we would make some kickass swords in that situation.
Sure we do, it’s just a specialty thing. A lot of modern sword makers make machine-made swords out of high quality steel that would put most historical blades to shame. They’re perfectly combat ready and capable.
They aren’t mass producing them like M4s or anything, but that’s more a matter of demand than anything. It’s not like the Army is calling for half a million longswords or anything.
Yeah, I do agree that hand forged swords today aren’t likely to be quite as quality as hand-forged swords from 700 years ago, give or take. Though to be fair to modern smiths, that’s more due to a lack of necessity and incentive than anything else, plus of course techniques lost to time.
Still, a machine forged swords tends to be stronger and more “usable” than a hand forged one, depending on who did the forging and who assembled and material of steel and etc., and machine forged blades are easier to assemble as well. Though even machine forged blades are still hand assembled in some manner - the hilt is still wrapped by a person, usually, or the peening is done manually, for another example. It usually comes down to how the blade is shaped and cut, from what I’ve read, as to how “hands-on” the process gets.
For anyone who wants to see how a machine made sword is forged, I found this fascinating - a quick overview of how Albion produces their museum-quality, battle-ready replicas:
A modern smith could create a superior sword if he used modern materials. It’s just a question of how “authentic” you want to get. If it includes using dirty ore and smelting your own iron/steel then they will be inferior. If they use an arc furnace with laboratory grade ingredients to make a modern steel blend, then go hammer on it, you’d get a superior sword using ancient techniques, just with better science and quality controls.
The interesting part for me was the molten salt bath for the annealing step. No idea they did that now.
You’ve got to figure though, that it’s about traditions and knacks, and usually closely-held family traditions knacks at that.
It’s parallel to the martial arts in general. It turns out that the West had extraordinarily sophisticated martial arts too, but all those traditions got lost or mutated into sports or pastimes or hobbies because guns. China and Japan, on the other hand, took to guns more recently, so we’re lucky (from the point of view of antiquarian interest) to have more of their martial arts traditions in a form closer to their sophistication as functional killing arts. e.g. there are still some families and clans in China whose scions were caravan bodyguards, etc., using edged weapons, only a few generations ago, so there’s a sort of fag-end of functional ancient martial arts still being taught here and there.
Same with making the stuff people used to kill with - family traditions and knacks mostly, and now completely lost, but in Asia there’s still a trailing edge of some of the old traditions.
I want to go to Iceland, make a hammer out of a block of ice, and forge my own sword out of iron I mined myself, on a glacier, in the gloaming light, while behind me a volcano is erupting ash and lightning.
Pretty much this. If you try and smelt you own “Damascus” steel in your authentic clay crucible fired in a brick oven using charcoal… you’re going to get an inferior steel that probably isn’t as good as the stuff that the ancient smiths put out of their forges after a generation or two of trial-and-error. And to be clear: even the best ancient smiths with their honed techniques and practice still put out a lot of crap with high failure rates – the ability to properly time the annealing and/or quenching was simply not there and they were at the mercy of materials-quality that they simply could not judge.
Modern metallurgy and industrial processes can (and do!) produce blades that would make the works of the old master smith look amateurish. While fiction is full of cases where the ancient blade is functionally superior to the modern one because of some half-mystic “lost art”, the fact of the matter is that we revere the old blades because they are hand-crafted, original works of art, not because they are actually better in any objective way.
The step that always gets left out of the legends is “the smith then made ten swords, and nine of them shattered when tested. The tenth was awesome though!” I’d say there was a lot of practical testing after the initial forging (whack it against something) and shaping (whack it against something) before they proceeded on to the final shaping, sharpening, and polishing.
The single biggest difference between then and now is practicality. Then, the stuff they made was going to be used in life or death situations. If anyone actually made swords for battle today–which, in general, they do not–there is no pressure to do it right beyond commercial or artistic drives. There is no real way to test swords in battle because no one uses them for war any more. Without the feedback loop, too, from constant use, there’s no way to really assess swordsmithing as a practical art.
We need sword fighting robots. Someone get Boston Dynamics on the line.
I dunno. I bet if you visited one of the factories that produce knives for use by combat troops, you’d be surprised at the specialized processing and quality-control that goes into some of these things.
A roommate in college was the scion to a family business making knives. Not a big firm, but fairly well thought-of. As a young Materials Engineering student, I got into a conversation with his father about the various steels that they used in their blades - they put a fair amount of thought and testing into the different styles. Tiny pocket-knife blades were highly ductile and relatively soft and homogeneous metal, while their bigger blades were actually forged with sword-like properties… big-crystal steel at the core and small-crystal tempered metal at the edges, etc, etc.
Is the Marine Corps sabre purely ceremonial or is it actually a working sword?
I intended–though I can’t recall if I actually did-- to note that knives are an exception, as yeah, there are a lot of excellent combat knives out there. But not swords, which are quite different in employment and use than knives as we generally think of them. I think my point still stands–we don’t sword fight any more, so there is no feedback loop for combat swordsmiths to benefit from, and hence, we have only theoretical knowledge of how good our stuff might be. Of course, yeah, it’s 99.99% likely modern combat swords, if made and used, would kick ass. But without actual sword combat, with armor, who knows?
Sneaky swords, making a comeback now after people stopped wearing armor. :)
Wow, you have not the slightest idea. TheWombat pretty much nails it. Feedback and proper testing are an outmost important part. You just don’t cut plastic bottles or halfed swines to get the needed input.
Interesting article (comparing Damascus, Nihonto (Katana) and the Viking Ulfberht):
We can say that, from a metallurgical perspective, all of these blades were far ahead of their time. All, at their best, exhibit qualities far beyond the global average for smiths at that time, and indeed equal or exceed some modern standards. They are all well worthy of their place in cutting legends.
http://www.tameshigiri.ca/2014/01/21/razor-edged-3-comparing-metallurgy/
I grant that point - since we don’t have thousands of people hacking at each other wearing armor there is no impetus to improve the art.
The key terms there are “at that time” and especially the “some” in “some modern standards”. The fact that Ulfberht swords used a remarkably-clean steel for the time (imported from the Caliphate, incidentally – the Europeans would not be able to match that quality themselves for several centuries) is great and laudable… but it was still lousy metal compared to practically anything that we would manufacture for the same purpose today. Saying that a top-of-the line katana was made of better metal than your wrought-iron patio furniture may be true, but it’s also beyond the point (<– terrible pun). I guarantee you that any medieval smith would have paid any price to acquire the steel in your car’s axle.
The article Lynch linked has an embedded documentary about trying to replicate the Ulfberht blades using the same techniques today. It’s an hour long, but well-worth the watching (I caught it a couple months back on some cable channel or another). In it they do a reasonably-thorough analysis of the steel’s ductility, tensile strength and hardness – which is fairly key since a sword needs all three; by comparison, the article itself focuses mostly on hardness to try and convince you that the old materials were comparable with today’s… which is simply misleading (to be fair, they do better later on when they talk about the Japanese swords).
If I have time tonight I think I’ll watch the Japanese documentary that is farther down in the article – if it’s made by the same people it should be a good watch.
Listen, I’m not trying to take anything away from high-quality ancient smiths. They were brilliant people who derived spectacular techniques to make up for the fact that their materials science was very limited. And Wombat’s point is valid – we don’t have too much of an incentive to improve sword technology beyond where it is right now; if we did, would modern smiths develop something similar to damacasizing with modern materials? Sure, maybe… though as a guy that used to do this stuff for a living (though I concentrated on composites back in the day), I have to say that there are millions of equally-pressing engineering problems out there that have metallurgists innovating; it’s not like we learned how to forge aluminum and decided we were done with ferrous alloys or sharp edges.
The next sword i buy will be a lightsaber (and i think we covered those getting some serious research in the science thread a while back?). I’ll always love my cold steel blades, but the lightsaber will 0wn/w1n or some such.