A small number of ‘super-strong’ Viking swords have been revealed that are forged of metal so pure that researchers are currently unable to explain how they were made with the innovation thought to be available at the time. To add to the secret, all of the weapons are engraved with a single word – ‘Ulfberht’
It was the sword of option for the discerning Viking – super-strong, and nearly unequalled in fight. Mystery surrounds a small number of Viking swords revealed in archeological excavations.
They are all engraved with a single word – ‘Ulfberht’, which experts believe might expose their maker.
< img src ="// cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/2255/3777/files/sword_large.png?v=1536054035" alt="The Super-strong' Ulfberht'Viking Sword"> a single word-‘Ulfberht’-on the blade of a
Viking
sword. Specialists believe a German monastry may have been accountable for the product of the super-strong weapons. About 170 Ulfberhts have been found in total, dating from 800 to 1,000 A.D. They are made from metal so pure it baffled archaeologists, who thought the technology to forge such metal was not created for another 800 or more years, throughout the Industrial Transformation. In the procedure of forging iron, the ore must be warmed to 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit to liquify, permitting the blacksmith to
eliminate the pollutants, referred to as’slag ‘. Carbon is likewise blended in to make the fragile iron stronger. Present thinking is that Middle ages innovation did not allow iron to be warmed to such a heat, so slag was eliminated by pounding it out, a far less reliable technique. The Ulfberht, however, has almost no slag,
and it has a carbon material 3 times that of other metals from the time. New research is assisting to get closer to the source of the swords, and possibly even
to the kiln in which these legendary weapons were forged. Alan Williams of the Wallace Collection in London has actually studied the blades, and thinks the maker is unique.
‘It’s just like putting the ‘Apple’name on a computer,’he said. They were exceptionally rare and important, and would have
been treasured ownerships of the most elite Vikings. Robert Lehmann, a chemist at the Institute for Inorganic Chemistry at the University of Hannover, studied an Ulfberht sword discovered in 2012 on a stack of gravel excavated from the Weser River, which flows through Lower Saxony in northwestern Germany. This sword’s blade has a high manganese material, which indicated to Lehmann that it did not originate from the East.
The guard was made from iron with a high arsenic material, which suggests a European deposit.
He traced the result in a website in the Taunus area, just north of Frankfurt, Germany – where he thinks it might have been made.
Whilst this doesn’t describe how the swords were made it does a minimum of get us closer to where they were made.