Well, I heard from my contact in Germany. He is Holger Ratsdorf, an entrepreneur who runs the following company:
http://www.hr-replikate.de/ which sells reproductions of museum items from prehistoric through Medieval times. I have purchased some of his smaller items, a fibula and a Roman era clasp knife and found them to be both exactingly made and very reasonable. I recommend his work highly if you do any re-enacting or have an interest in collecting ancient styles of jewelry, weaponry, etc. Be forewarned, however, that the prices on his weapons do run rather higher than the prices on his other items. Do take a look at his site.
BTW, "Damast" translates as "Damask", as in the cloth, like fine curtains or fine napkins, according to my German-English dictionary.
*********************************************
Guten Morgen Hugh,
The first pattern-welded blades we have in Europe are from the Celtic Era, around 500 BC. The "problem" is, that since that time, EVERY sword (or even every knife blade) was made of damast, up until the 17th/18th century. During that period a lot of different damast-techniques were used, every time had its own style - because technology went on. With the "older" technology, up to 17th century it was impossible to produce a modern steel as the oven was to small, and there was not enough heat for the necessary other chemical reactions. So you got only small pieces of soft iron (no steel!!). You would forge them together; this "mixture" is nearly a kind of damast, but a very soft kind, not useful for tools (I call blades "tools"). You can call every thing made of iron, composed of smaller pieces of iron, fire-welded together a damast. If you examine these objects, you find a typical structure of parallel lines. This says nothing about the quality. If we hear "damast" today, we think only about very fine quality. To get a good quality, we need hard steel. To get this, you had to put pieces of iron into a charcoal fire. During heating up to 800°C, carbon from the coal penetrates into the iron, 0,1mm in one hour, so it takes a long time and big piles of coal to get steel (very expensive!). And then you have to "mix" steel and iron to get a good blade-by fire welding. From around 500 BC up to around 200 AD blades had a "stripe" pattern of parallel lines; if this pattern is done with "bigger" stripes, you can see it still today, when a blade has been well preserved (in water, like the Rhine river). The finer the stripes, the better the quality! and now a strange thing happens, people with little knowledge about ancient technology see the broad stripes and think, "Wow, damast! It's fine quality!" and then they see a blade with fine stripes (but the problem is, that you can not see these fine stripes after a long time into the soil or even from the water because corroded too much!)so they see nothing and think, "Ordinary blade! Nothing special." But these blades were the best. But you can see this only with a special examination; even X-ray is useless for this.
In the beginning of the third century AD we now sometimes begin to see
pattern-welded damast, but the "stripe" damast is still the typical one, up until the beginning of the 6th century. Then we have nearly only the pattern-welded type; up to the 11th century. Then pattern-welded blades begin to disappear; the so-called gegerbte or refined steel was introduced. It's like striped damast, but after welding the block it was folded and doubled, fire welded again and doubled again and so on. This gives you a very very fine "mixture" which is nearly impossible to see with the naked eye. This quality was better than the pattern-welded damast. And with the beginning of "modern times" it vanished. Because then it was possible to get a liquid iron and steel directly out of the oven, which you can mix very easily- because it's liquid. With the old" technique it was impossible to get liquid iron or steel. The first liquid iron we had around 1500 AD, it was only useable for oven plates and not for tools!
So this is a very short history of iron. The Vikings got most of their blades from France and Germany, because of the bad quality of their iron ore, which was not too good for making quality blades (Kiruna in northern Sweden with it's finer iron ore was not discovered at this time).
I have examined some Celtic and roman blades; they were ALL made of
damast. So this person should come to Europe, I can show him a pile of
damast blades (in its original form, the small blade of the rooster folding knife from the Roman era that I sold to you was a damast blade.)
Einen schönen Tag wünsche ich Dir,
Holger
------------------
Walk in the Light,
Hugh Fuller
[This message has been edited by FullerH (edited 03-30-2001).]
