What Did Tolkien's Sting Look Like?

[Silverthorn]

I believe the leaf blade was because of a Celtic influence, leaning towards druid Celts in particular.

It is my belief that they were a large part of his inspiration for the elves.
Mystical people of the forest who had gone into hiding and whose numbers were dwindling...sound at all familiar?

As far as the reforging of Narsil into Anduril, it has a very very familiar feel.

In the story of Arthur breaking Clarent (the sword from the stone), while fighting Lancelot. Clarent fails Arthur because he is in the wrong and lets his pride rule him.
He then goes with Merlin and is given Excalibur from the lady of the lake.

Clarent to Excalibur, Narsil to Anduril

You can see this in the story of Anduril breaking in the face of Sauron, the king was already succumbing to the call of the ring.

In Norse mythology where Sigfried is given the broken sword Gram or Nothung depending on where you read.

(a sword that was drawn from a tree, that nobody else could draw it from)(Also after it was reforged it was said to be able to cut an anvil in twain) Excalibur and Clarent much ?

Even the great smith of the Nibelung dwarf cannot reforge it as it has to be reforged by someone without fear.
Sigfried then files the remains of the blade to powder and re smelts the metal to reforge the sword.

Strider also had to have no fear, although his sword was reforged by elves. In order to claim his birthright and the right of the king to the service of the undead army that was awaiting him for their redemption.

My guess is that his vision for the weapons in the books was wide to say the least.

I see Sting as more of a Scottish dirk style, as opposed to a seax or even the gladius type blade that they made it. The weapons that the rest of the hobbits had that were found in the cairn and given to them by Thom Bombadil were the only ones that I recall being described as leaf bladed.

http://lh3.googleusercontent.com/pu...26X7d31bEA4-ODlxli0qPqHq0U4NGL2NStSb0A0pZqsL1

or maybe even


http://lh4.googleusercontent.com/pu...RnWVx1y0pIw2CWi4raF5VyPQ9-eBUf2kiW8yG2a0oNwU4

just my thoughts on it, Great thread by the way.

 

[A.W.U.K.]

... Also reforging Narsil into Anduril gives me the heebie jeebies. The only way I would have carried Anduril would have been if that "reforging" included melting Narsil down and reforging a blade out of the pieces.

I always cringe at that point

 

[SeaxyBeast]

As far as the reforging of Narsil into Anduril, it has a very very familiar feel.

In the story of Arthur breaking Clarent (the sword from the stone), while fighting Lancelot. Clarent fails Arthur because he is in the wrong and lets his pride rule him.
He then goes with Merlin and is given Excalibur from the lady of the lake.

Clarent to Excalibur, Narsil to Anduril

You can see this in the story of Anduril breaking in the face of Sauron, the king was already succumbing to the call of the ring.

In Norse mythology where Sigfried is given the broken sword Gram or Nothung depending on where you read.

(a sword that was drawn from a tree, that nobody else could draw it from)(Also after it was reforged it was said to be able to cut an anvil in twain) Excalibur and Clarent much ?

Good stuff. Some literary history noodling to go with this. Oldest known source for Clarent/Excalibur is Geoffrey of Monmouth in the 12th C.. Its predecessor in the Welsh materials is Caledfwlch found in poems dating to the 9th C.. Tolkien was hugely influenced by these Welsh tales.

Gram (the earlier name for Sigurd's sword) comes from the Poetic Edda and the Volsung Saga which date to the 13th C.. However, there are picture stones depicting Sigurd's story that date to around the 8th C. so the story itself is much older than its recorded form.

Older still, we have the story of Weland (Volund, etc.), the smith who forges Gram. His story is depicted on the Frank's Casket which dates to 7th C. Northumbria. Weland is mentioned in Beowulf and a bunch of other Germanic sources as well and seems to have been a hugely popular story.

All sources that Prof. Tolkien knew intimately.

I have no idea if the sword in the Welsh material developed independent of influence from the Weland stories or if it was borrowed and I don't know if there is any way to settle it with any certainty from what we have.

 

[Uath]

OK

I just re-read The Hobbit, where Sting is introduced. Tolkien originally referred to it as a "Knife." Only later did he call it a "Dagger."

I think this answers it. Nobody would call a double-edged weapon a "Knife."
I think this proves that Sting was single-edged. I still think that because of Tolkien's affinity for Saxon lore, Sting would be a Seax.

PS

The Dwarves were armed with Mattocks, digging tools. Today, that would mean an axe mattock, or a pick mattock. Not Technically the axes they have come to represent.

Pick-Mattock:

Axe-Mattock:

 

[FortyTwoBlades]

I still always loved the Rankin & Bass representation of Sting.

 

[Triton]

OK

I just re-read The Hobbit, where Sting is introduced. Tolkien originally referred to it as a "Knife." Only later did he call it a "Dagger."

I think this answers it. Nobody would call a double-edged weapon a "Knife."
I think this proves that Sting was single-edged. I still think that because of Tolkien's affinity for Saxon lore, Sting would be a Seax.

...and yet later he called it a "dagger" and said that it was "as good as a short sword for the Hobbit." Things that one would consider unlikely it it were a Seax he were talking about.... if he were one of us. However, as mentioned, Tolkien didn't appear to be particularly interested in edged weapons or equipment or even worrying particularly about anachronisms. (I mean Bilbo had a waistcoat!) Rather he was interested in creating a mythology and the equipment was just part of the scenery. As such I don't think we can take his weapons descriptions (or lack thereof) or even his changing of terms knife to dagger too much to heart. If you want to imagine Sting as a seax that's fantastic, but "proving" it is another thing entirely. I don't think we can do that with the information we currently have.

I think we covered this ground before, I mentioned both the "knife" and "dagger" passages in post #9.

 

[gunfiter]

How about a scabbard?

In The Fellowship of the Ring, when. Bilbo gave Sting to Frodo, Tolkein wrote "He took from the box a small sword in an old shabby leather scabbard."

If I was going to wear a blade inside my pants, it better have a scabbard.

 

[Silverthorn]

I still always loved the Rankin & Bass representation of Sting.

I like that one too, its almost like a Misericord which is a smallish dagger for a man, but for a hobbit, a small sword.
Also, based on the books, hobbits have feet and hands disproportionate to their bodies so the handle might not have seemed as off as the rest of the knife. Similar to how many dwarves have the hands of a larger person.

 

[FortyTwoBlades]

I also love the integrated finger ring with the downturn of the guard.

 

[John Citizen]

I would like to congratulate all who have contributed their thougths to this topic. I'm also a reader of Tolkien (beginning with "The Silmarillion" and ending with "The Return of the King") and I'm not really sure that Tolkien based this saga only in Norse models.
Of corse, I'm not a scholar on Tolkien nor an archaelogist or historian. However, there is this book "The World of Tolkien" by David Day (Gramercy Books), where the author analyzes the mythological sources of the LOTR. Regarding the weapons, for instance, the Rohirrim would be the equivalent of the Goths, in the time of the Late Roman Empire, during the the Battle of Chalons against the Huns.
That being the case, their swords would be like the swords of the time of the Migrations: not wholly roman, not wholly Norse.
My point is: being Tolkien a scholar, he would probably knew about different cultures and their weapons, which he then portrayed in his books, and it would be a mistake to assume that all the weapons described would be Norse-Viking. In "The return of the King", when he speaks of the Southerners, he migth have been thinking arabs-africans.
As I said, just my 0.02 on this very interesting topic.

The mythical continent of Middle Earth was based on Eurasia-Africa. The Shire was located in a geographically similar area to England. Rivendell was likely a Scandinavian city. Gondor was somewhat being culturally related to Rome or Byzantine. Rohan was some Germanic peoples. Mordor was either Sicily, Asia Minor or Transylvania (depends on who you ask).

Tolkien also was a Christian and placed important events on dates of Christian significance, e.g. ring destroyed on the 25th of March, which is the traditional date for Easter; and there are many other examples of this throughout the book.

Some say that The War of the Ring was modelled off The Great War, in which Tolkien was involved, although he rejected claims that he did.

Undoubtedly, there are some references in Tolkien's writings which may be seen to refer to historical events, geography, culture, et cetera.



P.S. I hereby pledge that I will re-read The Lord of the Rings during coronavirus lockdown.

 

[madcap_magician]

For the movies, I think part of the decision making behind the prop weaponry was a desire to have each of the cultures be visually distinct. You can see the Norse heritage in the architecture, armor, and weapons of Rohan, so it would have been visually incongruous to have the elf-made Orcrist, Glamdring, and Sting look dissimilar to the Elvish style.

 

[riversidedep]

http://tolkiengateway.net/w/images/a/ae/J.R.R._Tolkien_-_Conversation_with_Smaug_(large).jpg

Zombie thread but I'll play. This is a drawing by Tolkien in which can be seen 4 or 5 swords, as well as some daggers, axes, and spears. The weapons are very small in the drawing and pretty indistinct. They all look very generic, but I think it shows what he was picturing in his head when he thought of weapons. Either that, or he was just not a good enough artist to draw what he was envisioning.

 

[BitingSarcasm]

For the movies, I think part of the decision making behind the prop weaponry was a desire to have each of the cultures be visually distinct. You can see the Norse heritage in the architecture, armor, and weapons of Rohan, so it would have been visually incongruous to have the elf-made Orcrist, Glamdring, and Sting look dissimilar to the Elvish style.

There is a nice visual encyclopedia of the movies with closeup shots of the armor and weapons of all the races of the LotR films. They talked at length how a visual style was chosen for each race and explained how the weapons evolved from a combination of the base racial imagery with how each race's fighting style was going to be choreographed. I should have bought that book, it really spoke to my inner geek.