Erland, German Executioners Sword
(About): A Germanic Fantasy, Forged In Steel and Bronze
Erlendr – Old Norse for ‘foreigner’ or ‘outsider’, encompassing the lone warrior who comes from afar to vanquish ancient evil, the lindworm that has been terrorizing the town. This is their sword. Throughout the design process of this forbidding weapon, Darksword Armory were at pains to avoid the pitfalls of many other fantasy executioner swords for sale. They are over-designed, impractical and awkward to even hold. Starting from the very first principles, Darksword set out to build a fully functional fantasy barbarian sword that can be used in combat, re-enactment and roleplay from now until Ragnarök. They brag of their Erland Sword as “virtually indestructible” – and we know that when Darksword Armory makes a claim, their weapons will live up to it, every time.
An Inscribed Blade With One Purpose
The blade of our German Executioners Sword is a spectacular blend of history and fantasy, coming together to create a striking vorpal blade. It is lenticular in profile, charactised by a subtly tapering blade, a short tip and a deep, engraved fuller. The most spectacular aspect of the blade of our Erland sword is the stark runic engraving along the whole length of the fuller. These are Elder Futhark runes, belying the sword’s indelible link to Viking mythology. Its design is based on the Oakeshott Type XIIIa. This enormous hand-and-a-half sword descended directly from the late-Viking arming swords, and it emerged in the Crusader period in response to the improving armor of the age – these smashing weapons were long, their edges were nearly parallel, and their points were short or even spatulate (rounded). They were designed purely for one purpose: delivering devastating cutting blows. Such weapons could split helmets and chainmail due to their careful distribution of weight along the blade. These were not delicate fencing swords, and would have been unwieldy for any but the largest warriors. However, our Erland German Executioners Sword has been subtly adjusted from these historical originals by Darksword Armory’s expert designers and master-smiths. The engraved fuller is deep and wide, running almost the whole length of the blade, reducing the blade’s weight and drawing the point-of-balance in closer to the hilt. The blade has a subtle distal taper, meaning it gets slenderer in cross-section from hilt to tip, further balancing the whole sword. The stocky incipient ricasso (the built-up blunt length of blade below the guard) also anchors the point-of-balance. All of these minute adjustments to the blade design create a weapon that is fluid and agile, whilst retaining the presence and weight of a heavy cutting sword. The lenticular cross-section lends this sword the flexibility to bend with the enormous shearing forces involved in full-force blade impacts.
Modern Blade Construction for The Needs of Modern Sword Wielders
In pursuit of creating a rugged and useable sword that will stand up to everything that you can throw at it, Darksword Armory’s master smiths have chosen ultra-modern 5160 spring steel from which to hand-forge the blade of Erland, our German Executioners Sword. Steel in the Viking age was an extremely temperamental material. Producing steel in the bloomery furnaces available to the smiths of the age was haphazard at best, with techniques being passed on only orally from master to apprentice. The best steel came of the Viking Age was the mysterious wootz steel from South India known as ‘Damascus steel’, which would have been acquired by Western European smiths only in tiny quantities, likely via the Mediterranean trade with Islamic empires in the East. Weapons made from Damascus steel would have been qualitatively in a different league to even the best swords made by other steelmaking methods; perhaps it was this material that inspired Viking legends about King Hrolf Kraki’s sword Skofnung, which was unbreakably hard and supernaturally sharp. However, whilst some of the finest medieval steels approached the quality of modern ones, they would have been extremely rare. Using far more consistent modern steels such as 5160 means that Darksword’s master smiths can turn out perfect blades, time after time after time. As an added bonus, 5160 steel is alloyed with a small percentage of chromium, making it stainless and corrosion-resistant (although we highly recommend keeping your weaponry dry at all time, especially when in storage!). Darksword Armory have hardened the blade with their signature differential-temper, which hardens the edge to 60 HRc, keeping the core at 48-50 HRc. This dual temper means that the Erland German Executioners Sword has both fantastic edge retention and resilient flex to roll with the punches without damage. All of this superior craft is guaranteed by Darksword Armory’s makers mark, a dragon sejant on the blade just below the guard.
A Dragon’s Claw Hilt Made With Viking Heritage Techniques
The hilt of our Erland Sword conjures terrifying beasts from a dark Gothic past. Germanic and Nordic peoples in the Early Middle Ages were well-versed in the poetry and songs written by the skalds, the bardic writers of Scandinavia, whose name is not soft and gentle as we might associate with poetry today – the word skald comes the Germanic route ‘to shout’. These were not odes to flowers and feelings, but litanies of achievements and conquests, betrayal and slayings. And no skaldic epic would be complete without a dragon. These fearsome beasts litter Germanic mythology, heralding dangerous evil – and so for Darksword Armory’s designers to include dragon’s claws into the hilt of the Erland German Executioners Sword is a bold statement indeed: this is the sword of a dragonslayer. The guard of our Erland Sword has been lovingly sculpted and cast from solid-bronze using the ‘lost-wax’ method, a historically authentic technique with which Viking artisans created their finest art objects. The cross-guard is short and robust, in a typical Viking bar-style, but with the addition of dramatic pointed langets, and of course, the spectacular bronze dragon claws that curve downward to frame the wide blade. The grip is a generous hand-and-a-half style which, sadly, was never seen on Viking blades, since their prime concern was freedom to wield the large Germanic round-shield – thus it further magnifies the fantastical aspect of this fierce weapon. The sword is capped off with a flourish: the scent-stopper style pommel is also made from glorious cast bronze. It has been meticulously weighted so as to balance the Erland Executioners Sword just so – it combines the weighty presence of a large Germanic cutting blade with the finesse of a legendary blade straight out of the sagas. The hilt has been constructed with a full-tang, peened construction: all of the hilt components are slotted directly onto the long tang of the blade, and then secured in place by peening the protruding end. This means our Erland German Executioners Sword is a 100% functional, battle-ready sword – indeed, Darksword have designed it specifically to be used in simulated combat settings. Its temper and its construction mean that it is safe in contact with other blades of similar hardness (make sure you match hardnesses and take maximum safety precautions, otherwise you could chip, damage or even shatter the less hard blade!).
When all is said and done, you’ll have to vanquish a great serpent to find a finer functional fantasy sword. As any sword collector will tell you, Darksword Armory’s weaponry is amongst the finest modern historical reproductions on the market – and they have truly excelled themselves with this fantasy executioners sword for sale. It would make for an absolutely stunning addition to any fantasy roleplay outfit inspired by the ‘barbarian’ cultures of the Early Middle Ages. It could be the devastating two-handed weapon of a berserker, or the magical blade of an armored dragonslayer. It is the envy of any einherjar who has attained the halls of Valhalla.
(Curiosity): Germanic Draconology
We don’t often think of the Vikings as ‘German’ – but there is no doubt historically that the Vikings and the Germans are closely related, culturally and linguistically. After the Roman Empire withdrew in the 5th-century CE, old social and political ties loosened in the vacuum, and many different political groups and tribes moved around, settling new areas, conquering territories and peacefully intermarrying in equal measure. This is what scholars call the ‘Migration Period’. Although for the sake of brevity we have to massively oversimplify a complex and little-understood period of history, in broad strokes: two large Germanic groups, the Goths from southern Scandinavia and the Vandals from modern Poland, moved southward into Western Europe, establishing states in Germany and Spain (some Vandals even ended up establishing a kingdom in North Africa!) – the peoples who stayed behind were the ancestors of the Vikings. This means that there is a significant overlap of shared mythology between Germanic and Norse peoples, with common ideals, recurring heroic tropes – and the same dark beasts who stalk in the shadows. The most fearsome of all of these beasts are the wily Germanic dragons, whose malign intelligence is a fearful foe for many a protagonist. These beasts fall into two broad categories: the lindworm and the sea serpent.
Lithe Lindworms
The first of these categories is the sly, winding lindworm. In terms of their specific physiology, unlike later four-limbed dragons the lindworm has only two forelimbs and no wings – Norse artistic examples seem to depict it as slithering and coiling in the manner of a snake. The word derives from lind-, associated with agility and softness, and orm, a snake.
The dragons of Norse mythology frequently fall into the lindworm category, being intelligent and wily creatures whose physical form reflects their characteristics (a technique employed by smart storytellers to this day!). One of the most famous of these is the ormr Fáfnir. This story is contained in the Völsunga saga, an Icelandic texts written down in the late 13th-century, but which is clearly a transcription of a much older oral tradition. Modern scholarship widely agrees that part of the Völsunga saga are based on events which happened during the Migration Period, such as the destruction of the Germanic Burgundians by the Huns in the 5th century. Again, this points to the deep common mythic heritage between the Norse and Germanic peoples. In the Völsunga saga, Fáfnir was originally a dwarf, the son of the dwarf King Hreidmar. When his brother was killed by the Aesir in a hunting accident (his brother had adopted the form of an otter, as you do), the trickster god Loki paid King Hreidmar the blood-price with cursed magic gold, and a gold ring called Andvaranaut. This ring was able to bring great wealth, but would ultimately bring the death of its keeper. Corrupted by the cursed greed, Fáfnir killed his father the King, and stole all of his gold for himself, retreating into the wilderness and transforming into an ormr, sitting atop his horde and guarding it jealously. Norse artistic representations depict Fáfnir in dragon form as a lindworm – for example, the earliest depiction of the Völsunga saga, the Ramsund carving which dates to around 1000 CE, shows Fáfnir as a curling abstracted serpent, encircling the events of the story. In the bottom right, you can even see the hero Sigurd impaling the lindworm with his sword – could that be Erland, our German Executioners Sword?
Folk representations of lindworms continue to appear in the Germanic tradition throughout the medieval period, and even right up into the 19th-century. There is a magnificent fountain called the Lindwurmbrummen in the German city of Klagenfurt depicting an enormous dragon. This dragon was terrorising the area in 13th-century, and it was finally slain by a group of plucky peasants, who anchored a chain to a bull and hooked the dragon like a fish. The skull of this enormous creature was discovered in a nearby quarry in 1335, and it was used as the basis for a sculptural reconstruction of the animal in 1590. This finished stone sculpture became the basis for the Lindwurmbrummen, which was completed in 1624. Around a century later the town added a statue of Hercules slaying said dragon, who had by then apparently replaced the dragonslaying farmers. Of course, there was no dragon – the enormous skull that was dug up in the 14th-century was identified in the 1800s as that of a woolly rhinoceros from the last Ice Age – but the mythological status of the Klagenfurt lindworm was such that it found its way onto the coat of arms of the city, which remain to this day.
Soggy Sea Serpents
The Norse peoples were deeply connected with the sea. They were colonisers and traders, the routes for all of which were over sea, since land travel under load was arduous and slow even on the few roads of the medieval period. The sea was a great source of bounty for the Vikings too, both in fish, and in loot from raiding. But the seas were only barely understood in the early medieval period: without doubt the Vikings were skilled navigators, able to cross large distances swiftly and accurately using practical methods such as astronavigation, but they did not have systematic maps of the known world. Who knows what could be out there? It is unsurprising that the Vikings filled in these gaps with enormous beasts and serpents from their mythology. The greatest of these mythic sea serpents was Jörmungandr. Its name literally means ‘huge monster’, and it does exactly what it says on the tin. Jörmungandr is so vast that its body encircles the entire world, gripping its tail in its mouth, its undulating body mistaken by sailors for chains of islands. In several sagas, Thor and the jötunn Hymir actually manage to catch Jörmungandr on a fishing trip by luring him with an ox’s head!
At the end of the world, during the period known Ragnarök, the Germanic legends foretell that Jörmungandr will slither out from the sea onto the land, to fight a final climactic battle with Thor. The thunder-god will slay the sea serpent, but he will be mortally poisoned by the beast, and fall dead after nine steps. Perhaps if he is armed with Erland, our German Executioners Sword, he might survive!
Technical Specifications:
- Total length: 44 inches
- Blade length: 32 inches
- Blade material: 5160 carbon steel
- Blade hardness: 60 HRc at edge ; 48-50 HRc at core
- Guard and pommel material: Solid bronze
- Grip material: Leather
- Weight: 4.5 lbs.