I am a little high but what if people proposed with beautiful, intricate knives. Ladies would gather around the table and be like “guess what finally happened!!” And pull this beautiful, intricate dagger out of her purse and all the other ladies would gasp and congratulate her
And handmade is clearly better, because look at all the time and effort! Something unique but inexpensive would mean a lot more than something expensive but generic.
I have clearly watched too much Forged In Fire recently, because my first thought was ‘oh my god, put that curl somewhere else, that’s going to hurt to hold’.
Kaskara from southern Sudan. The blade is over 37 inches long and of excellent quality, etched with a floral pattern on the fuller. The grip is wood covered in hide and the scabbard is tooled leather complete with hanging belt.
I don’t wanna like Kill The Joke but this brings up a really cool fact about swords in ~14th-16th century Germany! The only people who were allowed to own Real Swords were the royalty and nobility BUT! Everyone else was allowed to own knives. The definition of a knife, however, was based on not length but handle construction, and to some extent how it was sharpened. The handle had to be constructed Like So with 2 pieces of wood sandwiching the metal tang.
Only one edge was allowed to be sharpened, but oftentimes a small part (a couple inches) of the short edge (e.g. the edge that wasn’t sharp) would be sharpened, and weapon design often allowed for this
In this way, something that looked like This, a messer of just over a meter in length…
…would be legally considered a knife, and therefore allowable for non-nobility to possess. (you can also see the bit on the back of the tip that would be sharpened)
So @swordmutual, there’s a not definitive but certainly interesting historical perspective on your question
Thank you for finally answering my years old question, “why the hell are all these old german swords just called ‘knife’”
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