The pirating of the Solingen name was not a one-way affair. Some German bladesmiths, recognizing the personal reputation of their best foreign competitors, applied fake markings—work attributed to Tomás de Ayla, a prominent Spanish swordsmith, is one example. In some cases, these forged blades were actually inferior to the German smiths’ usual product and may have been poorly made in an attempt to destroy the competitor’s reputation.
High-quality blades were also forged at Augsburg, Mainz, Nuremberg, Strasbourg, and Danzig throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance, their makers stamping them with the forms of eagles, lions, bears, wolves, horses, unicorns, or serpents—and adding Latin mottos, biblical verses, prayers, charms, curses, anagrams, and secret ciphers. Among the artists who made designs for such emblems were Hans Holbein the Elder, Albrecht Dürer, and Rembrandt. The most famous marking of all was “Me Fecit Solingen”—“Solingen Made Me.” How highly the city’s work was prized may be gathered from the fact that in 1600 Pope Clement VIII presented the convert King Henri IV of France with a Solingen sword on the occasion of his wedding, while Louis XIV paid 28,000 livres to the Elector of Brandenburg and 40,000 livres to the Elector of Bavaria for their craftsmen’s swords—huge sums for their day. Royal families throughout Europe ordered their swords from Solingen.
The Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) sharply increased the demand for weaponry, forcing Solingen into mass production and creating intense competition among its swordmakers. The guilds enforced stringent controls over production, so a swordmaker could not make more than four broadswords daily—although he could substitute six daggers or stilettos. Trademarks were de rigueur, and bladesmiths jealously guarded their skills. “The ability to produce an artisan product in defiance of another’s knowledge,” writes Frederick Stephens in his history of German swords, “was the foundation stone upon which almost all the craft guilds came into existence—closed societies which taught only their own, and some other chosen few, the skills and secrets of their craft, thus ensuring for perpetuity their labour, market, and wealth from their own skilled hands.”17 Members were put under oath never to leave the jurisdiction, and by the seventeenth century three hundred specialist families in and around Solingen were producing swords.
The cartelism of the closed brotherhoods cut two ways: many who wished to become bladesmiths but were excluded left for Copenhagen, Paris, or Moscow. In 1687 a group of English merchants lured nine families of swordmakers from Solingen to settle in northern England. This came as a devastating shock to the burghers of Solingen and nearby Cologne, who threatened dire penalties. The emigrant cutlers responded by marking their blades with the famous emblem of the Solingen wolf: they were not to be intimidated. The exodus continued: a group of Solingen smiths established themselves at Tula in Russia in 1730; four decades later, groups emigrated to Eskilstuna in Sweden, Danzig in Poland, and Klingenthal in eastern France. In 1814, following Napoleon’s disastrous campaign in Russia, a number of German swordsmiths set up in Zlatoust, north of Omsk. The blademaking center they founded continues today, having evolved into one of the largest weapons-manufacturing complexes of Eastern Europe.
AROUND 1875 RICHARD BURTON, WORKING ON HIS SECOND VOLUME of the history of the sword, came to Solingen. On notepaper headed “Hotel Feder, Turin” he recalls his day “in the industrious valley of the Wupper,” which is “quite enough to show the reasons why the foils and rapiers bearing that famous hand are still so popular throughout Europe.” Solingen, Burton went on, “is a regular black town, one long street following the brow of a hill and splitting into a three-pronged fork to the south. It is never clear, dark with coal dust like the faces of the men.” When Burton passed through, the Gau (district) had about 30,000 inhabitants, the town itself 14,000. “They are independent in manner,” he observed. “The men drink hard and are handy with their knives.”
The city had not yet been touched by the Industrial Revolution. “The hammering and forging are utterly ignorant of progress,” Burton noted, with a clear contempt for this distasteful modern affectation. “The tempering is done in water as usual.… Solingen keeps its place in the market because [its blades are] chiefly made by hand: if more machinery were used it would soon lose rank.” His statement is doubly surprising, first because water rather than oil was being used, and second because the advent of the steam engine had led to the creation of countless new engines, and by the time of Burton’s visit the arduous job of forging a blade over an anvil by hand was already yielding to mechanically driven hammers. Many bladesmiths disliked and distrusted the new machines, but such innovation provided opportunities for mass production that could not be avoided.c
Business in Solingen was nevertheless brisk. The extension of trade, as well as the demands of war, meant that orders poured in from around the world, including the United States, for swords and bayonets. In 1847 a mechanism for rolling blades from long strips of steel was introduced, a painful blow to the old masters. Within the year, the swordsmiths had given up their traditional proof marks and substituted the trademarks of the newly consolidated firms. Solingen’s artisans had finally been recruited to factory work.
However, after 1900 craftsmen once more came into their own, as diplomats, statesmen, and military officers requested individually made arms. Solingen flowered again, into a prosperity that lasted almost two decades. The total defeat of the Reich in 1918 brought ruin on the town. Attempts were made to convert the factories to such items as scissors and tableware, but these contributed little. Solingen would lie dormant and decaying until Adolf Hitler came to power. In April 1933 a group of city fathers went to Berlin to petition the Führer. Not only did he agree to see them, but it was at their meeting that the idea of daggers for servants of the Third Reich was proposed.
Hitler was keen to lift Germany from the economic depression gripping the developed world and to remind his countrymen of their past glories. A professor from Solingen’s Industrial Trade School designed the prototype weapon for the SA and SS, and on February 6, 1934, the first orders were placed. Soon weapons fever was rampant: nearly every Nazi Party and military organization wanted its own identifying brand of dagger and sword.d
Led by Hermann Göring, who was seldom seen without an edged weapon of some fashion in his belt, the new Germany idolized the sword. One Solingen firm alone produced seventy thousand swords and daggers between 1938 and 1941, just for naval use (and the German navy was principally a submarine force)—still only a small portion of its overall output for the period.
The last three years of the war saw yet another reversal as Allied bombs shattered Solingen. The Reich’s worsening position meant that even skilled craftsmen were being called up. Copper shortages forced the substitution of aluminum in pommels, crossguards, and scabbard fittings, while a diminished workforce made inferior products. With war’s end, hundreds of thousands of Nazi swords were removed from Solingen’s factories by Allied soldiers, who drove tanks back and forth over them.
One sunny October morning two years ago, I visited Solingen. The valleys leading into the town were bathed in a light haze, and the falling leaves imparted a melancholy beauty. It could not have been more different from Toledo, perched defiantly atop a huge hill as if challenging its enemies to besiege it. Toledo still looks like a proud medieval fortress, but Solingen bears little trace of its famous past. Now even “Old Fritz,” the affectionate nickname given to its emblematic statue of a swordsmith, has been removed from the marketplace of the old town, where it stood for centuries. The one factory I visited was little more than a couple of rooms devoted to making steelware for domestic use: if I had been hoping to find glittering blades to rival those of earlier times, I was disappointed.
The author of a book I was reading on Nazi weaponry concluded sadly, “Since the demand today for edged weapons is so limited, [Solingen’s] firms are turning more and more toward the production of cutlery and tableware as a full-time industry. It is extremely doubtful that the Solingen machinery for producing
swords and daggers will ever again hum at the high pitch attained during the peak of the Third Reich.”19 Only an obsessive sword collector, I reflected, could regard that as a calamity.
AFTER THE WAR, A BAN ON MAKING OR POSSESSING SWORDS WAS imposed upon Japan as well as on Germany and lasted seven years—effectively until the Americans left in 1952. For the first time in its history, swordmaking in Japan came to a halt. (The practice of kendo, the martial art that imitates samurai swordplay, was also outlawed, but the Japanese soon initiated a different form of the sport, and by about 1947 were training again, in secret.)
The statue of “Old Fritz,” for decades a centerpiece of the Solingen marketplace. (illustration credit 5.3)
The experience was uniquely painful. Swordmaking lay at the heart of Japan’s high culture; the best swords were often ancient heirlooms, with their own names, handed down through the generations. Now they were confiscated, taken as souvenirs by the conquering troops, or destroyed. Yet these weapons had embodied something profound: blademakers had decorated their forges with religious symbols and worn ceremonial costume. A swordsmith was forbidden to engage in sexual activity for three days before beginning work on a blade or during the process, and approached his task only after elaborate rituals of purification and prayer. Swordmaking in Japan was a world apart: for all the pride in craftsmanship and the high-quality work in Toledo or Solingen, only in Japan was it a spiritual activity.
Religion was interwoven with tradition.20 Two of the earliest authorities we have, both books from the eighth century A.D., state that Japanese iron swords and swordsmanship date back to the shindai (the age of the gods), which is not very helpful. Most likely, the technology that led to the development of Japan’s swordmaking actually originated in China and crossed over via Korea around the fourth century. Steel swords, many from China, have been recovered from tombs of the fourth and fifth centuries. Japan’s own blades date from at least A.D. 794 and ended as weapons of war in 1945. During those eleven centuries there can be distinguished seven distinct periods of production: Heian, Kamakura, Nanbokucho, Muromachi, Momoyami, Edo, and Meiji. Whereas there had been 450 identified swordsmiths over the 300 years of the mid- to late-Heian period and 1,150 during the 150 years of Kamakura, there were 3,550 during the 250 years of Muromachi. It is to these we must refer in order to explain what made Japanese swords, in the words of John Keegan, “the best edged weapons that have ever been made.”21e
In the later Japanese Middle Ages, a completed blade would be tested on the corpses of criminals (not murderers, or anyone with a skin disease), an elaborate procedure (tameshigiri) involving sixteen separate forms of cut, ranging in difficulty, until the examiner was satisfied. A good sword might use up as many as three whole corpses before it lost its edge; the record appears to have been seven. Bruce Chatwin, in his short story “The Estate of Maximilian Tod,” writes chillingly of a blade dated 1279 and signed by Toshiru Yoshimitsu, the greatest swordsmith of the time, which carried a mark that “signified that it had successfully performed, on a criminal, the movement known as iai, an upward thrust that severs the body clean from the right hip to the left shoulder.”22 Clan members who did the testing would generally effect three thousand practice cuts in the morning and eight hundred in the evening with blades mounted in a special grip.
This important exception apart, the process of manufacture was not intrinsically different from elsewhere, but the cultural and religious importance of swordmaking meant that greater care was taken, and it showed. The most prized Japanese blade still had to justify its aesthetic qualities by its effectiveness as a weapon. Such objects aroused, and arouse still, a mingled sense of power and beauty, awe and terror.
The “golden age” of these swords was the Kamakura period (1185–1333), when the great bladesmith Goro Nyudo Masamune of Soshiu perfected the technique of joining a hardened edge to a flexible core. He also repeatedly doubled over each steel billet, creating a multiplicity of inner surfaces, continually strengthening the blade that resulted. His disciple, Getsu, would “fold” the steel up to fifteen times—that is, creating two to the power of fifteen, or more than thirty thousand layers—infinitely thinner than tissue paper.f “It was as if he were trying to combine the flexibility of rubber with the hardness of glass,” one connoisseur wrote of Getsu’s work.24 Sometimes a rose was kept nearby; only when the color of the steel was neither too red nor too orange but matched that of the rose could the folding process begin. After the folding came the tempering, until each blade “glowed to the color of the morning sun,” that being the color of Japan (itself meaning “the source of the sun”).
Each blade would be coated with a mixture of clay, ash, and iron filings to retard the outward flow of heat. Parts of the coating would be scraped away, creating different patterns according to the school of blademaking and personal choice. The blade would then be heated again until it was cherry red—around 900 degrees Fahrenheit—and finally quenched. This process of “differential quenching” seems to be unique to Japan.
Samurai swords are still made, but not for military use. After 1953 smiths from what was called “the lost generation” returned to the craft, and there is now a flourishing guild of bladesmiths making gendaito (“modern swords”), working under strict government control. Each smith is limited to two blades a month, a figure derived from the work rate of one Akihira Miyairi, a much-revered but notably slow craftsman. New smiths must undergo not less than ten years’ apprenticeship.g
The craftsman has given way to the machine, and the market today, all for sporting goods, is dominated by Britain (Leon Paul), Ukraine (Lammet), Saint Petersburg, and France (France Lames and Blaise). France Lames produced more than 150,000 new swords—almost half of them foils—in 2000 alone.
Recent improvements have been driven not by aesthetics or even cost but by safety concerns. A modern blade is functional rather than beautiful. There is no time for the Japanese passion for detail. In his book Bushido: The Soul of Japan, about the cult of the Japanese warrior, Inazo Nitobe describes the sword’s “cold blade, collecting on its surface the moment it is drawn the vapor of the atmosphere; its immaculate texture, flashing light of bluish hue; its matchless edge … the curve of its back, uniting exquisite grace with utmost strength.”25 A high-flown vision; but then swordplay remains something different for Japan—no mere adjunct to religious practice but a central part of it, embodying a history of skill, philosophy, and codes of honor that provide a revealing counterpoint to swordplay in the West.
* He was very happy there and was disappointed when promoted to more “suitable” duties. My father was a big man, six feet, two inches tall. Even at the age of fourteen, he fought as a heavyweight and went on to be named second best amateur at the weight in the country. In the early 1930s he reached the final of the Amateur Championships, where he was up against the defending champion, and by the end of the opening round he was ahead on points.
At the start of the second round, The Times reported, my father landed “a fearful blow” to his opponent’s head and was alarmed to see his eyes glaze over. To the astonishment of the ringside spectators, “concerned for the man,” he was heard to ask, “Are you all right?” At which point his semiconscious adversary, in a reflex action, let go “an equally violent blow,” which knocked my father to the canvas and “successfully deprived him of the title.”
My father was far too softhearted ever to make a champion. His sister once wrote that he “did not like hurting people but it only needed his opponent to hit him hardenough to hurt, without knocking him out, to let his temper take over, then he would box.” It must have been a closely calculated affair between turning on the light and extinguishing it completely.
He fenced briefly as a teenager but stopped following an exhibition match in which he was pitted against a well-developed girl a year or two his senior. Every time he got through her defenses, his foil landed flat against her chest, her exaggerated curves giving his point no purchase. He gave up the sp
ort in disgust.
† When is a sword a sword, and when a dagger? Blade lengths have varied from country to country and over time and culture, but probably any weapon that can be concealed easily about one’s person counts as a dagger and a blade over fourteen inches long should count as a sword. The largest swords on record are the medieval two-handers boasting blades between 60 and 70 inches, followed by the No-Dachi blade of the Japanese at four feet long: but the longer the sword, the harder to temper accurately. The Greeks generally fought with relatively short, hacking weapons of 14 to 25 inches; the Romans used somewhat longer ones of 19 to 27 inches. A sixteenth-century rapier was between 30 and 50 inches in blade length, but by the seventeenth century the blades of most cultures stabilized at 30 to 40 inches. Current foils and épées have the same maximum length of 357/16 inches, sabers 3441/64 inches.
‡ In ancient Japan, one swordsmith, visiting his prospective father-in-law, another leading blademaker, dipped his fingers in the quenching trough when he thought the other smith was not looking. He was caught in the act, “and a swift stroke of the master’s own sword severed his guilty hand before he had time to get it out of the tub.” Thus he lost his livelihood, his hand, and the hand of his fiancée.10
§ Although in The Songlines (London: Penguin, 1988, p. 215) Bruce Chatwin notes that “Cain” means “metal-smith.” And since in several languages “the words for ‘violence’ and ‘subjugation’ are linked to the discovery of metal, it is perhaps the destiny of Cain and his descendants to practice the black arts of technology.”
By the Sword Page 17