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Immediate Family – The new documentary starring James Taylor, Keith Richards, Jackson Browne, Carole King, Stevie Nicks, and David Crosby gets a release date. Trailer and details here https://bit.ly/439JlRP
#ImmediateFamily #documentary #film #JamesTaylor #KeithRichards #JacksonBrowne #CaroleKing #StevieNicks #DavidCrosby #LindaRonstadt #DonHenley #WarrenZevon #PhilCollins #music
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Immediate Family – The new documentary starring James Taylor, Keith Richards, Jackson Browne, Carole King, Stevie Nicks, and David Crosby gets a release date. Trailer and details here https://bit.ly/439JlRP
#ImmediateFamily #documentary #film #JamesTaylor #KeithRichards #JacksonBrowne #CaroleKing #StevieNicks #DavidCrosby #LindaRonstadt #DonHenley #WarrenZevon #PhilCollins #music
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Immediate Family – The new documentary starring James Taylor, Keith Richards, Jackson Browne, Carole King, Stevie Nicks, and David Crosby gets a release date. Trailer and details here https://bit.ly/439JlRP
#ImmediateFamily #documentary #film #JamesTaylor #KeithRichards #JacksonBrowne #CaroleKing #StevieNicks #DavidCrosby #LindaRonstadt #DonHenley #WarrenZevon #PhilCollins #music
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Comments on the Djurhamn Sword
The hilt of the Djurhamn sword care of Christer Åhlin, Christer, Swedish Historical Museum (CC BY 4.0) https://samlingar.shm.se/object/A854574B-07FD-4550-87E8-891C6B3EF89D(response to a request from Martin Rundkvist https://archaeo.social/@mrundkvist)
A complex-hilted sword was found in 2007 at Djurhamn on an island in the Stockholm Archipelago. In the middle ages and early modern period the island was very important for merchant and royal ships, but post-glacial rebound has shrunk the nearby harbour. The find spot was just below a line of boulders marking the Late Medieval shoreline, as if it was dropped off a later dock or wharf.
Latin Christian Europe from 1000 to 1450 had strict and austere ideas of what a sword should be: straight, two-edged, with a crossguard, a pommel, and minimal decoration. Swords were understood as Christian crosses, and clearly distinguished from other long bladed weapons like sabres and falchions. In the fifteenth century and especially the sixteenth century these rules began to be broken, and it becomes hard to make general statements and create categories. As it became common to wear swords again, their role as male jewelry came to the forefront, and the hilts and pommels started to receive more ornament.
Unfortunately, there is no profession that gets paid to research swords from armouries and stately homes, like archaeologists get paid to study swords from graves. Most research on swords after the Viking Age is by amateurs like Ewart Oakeshott, James G. Elmslie (Facebook), Peter Johnsson, and Maciej Kopciuch, with the occasional curator like A.V.B. Norman (Wikipedia), Marko Aleksić (Serbian Wikipedia), or Alfred Geibig (German Wikipedia). With limited resources, most have not tried to create typologies, just studied groups of similar swords like British backswords or the swords of the Munich town guard. Its necessary to combine typologies of the medieval sword such as Ewart Oakeshott’s with Norman’s typology of complex hilts.
The following comments are based on a photo gallery, the museum catalogue page, and the Swedish Wikipedia page for the sword. I don’t have a paper copy of Norman’s book and the nearest copy is in Calgary but it can be borrowed from the Internet Archive. There are measurements of the sword in an academic article from 2009.
General Remarks
The Djurhamn sword as found care of https://www.djurokultur.se/SS/Bilder/album/Svardet/index.html Note that as found, it had very little active red rust, because it had been sealed away from oxygen.Functionally a sword like this is good for chopping up people at close quarters, but not stabbing at armour or pushing someone out of the saddle. The rounded point won’t stick in the rings of mail and the broad flat blade will bend like a spring.
A date around the 16th century seems reasonable. This sword would have been the latest thing in the late 15th century, by the late 16th century broad cutting blades were falling out of fashion and narrow stiff blades were becoming admired. By the early 17th century it would have been definitely old-fashioned.
Up to about 1540, broad swords with complex hilts were often worn by lightly-armoured infantry and men in civil dress. There was an old tradition that an honest man should not wear stabbing weapons in peacetime because they killed too easily.1 Around 1540 the first cutler mounted a complex hilt on a narrow stiff blade, creating what we now think of as a rapier. Two of the oldest surviving examples are the sword of Gustav Vasa (Statens Historiska Museer, Stockholm, object 13502_LRK) and Francesco Negroli’s sword for Emperor Charles V (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, object 04.3.21). After 1540, broad swords with relatively simple hilts are increasingly worn to war by men who want to look like the knights of old, while people at court or in town preferred narrower swords with better hand protection. A good example of a modest military hilt is the Saxon Military Sword by Arms & Armour of Minnesota, but many hand-and-a-half swords with blades like the Djurhamn Sword and complex hilts survive in the Rüstkammer in Dresden.
Three of the four nicks in the edge are all in the half of the blade towards the tip, and the fourth is approximately in the middle. This suggests that it was damaged while striking, since fencers usually strike with the half of the blade towards the point (the weak or debole) and parry with the half of the blade towards the guard (the strong or forte).
Blade
The blade of the Djurhamn sword care of https://www.djurokultur.se/SS/Bilder/album/Svardet/index.htmlSwords with broad flat parallel-sided blades appear in most societies with metalworking. In 15th-17th century western Europe they tend to have short fullers and be hexagonal in section, wheres swords of the high middle ages tend to have fullers that extend past the midpoint of the blade and often have a lenticular cross-section2. This sword appears to have a shallow fuller near the base of the blade which is about 1/3 or 1/4 as wide as the blade. Martin Rundkvist did not notice one when he examined the sword in 2007 and 2008, but a shallow fuller seems visible in the photographs above. The ricasso (blunt area at the base of the blade) is also characteristic of swords after the year 1300 with finger rings. Overall the blade fits into Oakeshott’s type XIX which was used from the 14th century onwards. The sword from the Alexandria Arsenal below is a good example, as are Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, object 930.26.43 and Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts, object 2014.95.
The blade is 77.1 cm long and 4 cm wide. These are typical measurements for a single-handed sword of the period. Type XIX tends to be somewhat narrower than earlier types. The maximum thickness of the blade is relatively high at 5 mm (stiff thrusting swords are often twice as thick at the base).3 Knowing the length of the fuller would be useful.
Hilt
The Dutch admiral’s sword care of https://id.rijksmuseum.nl/200387530 He was wearing this sword and a matching armour when he got in the way of a cannonball at the Battle off Gibraltar in 1607. The gilding on the hilt is a bit tarnished, suggesting that the underlying metal is strong but hard-to-gild iron not weak brass.Hilts with down-turned crossguards and two finger rings first became popular in fifteenth-century Iberia and can be seen in the Pastrana Tapestries from 1471. They had reached the southern fringe of Germany by around 1500. An early depiction is a crucifixion from Cologne (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, object 12.169a-e). A finger ring both protects the pointer finger when it is bent over the crossguard, and stops weapons which are sliding down the blade before they endanger the top of the hand. The earliest art with finger rings shows them just on one side of the blade, the side towards the knuckles (like one of the swords from the Mamluke arsenal at Alexandria, Royal Armouries, Leeds, object IX.950). While in theory a sword can be turned in the hand so that either edge is towards the knuckles, in practice the second finger ring is probably for symmetry and visual balance.
Oakeshott does not cover hilts with more than a simple crossguard in his typology, but this would be a Norman hilt 15 like the sword of Admiral Jacob van Heemskerck (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, object NG-KOG-987-2-1). This type seems to have been most common from 1465 to 1520, but came back into fashion around the year 1600. Several swords of this type from the early 17th century are said to be in the War Museum in Copenhagen. That collection is not online, but the example in the Wallace Collection is, and that sword has a stiff four-sided blade (object A539). The shape of the broad flat hilt feels early to me, but the pommel is typical of later swords, so it could be from the heyday of the harbour c. 1500 or the declining days in the early 17th century.
A common variant added a U-shaped ‘staple’ or ‘post’ joining the two rings perpendicular to the sword blade. This provided additional protection to the top of the hand as weapons slid down the blade, and reinforced the rings. Norman called this hilt 16.
Pommel
The pommel of the Djurhamn sword care of https://www.djurokultur.se/SS/Bilder/album/Svardet/index.htmlWhereas the pommels of knightly swords are usually broad and flat, the pommels of sixteenth-century swords tend to be long, narrow, and equally thick in all directions like a cherry or a pear. This shape would probably belong somewhere in Oakeshott’s Type T if he had continued into the 16th century. While the long rounded pommels give more freedom to the wrist, and the wide pommels help keep the sword from being dragged out of the hand as it cuts something, the change was probably driven by changing taste more than any practical concerns. All types of blades tend to receive the new pommels.
The single incised line at the base and decorative nut are modest ornaments. Arms and armour of the 16th century often have lines cut into them, perhaps with a spinning wheel.
A.V.B. Norman would have called this pommel 16 or pommel 18 (he does not define his types clearly). He cites parallels like a Saints Peter and Paul in Palermo and a Madonna and saints in the Berliner Gemäldegalerie). The saints’ swords don’t have buttons on the ends of the pommels. Pommel 16 appears as early as 1470, but the nut or button is more typical of the sixteenth century. As the team at Arms & Armor explain, the nut makes it easier to file off the peened end of the tang to remove the hilt without scratching the pommel, so it became more useful as hilts became more ornate. Hilts were often swapped onto a new blade, favourite blades were often remounted with the latest hilt, and heavily used swords often start to rattle and will look and sound tidier if they are taken apart and rebuilt. Some medieval swords have pommel nuts (eg. Wallace Collection, London, object A460), but they become more popular in the sixteenth century.
Chronology
Stylistically this sword best fits the periods 1470-1520 and 1600-1650. The earlier date is most consistent with the archaeological context although a sword could be buried in a pit near the seventeenth-century shore as well as dropped or thrown off a fifteenth-century dock. The earlier date would make it roughly contemporary with the Gribshunden, a caravel-built ship armed with breechloading guns for King Hans of Denmark. Princes in the Baltic brought the latest style of ship from warmer parts of Europe, and humbler men could have brought the latest type of sword.
A sketch in the style of Jost Amman from the later sixteenth century. This Landesknecht soldier has a moderately broad sword with a knucklebow and several rings to protect the hand. Metropolitan Museum of Art, object 1995.300 Another helpful image is in Jost Amman’s 1599 Künstbuchlein.It would be useful to know if Swedes imported broad straight two-edged swords with single-handed grips like they imported single-edged curved dussacks in the sixteenth century. The relatively simple hilt and flat blade was a very common combination around the year 1500, and less common by the seventeenth century. At that time, the flexible cutting blades tend to be mounted on hilts with as much hand protection as possible. Admiral van Heemskerck wore a very similar sword in the seventeenth century, but he probably did not expect to use it as often as the musketeers on his flagship drew their swords.
You can relive the excitement of the original blogging boom (without the original pictures) at https://aardvarchaeology.wordpress.com/?s=sword
Help me build and repair my own equipment by supporting this site on Patreon or elsewhere. I need all my fingers to type with!
Further Reading
Martin Rundkvist, “Landarkeologi vid Djurhamn 2007–2008,” in K. Schoerner (ed.), Skärgård och örlog. Nedslag i Stockholms skärgårds tidiga historia. Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, Conferences 71 (Stockholm 2009) pp. 139-148
Appendix: Dimensions of the Djurhamn Sword (after Rundkvist 2009: 148)
Measurements taken September 5, 2008 after the sword was conserved.
Total length: 926 mm
Greatest width over the guard: 184 mm
Greatest width of the blade: 40 mm
Width of the ricasso: 30 mm
Greatest width of the tang: 13 mm
Minimum width of the tang: 10 mm
Length of the tang: 82 mm
Hilt length: 155 mm
Blade length: 771 mm
Length of the pommel: 63 mm
Diameter of the pommel: 36 mm
Weight: 829 g
Thickness of the guard at the center: 22 mm
Thickness of the guard at the end: 6 mm
Thickness of the blade near the base: 5 mm
Location of the nicks in the edge, measured from the tip: 64, 163, 285, 390 mmEdit 2025-11-08: s/in 2017/in 2007;
Edit 2025-11-10: added Aleksić as a curator
Edit 2025-11-13: cite 1599 Künstbuchlein
Edit 2026-01-29: trackback from https://meneame.net/story/comentarios-sobre-espada-djurhamn-eng
(scheduled 5 November, based on an email sent 3 November)
- This can be seen in medieval laws and in the sixteenth-century Central European sources collected by B. Ann Tlusty ↩︎
- A good example of the difference is the sword-blade of Ottokar II of Bohemia, captured at the Battle on the Marchfeld in 1278. It has a very similar blade to the Djurhamn sword, but a long fuller (and is generally larger and heavier). ↩︎
- The thickness of medieval swords is rarely published, because the people who measure them are usually swordmakers who can’t afford to share research with their competitors. In addition, many swords have expanded from rusting, or lost metal from being aggressively polished and chemically cleaned. Trusting the measurements of modern swords is dangerous because modern swords are built around standard thicknesses of sheet steel and an economy where grinding steel away is cheap and forging it thicker is expensive. A rare collection of measurements is Nathan Clough’s video How Thick Were Medieval Swords? ↩︎
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Comments on the Djurhamn Sword
The hilt of the Djurhamn sword care of Christer Åhlin, Christer, Swedish Historical Museum (CC BY 4.0) https://samlingar.shm.se/object/A854574B-07FD-4550-87E8-891C6B3EF89D(response to a request from Martin Rundkvist https://archaeo.social/@mrundkvist)
A complex-hilted sword was found in 2017 at Djurhamn on an island in the Stockholm Archipelago. In the middle ages and early modern period the island was very important for merchant and royal ships, but post-glacial rebound has shrunk the nearby harbour. The find spot was just below a line of boulders marking the Late Medieval shoreline, as if it was dropped off a later dock or wharf.
Latin Christian Europe from 1000 to 1450 had strict and austere ideas of what a sword should be: straight, two-edged, with a crossguard, a pommel, and minimal decoration. Swords were understood as Christian crosses, and clearly distinguished from other long bladed weapons like sabres and falchions. In the fifteenth century and especially the sixteenth century these rules began to be broken, and it becomes hard to make general statements and create categories. As it became common to wear swords again, their role as male jewelry came to the forefront, and the hilts and pommels started to receive more ornament.
Unfortunately, there is no profession that gets paid to research swords from armouries and stately homes, like archaeologists get paid to study swords from graves. Most research on swords after the Viking Age is by amateurs like Ewart Oakeshott, James G. Elmslie (Facebook), Peter Johnsson, and Maciej Kopciuch, with the occasional curator like A.V.B. Norman (Wikipedia) or Alfred Geibig (Wikipedia). With limited resources, most have not tried to create typologies, just studied groups of similar swords like British backswords or the swords of the Munich town guard. Its necessary to combine typologies of the medieval sword such as Ewart Oakeshott’s with Norman’s typology of complex hilts.
The following comments are based on a photo gallery, the museum catalogue page, and the Swedish Wikipedia page for the sword. I don’t have a paper copy of Norman’s book and the nearest copy is in Calgary but it can be borrowed from the Internet Archive. There are measurements of the sword in an academic article from 2009.
General Remarks
The Djurhamn sword as found care of https://www.djurokultur.se/SS/Bilder/album/Svardet/index.html Note that as found, it had very little active red rust, because it had been sealed away from oxygen.Functionally a sword like this is good for chopping up people at close quarters, but not stabbing at armour or pushing someone out of the saddle. The rounded point won’t stick in the rings of mail and the broad flat blade will bend like a spring.
A date around the 16th century seems reasonable. This sword would have been the latest thing in the late 15th century, by the late 16th century broad cutting blades were falling out of fashion and narrow stiff blades were becoming admired. By the early 17th century it would have been definitely old-fashioned.
Up to about 1540, broad swords with complex hilts were often worn by lightly-armoured infantry and men in civil dress. There was an old tradition that an honest man should not wear stabbing weapons in peacetime because they killed too easily.1 Around 1540 the first cutler mounted a complex hilt on a narrow stiff blade, creating what we now think of as a rapier. Two of the oldest surviving examples are the sword of Gustav Vasa (Statens Historiska Museer, Stockholm, object 13502_LRK) and Francesco Negroli’s sword for Emperor Charles V (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, object 04.3.21). After 1540, broad swords with relatively simple hilts are increasingly worn to war by men who want to look like the knights of old, while people at court or in town preferred narrower swords with better hand protection. A good example of a modest military hilt is the Saxon Military Sword by Arms & Armour of Minnesota, but many hand-and-a-half swords with blades like the Djurhamn Sword and complex hilts survive in the Rüstkammer in Dresden.
Three of the four nicks in the edge are all in the half of the blade towards the tip, and the fourth is approximately in the middle. This suggests that it was damaged while striking, since fencers usually strike with the half of the blade towards the top (the weak or debole) and parry with the half of the blade towards the guard (the strong or forte).
Blade
The blade of the Djurhamn sword care of https://www.djurokultur.se/SS/Bilder/album/Svardet/index.htmlSwords with broad flat parallel-sided blades appear in most societies with metalworking. In 15th-17th century western Europe they tend to have short fullers and be hexagonal in section, wheres swords of the high middle ages tend to have fullers that extend past the midpoint of the blade and often have a lenticular cross-section2. This sword appears to have a shallow fuller near the base of the blade which is about 1/3 or 1/4 as wide as the blade. Martin Rundkvist did not notice one when he examined the sword in 2007 and 2008, but a shallow fuller appears in the photographs above. The ricasso (blunt area at the base of the blade) is also characteristic of swords after the year 1300 with finger rings. Overall the blade fits into Oakeshott’s type XIX which was used from the 14th century onwards. The sword from the Alexandria Arsenal below is a good example, as are Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, object 930.26.43 and Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts, object 2014.95.
The blade is 77.1 cm long and 4 cm wide. These are typical measurements for a single-handed sword of the period. Type XIX tends to be somewhat narrower than earlier types. The maximum thickness of the blade is relatively high at 5 mm (stiff thrusting swords are often twice as thick at the base).3 Knowing the length of the fuller would be useful.
Hilt
The Dutch admiral’s sword care of https://id.rijksmuseum.nl/200387530 He was wearing this sword and a matching armour when he got in the way of a cannonball at the Battle off Gibraltar in 1607. The gilding on the hilt is a bit tarnished, suggesting that the underlying metal is strong but hard-to-gild iron not weak brass.Hilts with down-turned crossguards and two finger rings first became popular in fifteenth-century Iberia and can be seen in the Pastrana Tapestries from 1471. They had reached the southern fringe of Germany by around 1500. An early depiction is a crucifixion from Cologne (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, object 12.169a-e). A finger ring both protects the pointer finger when it is bent over the crossguard, and stops weapons which are sliding down the blade before they endanger the top of the hand. The earliest art with finger rings shows them just on one side of the blade, the side towards the knuckles (like one of the swords from the Mamluke arsenal at Alexandria, Royal Armouries, Leeds, object IX.950). While in theory a sword can be turned in the hand so that either edge is towards the knuckles, in practice the second finger ring is probably for symmetry and visual balance.
Oakeshott does not cover hilts with more than a simple crossguard in his typology, but this would be a Norman hilt 15 like the sword of Admiral Jacob van Heemskerck (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, object NG-KOG-987-2-1). This type seems to have been most common from 1465 to 1520, but came back into fashion around the year 1600. Several swords of this type from the early 17th century are said to be in the War Museum in Copenhagen. That collection is not online, but the example in the Wallace Collection is, and that sword has a stiff four-sided blade (object A539). The shape of the broad flat hilt feels early to me, but the pommel is typical of later swords, so it could be from the heyday of the harbour c. 1500 or the declining days in the early 17th century.
A common variant added a U-shaped ‘staple’ or ‘post’ joining the two rings perpendicular to the sword blade. This provided additional protection to the top of the hand as weapons slid down the blade, and reinforced the rings. Norman called this hilt 16.
Pommel
The pommel of the Djurhamn sword care of https://www.djurokultur.se/SS/Bilder/album/Svardet/index.htmlWhereas the pommels of knightly swords are usually broad and flat, the pommels of sixteenth-century swords tend to be long, narrow, and equally thick in all directions like a cherry or a pear. This shape would probably belong somewhere in Oakeshott’s Type T if he had continued into the 16th century. While the long rounded pommels give more freedom to the wrist, and the wide pommels help keep the sword from being dragged out of the hand as it cuts something, the change was probably driven by changing taste more than any practical concerns. All types of blades tend to receive the new pommels.
The single incised line at the base and decorative nut are modest ornaments. Arms and armour of the 16th century often have lines cut into them, perhaps with a spinning wheel.
A.V.B. Norman would have called this pommel 16 or pommel 18 (he does not define his types clearly). He cites parallels like a Saints Peter and Paul in Palermo and a Madonna and saints in the Berliner Gemäldegalerie). The saints’ swords don’t have buttons on the ends of the pommels. Pommel 16 appears as early as 1470, but the nut or button is more typical of the sixteenth century. As the team at Arms & Armor explain, the nut makes it easier to file off the peened end of the tang to remove the hilt without scratching the pommel, so it became more useful as hilts became more ornate. Hilts were often swapped onto a new blade, favourite blades were often remounted with the latest hilt, and heavily used swords often start to rattle and will look and sound tidier if they are taken apart and rebuilt. Some medieval swords have pommel nuts (eg. Wallace Collection, London, object A460), but they become more popular in the sixteenth century.
Chronology
Stylistically this sword best fits the periods 1470-1520 and 1600-1650. The earlier date is most consistent with the archaeological context although a sword could be buried in a pit near the seventeenth-century shore as well as dropped or thrown off a fifteenth-century dock. The earlier date would make it roughly contemporary with the Gribshunden, a caravel-built ship armed with breechloading guns for King Hans of Denmark. Princes in the Baltic brought the latest style of ship from warmer parts of Europe, and humbler men could have brought the latest type of sword.
A sketch in the style of Jost Amman from the later sixteenth century. This Landesknecht soldier has a moderately broad sword with a knucklebow and several rings to protect the hand. Metropolitan Museum of Art, object 1995.300It would be useful to know if Swedes imported broad straight two-edged swords with single-handed grips like they imported single-edged curved dussacks in the sixteenth century. The relatively simple hilt and flat blade was a very common combination around the year 1500, and less common by the seventeenth century. At that time, the flexible cutting blades tend to be mounted on hilts with as much hand protection as possible. Admiral van van Heemskerck wore a very similar sword in the seventeenth century, but he probably did not expect to use it as often as the musketeers on his flagship drew their swords.
You can relive the excitement of the original blogging boom (without the original pictures) at https://aardvarchaeology.wordpress.com/?s=sword
Help me build and repair my own equipment by supporting this site on Patreon or elsewhere. I need all my fingers to type with!
Further Reading
Martin Rundkvist, “Landarkeologi vid Djurhamn 2007–2008,” in K. Schoerner (ed.), Skärgård och örlog. Nedslag i Stockholms skärgårds tidiga historia. Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, Conferences 71 (Stockholm 2009) pp. 139-148
Appendix: Dimensions of the Djurhamn Sword (after Rundkvist 2009: 148)
Measurements taken September 5, 2008 after the sword was conserved.
Total length: 926 mm
Greatest width over the guard: 184 mm
Greatest width of the blade: 40 mm
Width of the ricasso: 30 mm
Greatest width of the tang: 13 mm
Minimum width of the tang: 10 mm
Length of the tang: 82 mm
Hilt length: 155 mm
Blade length: 771 mm
Length of the pommel: 63 mm
Diameter of the pommel: 36 mm
Weight: 829 g
Thickness of the guard at the center: 22 mm
Thickness of the guard at the end: 6 mm
Thickness of the blade near the base: 5 mm
Location of the nicks in the edge, measured from the tip: 64, 163, 285, 390 mm(scheduled 5 November, based on an email sent 3 November)
- This can be seen in medieval laws and in the sixteenth-century Central European sources collected by B. Ann Tlusty ↩︎
- A good example of the difference is the sword-blade of Ottokar II of Bohemia, captured at the Battle on the Marchfeld in 1278. It has a very similar blade to the Djurhamn sword, but a long fuller (and is generally larger and heavier). ↩︎
- The thickness of medieval swords is rarely published, because the people who measure them are usually swordmakers who can’t afford to share research with their competitors. In addition, many swords have expanded from rusting, or lost metal from being aggressively polished and chemically cleaned. Trusting the measurements of modern swords is dangerous because modern swords are built around standard thicknesses of sheet steel and an economy where grinding steel away is cheap and forging it thicker is expensive. A rare collection of measurements is Nathan Clough’s video How Thick Were Medieval Swords? ↩︎
#artefact #bonusPost #medieval #modern #sixteenthCentury #sword #swords
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Comments on the Djurhamn Sword
The hilt of the Djurhamn sword care of Christer Åhlin, Christer, Swedish Historical Museum (CC BY 4.0) https://samlingar.shm.se/object/A854574B-07FD-4550-87E8-891C6B3EF89D(response to a request from Martin Rundkvist https://archaeo.social/@mrundkvist)
A complex-hilted sword was found in 2007 at Djurhamn on an island in the Stockholm Archipelago. In the middle ages and early modern period the island was very important for merchant and royal ships, but post-glacial rebound has shrunk the nearby harbour. The find spot was just below a line of boulders marking the Late Medieval shoreline, as if it was dropped off a later dock or wharf.
Latin Christian Europe from 1000 to 1450 had strict and austere ideas of what a sword should be: straight, two-edged, with a crossguard, a pommel, and minimal decoration. Swords were understood as Christian crosses, and clearly distinguished from other long bladed weapons like sabres and falchions. In the fifteenth century and especially the sixteenth century these rules began to be broken, and it becomes hard to make general statements and create categories. As it became common to wear swords again, their role as male jewelry came to the forefront, and the hilts and pommels started to receive more ornament.
Unfortunately, there is no profession that gets paid to research swords from armouries and stately homes, like archaeologists get paid to study swords from graves. Most research on swords after the Viking Age is by amateurs like Ewart Oakeshott, James G. Elmslie (Facebook), Peter Johnsson, and Maciej Kopciuch, with the occasional curator like A.V.B. Norman (Wikipedia), Marko Aleksić (Serbian Wikipedia), or Alfred Geibig (German Wikipedia). With limited resources, most have not tried to create typologies, just studied groups of similar swords like British backswords or the swords of the Munich town guard. Its necessary to combine typologies of the medieval sword such as Ewart Oakeshott’s with Norman’s typology of complex hilts.
The following comments are based on a photo gallery, the museum catalogue page, and the Swedish Wikipedia page for the sword. I don’t have a paper copy of Norman’s book and the nearest copy is in Calgary but it can be borrowed from the Internet Archive. There are measurements of the sword in an academic article from 2009.
General Remarks
The Djurhamn sword as found care of https://www.djurokultur.se/SS/Bilder/album/Svardet/index.html Note that as found, it had very little active red rust, because it had been sealed away from oxygen.Functionally a sword like this is good for chopping up people at close quarters, but not stabbing at armour or pushing someone out of the saddle. The rounded point won’t stick in the rings of mail and the broad flat blade will bend like a spring.
A date around the 16th century seems reasonable. This sword would have been the latest thing in the late 15th century, by the late 16th century broad cutting blades were falling out of fashion and narrow stiff blades were becoming admired. By the early 17th century it would have been definitely old-fashioned.
Up to about 1540, broad swords with complex hilts were often worn by lightly-armoured infantry and men in civil dress. There was an old tradition that an honest man should not wear stabbing weapons in peacetime because they killed too easily.1 Around 1540 the first cutler mounted a complex hilt on a narrow stiff blade, creating what we now think of as a rapier. Two of the oldest surviving examples are the sword of Gustav Vasa (Statens Historiska Museer, Stockholm, object 13502_LRK) and Francesco Negroli’s sword for Emperor Charles V (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, object 04.3.21). After 1540, broad swords with relatively simple hilts are increasingly worn to war by men who want to look like the knights of old, while people at court or in town preferred narrower swords with better hand protection. A good example of a modest military hilt is the Saxon Military Sword by Arms & Armour of Minnesota, but many hand-and-a-half swords with blades like the Djurhamn Sword and complex hilts survive in the Rüstkammer in Dresden.
Three of the four nicks in the edge are all in the half of the blade towards the tip, and the fourth is approximately in the middle. This suggests that it was damaged while striking, since fencers usually strike with the half of the blade towards the point (the weak or debole) and parry with the half of the blade towards the guard (the strong or forte).
Blade
The blade of the Djurhamn sword care of https://www.djurokultur.se/SS/Bilder/album/Svardet/index.htmlSwords with broad flat parallel-sided blades appear in most societies with metalworking. In 15th-17th century western Europe they tend to have short fullers and be hexagonal in section, wheres swords of the high middle ages tend to have fullers that extend past the midpoint of the blade and often have a lenticular cross-section2. This sword appears to have a shallow fuller near the base of the blade which is about 1/3 or 1/4 as wide as the blade. Martin Rundkvist did not notice one when he examined the sword in 2007 and 2008, but a shallow fuller seems visible in the photographs above. The ricasso (blunt area at the base of the blade) is also characteristic of swords after the year 1300 with finger rings. Overall the blade fits into Oakeshott’s type XIX which was used from the 14th century onwards. The sword from the Alexandria Arsenal below is a good example, as are Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, object 930.26.43 and Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts, object 2014.95.
The blade is 77.1 cm long and 4 cm wide. These are typical measurements for a single-handed sword of the period. Type XIX tends to be somewhat narrower than earlier types. The maximum thickness of the blade is relatively high at 5 mm (stiff thrusting swords are often twice as thick at the base).3 Knowing the length of the fuller would be useful.
Hilt
The Dutch admiral’s sword care of https://id.rijksmuseum.nl/200387530 He was wearing this sword and a matching armour when he got in the way of a cannonball at the Battle off Gibraltar in 1607. The gilding on the hilt is a bit tarnished, suggesting that the underlying metal is strong but hard-to-gild iron not weak brass.Hilts with down-turned crossguards and two finger rings first became popular in fifteenth-century Iberia and can be seen in the Pastrana Tapestries from 1471. They had reached the southern fringe of Germany by around 1500. An early depiction is a crucifixion from Cologne (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, object 12.169a-e). A finger ring both protects the pointer finger when it is bent over the crossguard, and stops weapons which are sliding down the blade before they endanger the top of the hand. The earliest art with finger rings shows them just on one side of the blade, the side towards the knuckles (like one of the swords from the Mamluke arsenal at Alexandria, Royal Armouries, Leeds, object IX.950). While in theory a sword can be turned in the hand so that either edge is towards the knuckles, in practice the second finger ring is probably for symmetry and visual balance.
Oakeshott does not cover hilts with more than a simple crossguard in his typology, but this would be a Norman hilt 15 like the sword of Admiral Jacob van Heemskerck (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, object NG-KOG-987-2-1). This type seems to have been most common from 1465 to 1520, but came back into fashion around the year 1600. Several swords of this type from the early 17th century are said to be in the War Museum in Copenhagen. That collection is not online, but the example in the Wallace Collection is, and that sword has a stiff four-sided blade (object A539). The shape of the broad flat hilt feels early to me, but the pommel is typical of later swords, so it could be from the heyday of the harbour c. 1500 or the declining days in the early 17th century.
A common variant added a U-shaped ‘staple’ or ‘post’ joining the two rings perpendicular to the sword blade. This provided additional protection to the top of the hand as weapons slid down the blade, and reinforced the rings. Norman called this hilt 16.
Pommel
The pommel of the Djurhamn sword care of https://www.djurokultur.se/SS/Bilder/album/Svardet/index.htmlWhereas the pommels of knightly swords are usually broad and flat, the pommels of sixteenth-century swords tend to be long, narrow, and equally thick in all directions like a cherry or a pear. This shape would probably belong somewhere in Oakeshott’s Type T if he had continued into the 16th century. While the long rounded pommels give more freedom to the wrist, and the wide pommels help keep the sword from being dragged out of the hand as it cuts something, the change was probably driven by changing taste more than any practical concerns. All types of blades tend to receive the new pommels.
The single incised line at the base and decorative nut are modest ornaments. Arms and armour of the 16th century often have lines cut into them, perhaps with a spinning wheel.
A.V.B. Norman would have called this pommel 16 or pommel 18 (he does not define his types clearly). He cites parallels like a Saints Peter and Paul in Palermo and a Madonna and saints in the Berliner Gemäldegalerie). The saints’ swords don’t have buttons on the ends of the pommels. Pommel 16 appears as early as 1470, but the nut or button is more typical of the sixteenth century. As the team at Arms & Armor explain, the nut makes it easier to file off the peened end of the tang to remove the hilt without scratching the pommel, so it became more useful as hilts became more ornate. Hilts were often swapped onto a new blade, favourite blades were often remounted with the latest hilt, and heavily used swords often start to rattle and will look and sound tidier if they are taken apart and rebuilt. Some medieval swords have pommel nuts (eg. Wallace Collection, London, object A460), but they become more popular in the sixteenth century.
Chronology
Stylistically this sword best fits the periods 1470-1520 and 1600-1650. The earlier date is most consistent with the archaeological context although a sword could be buried in a pit near the seventeenth-century shore as well as dropped or thrown off a fifteenth-century dock. The earlier date would make it roughly contemporary with the Gribshunden, a caravel-built ship armed with breechloading guns for King Hans of Denmark. Princes in the Baltic brought the latest style of ship from warmer parts of Europe, and humbler men could have brought the latest type of sword.
A sketch in the style of Jost Amman from the later sixteenth century. This Landesknecht soldier has a moderately broad sword with a knucklebow and several rings to protect the hand. Metropolitan Museum of Art, object 1995.300 Another helpful image is in Jost Amman’s 1599 Künstbuchlein.It would be useful to know if Swedes imported broad straight two-edged swords with single-handed grips like they imported single-edged curved dussacks in the sixteenth century. The relatively simple hilt and flat blade was a very common combination around the year 1500, and less common by the seventeenth century. At that time, the flexible cutting blades tend to be mounted on hilts with as much hand protection as possible. Admiral van Heemskerck wore a very similar sword in the seventeenth century, but he probably did not expect to use it as often as the musketeers on his flagship drew their swords.
You can relive the excitement of the original blogging boom (without the original pictures) at https://aardvarchaeology.wordpress.com/?s=sword
Help me build and repair my own equipment by supporting this site on Patreon or elsewhere. I need all my fingers to type with!
Further Reading
Martin Rundkvist, “Landarkeologi vid Djurhamn 2007–2008,” in K. Schoerner (ed.), Skärgård och örlog. Nedslag i Stockholms skärgårds tidiga historia. Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, Conferences 71 (Stockholm 2009) pp. 139-148
Appendix: Dimensions of the Djurhamn Sword (after Rundkvist 2009: 148)
Measurements taken September 5, 2008 after the sword was conserved.
Total length: 926 mm
Greatest width over the guard: 184 mm
Greatest width of the blade: 40 mm
Width of the ricasso: 30 mm
Greatest width of the tang: 13 mm
Minimum width of the tang: 10 mm
Length of the tang: 82 mm
Hilt length: 155 mm
Blade length: 771 mm
Length of the pommel: 63 mm
Diameter of the pommel: 36 mm
Weight: 829 g
Thickness of the guard at the center: 22 mm
Thickness of the guard at the end: 6 mm
Thickness of the blade near the base: 5 mm
Location of the nicks in the edge, measured from the tip: 64, 163, 285, 390 mmEdit 2025-11-08: s/in 2017/in 2007;
Edit 2025-11-10: added Aleksić as a curator
Edit 2025-11-13: cite 1599 Künstbuchlein
(scheduled 5 November, based on an email sent 3 November)
- This can be seen in medieval laws and in the sixteenth-century Central European sources collected by B. Ann Tlusty ↩︎
- A good example of the difference is the sword-blade of Ottokar II of Bohemia, captured at the Battle on the Marchfeld in 1278. It has a very similar blade to the Djurhamn sword, but a long fuller (and is generally larger and heavier). ↩︎
- The thickness of medieval swords is rarely published, because the people who measure them are usually swordmakers who can’t afford to share research with their competitors. In addition, many swords have expanded from rusting, or lost metal from being aggressively polished and chemically cleaned. Trusting the measurements of modern swords is dangerous because modern swords are built around standard thicknesses of sheet steel and an economy where grinding steel away is cheap and forging it thicker is expensive. A rare collection of measurements is Nathan Clough’s video How Thick Were Medieval Swords? ↩︎
#artefact #bonusPost #medieval #modern #sixteenthCentury #sword #swords
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Comments on the Djurhamn Sword
The hilt of the Djurhamn sword care of Christer Åhlin, Christer, Swedish Historical Museum (CC BY 4.0) https://samlingar.shm.se/object/A854574B-07FD-4550-87E8-891C6B3EF89D(response to a request from Martin Rundkvist https://archaeo.social/@mrundkvist)
A complex-hilted sword was found in 2017 at Djurhamn on an island in the Stockholm Archipelago. In the middle ages and early modern period the island was very important for merchant and royal ships, but post-glacial rebound has shrunk the nearby harbour. The find spot was just below a line of boulders marking the Late Medieval shoreline, as if it was dropped off a later dock or wharf.
Latin Christian Europe from 1000 to 1450 had strict and austere ideas of what a sword should be: straight, two-edged, with a crossguard, a pommel, and minimal decoration. Swords were understood as Christian crosses, and clearly distinguished from other long bladed weapons like sabres and falchions. In the fifteenth century and especially the sixteenth century these rules began to be broken, and it becomes hard to make general statements and create categories. As it became common to wear swords again, their role as male jewelry came to the forefront, and the hilts and pommels started to receive more ornament.
Unfortunately, there is no profession that gets paid to research swords from armouries and stately homes, like archaeologists get paid to study swords from graves. Most research on swords after the Viking Age is by amateurs like Ewart Oakeshott, James G. Elmslie (Facebook), Peter Johnsson, and Maciej Kopciuch, with the occasional curator like A.V.B. Norman (Wikipedia) or Alfred Geibig (Wikipedia). With limited resources, most have not tried to create typologies, just studied groups of similar swords like British backswords or the swords of the Munich town guard. Its necessary to combine typologies of the medieval sword such as Ewart Oakeshott’s with Norman’s typology of complex hilts.
The following comments are based on a photo gallery, the museum catalogue page, and the Swedish Wikipedia page for the sword. I don’t have a paper copy of Norman’s book and the nearest copy is in Calgary but it can be borrowed from the Internet Archive. There are measurements of the sword in an academic article from 2009.
General Remarks
The Djurhamn sword as found care of https://www.djurokultur.se/SS/Bilder/album/Svardet/index.html Note that as found, it had very little active red rust, because it had been sealed away from oxygen.Functionally a sword like this is good for chopping up people at close quarters, but not stabbing at armour or pushing someone out of the saddle. The rounded point won’t stick in the rings of mail and the broad flat blade will bend like a spring.
A date around the 16th century seems reasonable. This sword would have been the latest thing in the late 15th century, by the late 16th century broad cutting blades were falling out of fashion and narrow stiff blades were becoming admired. By the early 17th century it would have been definitely old-fashioned.
Up to about 1540, broad swords with complex hilts were often worn by lightly-armoured infantry and men in civil dress. There was an old tradition that an honest man should not wear stabbing weapons in peacetime because they killed too easily.1 Around 1540 the first cutler mounted a complex hilt on a narrow stiff blade, creating what we now think of as a rapier. Two of the oldest surviving examples are the sword of Gustav Vasa (Statens Historiska Museer, Stockholm, object 13502_LRK) and Francesco Negroli’s sword for Emperor Charles V (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, object 04.3.21). After 1540, broad swords with relatively simple hilts are increasingly worn to war by men who want to look like the knights of old, while people at court or in town preferred narrower swords with better hand protection. A good example of a modest military hilt is the Saxon Military Sword by Arms & Armour of Minnesota, but many hand-and-a-half swords with blades like the Djurhamn Sword and complex hilts survive in the Rüstkammer in Dresden.
Three of the four nicks in the edge are all in the half of the blade towards the tip, and the fourth is approximately in the middle. This suggests that it was damaged while striking, since fencers usually strike with the half of the blade towards the top (the weak or debole) and parry with the half of the blade towards the guard (the strong or forte).
Blade
The blade of the Djurhamn sword care of https://www.djurokultur.se/SS/Bilder/album/Svardet/index.htmlSwords with broad flat parallel-sided blades appear in most societies with metalworking. In 15th-17th century western Europe they tend to have short fullers and be hexagonal in section, wheres swords of the high middle ages tend to have fullers that extend past the midpoint of the blade and often have a lenticular cross-section2. This sword appears to have a shallow fuller near the base of the blade which is about 1/3 or 1/4 as wide as the blade. Martin Rundkvist did not notice one when he examined the sword in 2007 and 2008, but a shallow fuller appears in the photographs above. The ricasso (blunt area at the base of the blade) is also characteristic of swords after the year 1300 with finger rings. Overall the blade fits into Oakeshott’s type XIX which was used from the 14th century onwards. The sword from the Alexandria Arsenal below is a good example, as are Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, object 930.26.43 and Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts, object 2014.95.
The blade is 77.1 cm long and 4 cm wide. These are typical measurements for a single-handed sword of the period. Type XIX tends to be somewhat narrower than earlier types. The maximum thickness of the blade is relatively high at 5 mm (stiff thrusting swords are often twice as thick at the base).3 Knowing the length of the fuller would be useful.
Hilt
The Dutch admiral’s sword care of https://id.rijksmuseum.nl/200387530 He was wearing this sword and a matching armour when he got in the way of a cannonball at the Battle off Gibraltar in 1607. The gilding on the hilt is a bit tarnished, suggesting that the underlying metal is strong but hard-to-gild iron not weak brass.Hilts with down-turned crossguards and two finger rings first became popular in fifteenth-century Iberia and can be seen in the Pastrana Tapestries from 1471. They had reached the southern fringe of Germany by around 1500. An early depiction is a crucifixion from Cologne (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, object 12.169a-e). A finger ring both protects the pointer finger when it is bent over the crossguard, and stops weapons which are sliding down the blade before they endanger the top of the hand. The earliest art with finger rings shows them just on one side of the blade, the side towards the knuckles (like one of the swords from the Mamluke arsenal at Alexandria, Royal Armouries, Leeds, object IX.950). While in theory a sword can be turned in the hand so that either edge is towards the knuckles, in practice the second finger ring is probably for symmetry and visual balance.
Oakeshott does not cover hilts with more than a simple crossguard in his typology, but this would be a Norman hilt 15 like the sword of Admiral Jacob van Heemskerck (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, object NG-KOG-987-2-1). This type seems to have been most common from 1465 to 1520, but came back into fashion around the year 1600. Several swords of this type from the early 17th century are said to be in the War Museum in Copenhagen. That collection is not online, but the example in the Wallace Collection is, and that sword has a stiff four-sided blade (object A539). The shape of the broad flat hilt feels early to me, but the pommel is typical of later swords, so it could be from the heyday of the harbour c. 1500 or the declining days in the early 17th century.
A common variant added a U-shaped ‘staple’ or ‘post’ joining the two rings perpendicular to the sword blade. This provided additional protection to the top of the hand as weapons slid down the blade, and reinforced the rings. Norman called this hilt 16.
Pommel
The pommel of the Djurhamn sword care of https://www.djurokultur.se/SS/Bilder/album/Svardet/index.htmlWhereas the pommels of knightly swords are usually broad and flat, the pommels of sixteenth-century swords tend to be long, narrow, and equally thick in all directions like a cherry or a pear. This shape would probably belong somewhere in Oakeshott’s Type T if he had continued into the 16th century. While the long rounded pommels give more freedom to the wrist, and the wide pommels help keep the sword from being dragged out of the hand as it cuts something, the change was probably driven by changing taste more than any practical concerns. All types of blades tend to receive the new pommels.
The single incised line at the base and decorative nut are modest ornaments. Arms and armour of the 16th century often have lines cut into them, perhaps with a spinning wheel.
A.V.B. Norman would have called this pommel 16 or pommel 18 (he does not define his types clearly). He cites parallels like a Saints Peter and Paul in Palermo and a Madonna and saints in the Berliner Gemäldegalerie). The saints’ swords don’t have buttons on the ends of the pommels. Pommel 16 appears as early as 1470, but the nut or button is more typical of the sixteenth century. As the team at Arms & Armor explain, the nut makes it easier to file off the peened end of the tang to remove the hilt without scratching the pommel, so it became more useful as hilts became more ornate. Hilts were often swapped onto a new blade, favourite blades were often remounted with the latest hilt, and heavily used swords often start to rattle and will look and sound tidier if they are taken apart and rebuilt. Some medieval swords have pommel nuts (eg. Wallace Collection, London, object A460), but they become more popular in the sixteenth century.
Chronology
Stylistically this sword best fits the periods 1470-1520 and 1600-1650. The earlier date is most consistent with the archaeological context although a sword could be buried in a pit near the seventeenth-century shore as well as dropped or thrown off a fifteenth-century dock. The earlier date would make it roughly contemporary with the Gribshunden, a caravel-built ship armed with breechloading guns for King Hans of Denmark. Princes in the Baltic brought the latest style of ship from warmer parts of Europe, and humbler men could have brought the latest type of sword.
A sketch in the style of Jost Amman from the later sixteenth century. This Landesknecht soldier has a moderately broad sword with a knucklebow and several rings to protect the hand. Metropolitan Museum of Art, object 1995.300It would be useful to know if Swedes imported broad straight two-edged swords with single-handed grips like they imported single-edged curved dussacks in the sixteenth century. The relatively simple hilt and flat blade was a very common combination around the year 1500, and less common by the seventeenth century. At that time, the flexible cutting blades tend to be mounted on hilts with as much hand protection as possible. Admiral van van Heemskerck wore a very similar sword in the seventeenth century, but he probably did not expect to use it as often as the musketeers on his flagship drew their swords.
You can relive the excitement of the original blogging boom (without the original pictures) at https://aardvarchaeology.wordpress.com/?s=sword
Help me build and repair my own equipment by supporting this site on Patreon or elsewhere. I need all my fingers to type with!
Further Reading
Martin Rundkvist, “Landarkeologi vid Djurhamn 2007–2008,” in K. Schoerner (ed.), Skärgård och örlog. Nedslag i Stockholms skärgårds tidiga historia. Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, Conferences 71 (Stockholm 2009) pp. 139-148
Appendix: Dimensions of the Djurhamn Sword (after Rundkvist 2009: 148)
Measurements taken September 5, 2008 after the sword was conserved.
Total length: 926 mm
Greatest width over the guard: 184 mm
Greatest width of the blade: 40 mm
Width of the ricasso: 30 mm
Greatest width of the tang: 13 mm
Minimum width of the tang: 10 mm
Length of the tang: 82 mm
Hilt length: 155 mm
Blade length: 771 mm
Length of the pommel: 63 mm
Diameter of the pommel: 36 mm
Weight: 829 g
Thickness of the guard at the center: 22 mm
Thickness of the guard at the end: 6 mm
Thickness of the blade near the base: 5 mm
Location of the nicks in the edge, measured from the tip: 64, 163, 285, 390 mm(scheduled 5 November, based on an email sent 3 November)
- This can be seen in medieval laws and in the sixteenth-century Central European sources collected by B. Ann Tlusty ↩︎
- A good example of the difference is the sword-blade of Ottokar II of Bohemia, captured at the Battle on the Marchfeld in 1278. It has a very similar blade to the Djurhamn sword, but a long fuller (and is generally larger and heavier). ↩︎
- The thickness of medieval swords is rarely published, because the people who measure them are usually swordmakers who can’t afford to share research with their competitors. In addition, many swords have expanded from rusting, or lost metal from being aggressively polished and chemically cleaned. Trusting the measurements of modern swords is dangerous because modern swords are built around standard thicknesses of sheet steel and an economy where grinding steel away is cheap and forging it thicker is expensive. A rare collection of measurements is Nathan Clough’s video How Thick Were Medieval Swords? ↩︎
#artefact #bonusPost #medieval #modern #sixteenthCentury #sword #swords
-
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Hier gehts dann zum #LiveStream: https://piraten.live/bpt251
Und hier zu den Anträgen usw.: https://wiki.piratenpartei.de/Antrag:Bundesparteitag_2025.1/Antragsportal#BundesParteiTag #ParteiTag #Event #BPT #Piraten #NurMitPiraten #BTW #BTW25 #Bundestagswahl2025 #Neuwahl #Neuwahl2025 #oBPT251 #OpenSlides
-
Der #oBPT #BPT251 der #PiratenPartei geht gleich los.
Hier gehts dann zum #LiveStream: https://piraten.live/bpt251
Und hier zu den Anträgen usw.: https://wiki.piratenpartei.de/Antrag:Bundesparteitag_2025.1/Antragsportal#BundesParteiTag #ParteiTag #Event #BPT #Piraten #NurMitPiraten #BTW #BTW25 #Bundestagswahl2025 #Neuwahl #Neuwahl2025 #oBPT251 #OpenSlides
-
Der #oBPT #BPT251 der #PiratenPartei geht gleich los.
Hier gehts dann zum #LiveStream: https://piraten.live/bpt251
Und hier zu den Anträgen usw.: https://wiki.piratenpartei.de/Antrag:Bundesparteitag_2025.1/Antragsportal#BundesParteiTag #ParteiTag #Event #BPT #Piraten #NurMitPiraten #BTW #BTW25 #Bundestagswahl2025 #Neuwahl #Neuwahl2025 #oBPT251 #OpenSlides
-
Der #oBPT #BPT251 der #PiratenPartei geht gleich los.
Hier gehts dann zum #LiveStream: https://piraten.live/bpt251
Und hier zu den Anträgen usw.: https://wiki.piratenpartei.de/Antrag:Bundesparteitag_2025.1/Antragsportal#BundesParteiTag #ParteiTag #Event #BPT #Piraten #NurMitPiraten #BTW #BTW25 #Bundestagswahl2025 #Neuwahl #Neuwahl2025 #oBPT251 #OpenSlides
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Ich habe mir diese Woche eine alte #Honda #NX650 #Dominator gegönnt. 44 PS, Einzylinder. Nices Teil. 😁 Vorführen und anmelden steht noch aus und das ein oder andere möchte ich an ihr noch für mich anpassen, bevor es dann das erste Mal ins #Offroad geht für mich. Ich freu' mich schon...
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Ich habe mir diese Woche eine alte #Honda #NX650 #Dominator gegönnt. 44 PS, Einzylinder. Nices Teil. 😁 Vorführen und anmelden steht noch aus und das ein oder andere möchte ich an ihr noch für mich anpassen, bevor es dann das erste Mal ins #Offroad geht für mich. Ich freu' mich schon...
-
Ich habe mir diese Woche eine alte #Honda #NX650 #Dominator gegönnt. 44 PS, Einzylinder. Nices Teil. 😁 Vorführen und anmelden steht noch aus und das ein oder andere möchte ich an ihr noch für mich anpassen, bevor es dann das erste Mal ins #Offroad geht für mich. Ich freu' mich schon...
-
Ich habe mir diese Woche eine alte #Honda #NX650 #Dominator gegönnt. 44 PS, Einzylinder. Nices Teil. 😁 Vorführen und anmelden steht noch aus und das ein oder andere möchte ich an ihr noch für mich anpassen, bevor es dann das erste Mal ins #Offroad geht für mich. Ich freu' mich schon...
-
Ich habe mir diese Woche eine alte #Honda #NX650 #Dominator gegönnt. 44 PS, Einzylinder. Nices Teil. 😁 Vorführen und anmelden steht noch aus und das ein oder andere möchte ich an ihr noch für mich anpassen, bevor es dann das erste Mal ins #Offroad geht für mich. Ich freu' mich schon...
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“The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence – it is to act with yesterday’s logic”*…
Jennifer Pahlka— the founder and long-time leader of Code for America, the former US Deputy Chief Technology Officer, the author of Recoding America, and the cofounder and board chair of the Recoding America Fund— has dedicated her life to improving governance and government services. Here, she reflects on a core lesson that she has learned…
I got into government reform sixteen years ago, though I didn’t think of it as reform at the time. I thought of it as just trying to make a few specific things work better. Since then I’ve worked at the local, state, and federal levels, on benefit delivery, on national defense, on a handful of things in between. I’ve worked alongside a lot of people whose own paths in this work have run the gamut. Collectively we’ve seen a lot. I think we’ve learned a lot about what we often call the operating model of government.
But the government we have — the operating model it runs on, the rules and structures and assumptions that shape how it hires, procures, and delivers — was built for a world that no longer exists, and the distance between that world and this one is growing. We are approaching the kind of moment when that gap stops being a management problem and becomes a true legitimacy crisis. (Many will say that moment has already come.) It’s time to start asking whether the theory of change most of us have been operating under — incremental improvements off a pretty poor baseline — was ever going to get us to a government capable of meeting fast-changing needs. It hasn’t yet, and if we don’t do something differently, it won’t.
Kelly Born at the Packard Foundation recently shared with me a framework called the Three Horizons, originally developed by Anthony Hodgson and adapted widely in systems-change work. In it, Horizon 1 is the currently dominant system. It’s functional enough to persist but failing in critical ways, especially for people with less power. Horizon 3 is the future system you’re working toward, already visible in patches of practice that embody different values and different ways of working, but far from the norm. Horizon 2 is the turbulent middle where change agents work.
But the key insight is that not all Horizon 2 work is the same. Some H2 innovations genuinely create the conditions for the new system to emerge. Call those transforming H2, or H2+. Others, however inadvertently, extend the lifespan of the failing system by relieving the pressure that might otherwise force structural change. Call those sustaining H2, or H2-. Both feel like reform, but they have very different long-term implications.
H2- work is attractive because it usually produces real value in the short run. H2+ work can take a long time to pay off, and the path is rarely clear. In a stable environment, you can get away with a lot of H2-. In an environment where the underlying system has become truly untenable, the difference between the two starts to matter a great deal. I think that’s where we are now…
[Jen describes a few projects that illustrate patterns that play out over and over in the category of H2-, the work that sustains the status quo…]
… The H2- work I’m describing has been done in good faith by people. I am one of those people. Code for America, which I founded and where I spent more than a decade, is in important respects capacity substitution. USDR, which I also helped start, is as well. The healthcare.gov rescue (which I didn’t actually work on but tried to provide moral support for) was the rescue-and-rebuild cycle. For much of the past fifteen years, the H2- path was arguably the right call. When there was no political space for structural change, demonstrations were a good way to build the evidence base and develop the field.
I think we are in a different moment now. This moment is defined by disruption. I count three kinds.
Contingent disruption — pandemics, climate events, geopolitical shocks, financial crises — is unpredictable in its specifics but very predictable in its category: large, fast-moving, high-stakes demands that fall disproportionately on government. COVID was not an anomaly. The next version won’t look the same.
The most recent disruption to federal government, however, was political. Whatever the cost of its methods, DOGE made the brittleness of the current operating model impossible to ignore and created political openings for structural arguments that previously had no traction. The reform field did not create this moment. But it can shape what comes out of it.
AI brings structural disruption. This is a transformation already underway in the material conditions of work, economy, and administration. AI creates dramatic change in both the needs and conditions government must respond to and the ways in which it can respond at the same time. Yes, I certainly mean a social safety net not nearly fit to handle the levels of unemployment that are likely coming our way, and yes, I mean possible upsets in the balance of power between agencies and the vendors they rely on, but that’s barely scratching the surface.
AI is not only an exogenous shock that government will have to absorb. It is also moving the bar on what counts as acceptable service in the first place. People are already using AI to understand their medical bills, navigate insurance denials, and draft appeals for benefits they were wrongly denied. Soon they will expect to apply for SNAP or file their taxes by uploading a paystub and answering a few plain-language questions, not by filling out even the best-designed web form. The forty-page PDF used to feel intolerable. The well-designed web form will start to feel that way too, and faster than the last transition did.
And service delivery is only the most visible piece. The same expectation shift is going to hit regulation, permitting, enforcement, how quickly an agency can respond to a new problem, how a legislature decides whether a law is working. If a small team with the right tools can map a regulatory regime in a week, the timelines we have now, in which rulemaking takes several years–or even multiple presidential terms–become indefensible. If an advocate can stress-test a policy against thousands of edge cases before it gets enacted, the standard for what counts as due diligence in lawmaking starts to move. The bar is rising on the whole surface of what government does, not just on the forms people fill out.
Not everyone wants this shift to happen. Public sector unions have secured laws in several states forbidding the use of AI in service delivery, won contracts requiring union consent before autonomous vehicles can operate, and pushed legislation mandating staffing levels that the work no longer requires — as my colleagues Robert Gordon and Nick Bagley have documented. The concern for workers caught in this transition is legitimate. But blocking government’s transformation while the world around it moves on is not a strategy for protecting those workers. It exacerbates public frustration with government, weakens the case for investing in it, and leaves the people who most depend on public services with a system increasingly unfit to serve them.
So the gap we have been measuring, between what government delivers and what the public considers a basic level of competence, is widening from both ends at once. The system is straining to clear the old bar at the same moment the bar is rising.
In this environment, the benefits systems that struggled to scale during COVID will be asked to scale again. The regulatory processes that can’t move quickly will be asked to respond to developments they weren’t designed to anticipate. The civil service system that can’t attract the people it needs now will need to attract people with skills that didn’t exist a decade ago.
If I had to pick, it’s AI that drives this disruptive moment. But I don’t have to pick. You could just as easily imagine climate shocks, or the next pandemic, or an escalation of the current war. Truly, some combination of all the above is not that unlikely. Reasonable people may disagree about the size and shape of the disruption AI will bring, but betting against disruption generally seems deeply unwise at the moment.
If you buy that argument, then we must acknowledge that a reform field largely dedicated to H2- work is not what the moment calls for. In a stable environment, H2- work that buys time for a failing system might be much-needed, and might be a missed opportunity for transformation. In an environment where disruptions of all kinds are accelerating, it becomes a compounding liability. Extending the lifespan of a brittle system just means the system eventually fails more spectacularly. More people get hurt. More people look for alternatives to democracy.
That doesn’t mean we need to throw everything out and start over. For the reform ecosystem, it means existing actors need incentives to align their work toward structural transformation, new actors with adjacent expertise need to be welcomed into the fold (especially advocates and lobbyists, given how little influence muscle the field has today), and connections need to be made both upstream and downstream of where we’ve been focused. It means articulating competing H3 visions from a wide range of ideological and practical perspectives and debating them among, including the project that sparked this line of thinking, which Kelly funded and FAI and New America are currently working on. It means designing funding and partnership structures that reward structural ambition while staying grounded in meaningful near-term progress. Funders and grantees share responsibility for creating the conditions under which a diverse set of actors can aim higher by working together, and connecting the dots upstream.
For this to work, it can’t be a zero sum game. Government capacity is wildly neglected in philanthropy despite its high leverage. (Good luck naming an issue philanthropists care about that doesn’t benefit from increased government capacity.) Could the field stop doing some H2- work? Sure. That would free up some existing resources for more H2+ work, which has been too little of the field’s mindshare and resources to date. But that is not the path forward — it wouldn’t get us where we need to be. We need more resources, full stop. We need to make the case to philanthropy for greater investment in the entire field (that’s part of what Recoding America Fund is trying to do) and make the case to government leaders, including electeds, to invest in better plumbing, so that the investment in H2+ work isn’t coming at the expense of the essential life support…
[Jen outlines some of the key principles that animate H2+ efforts, then ponders “doing different things differently”…]
… I realized early last year that while I’d spent the bulk of my career trying to drag government into the Internet Era, that work has to change now. We are entering a new era, and if those of us who fought the last fight don’t adapt to the conditions and expectations of this one, we’ll make exactly the mistake the people who resisted internet-era ways of working made. We’ll become the blockers — the ones holding on to old ways of working because that is what we are used to and that is what we are good at.
None of which means rescue work should stop, or that demonstrations are worthless, or that capacity substitution isn’t helpful and needed. Some H2- work, done deliberately and named honestly, is best understood as experimentation: we’re running it inside the failing system precisely because that’s where we’ll learn what a new operating model has to do. That’s a different kind of work from rescue that produces learning incidentally, but both can be valuable.
But the field needs a shared frame clear-eyed enough to ask, with each investment: does this move the system toward H3, or does it prolong H1? That question should be driving how resources, talent, and attention get allocated now, not because the prior work was mistaken but because the moment is different and the cost of extending the status quo is too high. There will have to be work that sustains the status quo, but what tradeoffs are we willing to make?
But insisting we ask the question does not mean that answering it is easy: there is no objective set of criteria that distinguishes one from the other. What may look like H2+ to some may seem like H2- to others, and part of that depends on your particular vision of that third horizon (more on that in the coming weeks.) Some may see work as contributing to a transformation, and therefore H2+, but towards an undesired H3 state. Grappling with how to answer this question is work we all need to be doing…
… Some things haven’t changed. The community is still full of good, smart people with enormous insight into a very difficult problem. We’ve just run out of time to do it the way we’ve been doing it. A brittle system that gets propped up through manageable shocks will eventually meet a shock it can’t survive, and we are moving into a period where the shocks are neither manageable nor hypothetical. Every H2- intervention that returns the system to “good enough” is now a bet that good enough will hold. It’s a bet I no longer think we can afford to make.
The window for H2+ work has not been open like this before. It will not stay open indefinitely.
Eminently worth reading in full.
What DOGE coulda, shoulda been: “A Three Horizons Framework for Government Reform,” from @pahlkadot.bsky.social.
* Peter Drucker
###
As we face forward, we might recall that it was on this date in 1970 that President Richard Nixon formally authorized the commitment of U.S. combat troops, in cooperation with South Vietnamese units, against North Vietnamese troop sanctuaries in Cambodia.
#Cambodia #culture #future #government #governmentReform #history #Nixon #politics #RichardNixon #VietnamWarSecretary of State William Rogers and Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird, who had continually argued for a downsizing of the U.S. effort in Vietnam, were excluded from the decision to use U.S. troops in Cambodia. Gen. Earle Wheeler, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, cabled Gen. Creighton Abrams, senior U.S. commander in Saigon, informing him of the decision that a “higher authority has authorized certain military actions to protect U.S. forces operating in South Vietnam.” Nixon believed that the operation was necessary as a pre-emptive strike to forestall North Vietnamese attacks from Cambodia into South Vietnam as the U.S. forces withdrew and the South Vietnamese assumed more responsibility for the fighting. Nevertheless, three National Security Council staff members and key aides to presidential assistant Henry Kissinger resigned in protest over what amounted to an invasion of Cambodia.
When Nixon publicly announced the Cambodian incursion on April 30, it set off a wave of antiwar demonstrations. A May 4, protest at Kent State University resulted in the killing of four students by Army National Guard troops. Another student rally at Jackson State College in Mississippi resulted in the death of two students and 12 wounded when police opened fire on a women’s dormitory. The incursion angered many in Congress, who felt that Nixon was illegally widening the war; this resulted in a series of congressional resolutions and legislative initiatives that would severely limit the executive power of the president.
– source
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Last year’s 12 days of Christmas window. Cut out of black card with a craft knife and backed with tissue paper. It’s my relaxation time in the run up to Christmas! Very little else gets done until the last minute 😬
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Last year’s 12 days of Christmas window. Cut out of black card with a craft knife and backed with tissue paper. It’s my relaxation time in the run up to Christmas! Very little else gets done until the last minute 😬
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Last year’s 12 days of Christmas window. Cut out of black card with a craft knife and backed with tissue paper. It’s my relaxation time in the run up to Christmas! Very little else gets done until the last minute 😬
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Last year’s 12 days of Christmas window. Cut out of black card with a craft knife and backed with tissue paper. It’s my relaxation time in the run up to Christmas! Very little else gets done until the last minute 😬
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Last year’s 12 days of Christmas window. Cut out of black card with a craft knife and backed with tissue paper. It’s my relaxation time in the run up to Christmas! Very little else gets done until the last minute 😬
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Fascism gets another trouncing:
“The streets of Romania are erupting in celebration tonight!
Nicusor Dan has done the impossible and won! 53.92 versus 46.08”
~ Alex Nick
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CW: Adult NSFW
Wohin geht die Reise? #model #blond #topless #nude #naked #nackt #akt #aktmodel #nudeart #artnude #nudephoto #nudemodel #nudegirl #nudewoman #german #sensual #sexy #sexymodel #posing #outdoor #breasts #nipples #boobs #hot #body #erotic #adult #nsfw #patreon
Photo Credits: Nick Freund
https://www.patreon.com/cw/freund_foto -
CW: Adult NSFW
Wohin geht die Reise? #model #blond #topless #nude #naked #nackt #akt #aktmodel #nudeart #artnude #nudephoto #nudemodel #nudegirl #nudewoman #german #sensual #sexy #sexymodel #posing #outdoor #breasts #nipples #boobs #hot #body #erotic #adult #nsfw #patreon
Photo Credits: Nick Freund
https://www.patreon.com/cw/freund_foto -
CW: Adult NSFW
Wohin geht die Reise? #model #blond #topless #nude #naked #nackt #akt #aktmodel #nudeart #artnude #nudephoto #nudemodel #nudegirl #nudewoman #german #sensual #sexy #sexymodel #posing #outdoor #breasts #nipples #boobs #hot #body #erotic #adult #nsfw #patreon
Photo Credits: Nick Freund
https://www.patreon.com/cw/freund_foto -
By Carcharodon
15 years ago, on May 19, 2009, Angry Metal Guy spoke. For the very first time as AMG. And he had opinions: Very Important Opinions™. The post attracted relatively little attention at the time, but times change and, over the decade and a half since then, AMG Industries has grown into the blog you know today. Now with a staff of around 25 overrating overwriters (and an entirely non-suspicious graveyard for writers on permanent, all-expenses-paid sabbaticals), we have written more than 9,100 posts, comprising over seven million words. Over the site’s lifetime, we’ve had more than 107 million visits and now achieve well over a million hits each and every month. Through this, we’ve built up a fantastic community of readers drawn from every corner of the globe, whom we have (mostly) loved getting to know in the more than 360,000 comments posted on the site.
We have done this under the careful (if sternly authoritarian) stewardship of our eponymous leader Angry Metal Guy and his iron enforcer, Steel Druhm, while adhering to strict editorial policies and principles. We have done this by simply offering honest (and occasionally brutal) takes, and without running a single advert or taking a single cent from anyone. Ever. Mistakes have undoubtedly been made and we may be a laughing stock in the eyes of music intellectuals, socialites and critics everywhere but we are incredibly proud of what AMG Industries represents. In fact, we believe it may be the best metal blog, with the best community of readers, on the internet.
Now join us as the people responsible for making AMG a reality reflect on what the site means to them and why they would willingly work for a blog that pays in the currency of deadlines, abuse, and hobo wine. Welcome to the 15th Birthdaynalia.
Thou Shalt Have No Other Blogs!
Steel Druhm
AMG and me
I stumbled into the world of AMG Inc. by chance, one day in early 2010 and just never got around to leaving. To put a finer point on it, I’ve been slaving in the AMG salt mines so long, even the extremely sabbaticalized Happy Metal Guy thinks my mind is gone. Over time, I’ve evolved from unpaid assistant to the Founding Overlord Himself to become site overseer and brvtal enforcer of deadlines, and morale (still unpaid). The journey has been a wild one, full of moments I’ll always cherish. It’s also introduced me to a collection of loveable oddballs I care about, even though I want to murderize them most of the time (you would too if you had to deal with their outrageous bullshit daily).1
The site and the extensive work that goes into it have provided me with a satisfaction that my real job often lacks, and even helped me find my soulmate. In short, AMG means the world to me and that’s why I’ve given so much of myself to this little blog these last 14 years. Looking back, I regret nothing (except the staff’s penchant for wildly overrating complete garbage) and I’d do it all again in a heartbeat. Thank you to the writers past and present who helped make the site possible, and thanks to the readers who make it worth the effort, even though most of you are woefully deficient in the good taste department. Here’s to 15 more years of this burning shitshow of a trainwreck!
AMG gave to me
As I’ve been a part of AMG since the early days, it’s nearly impossible to come up with just three albums the site gave me because it’s given me so many. Instead, I’ll enumerate the biggest non-musical gifts AMG has bestowed upon me over the years.2
Madam X // Be My (Pri)Mate / Down with the Steelness – The best thing AMG gave me by far was the chance to meet my best friend, soulmate and life partner, Madam X. She had read some of my early reviews for AMG and by chance, we happened to run into each other on a now-defunct Facebook metal fan page. She reached out to discuss my reviews and get some recommendations, we started chatting, and the rest, as they say, is history. I’m the luckiest guy in the world to have her and, since she lived in South Africa and I in New York, I highly doubt we ever would have found one another were it not for AMG. For this reason alone, I’ll cherish this little blog until my rusty metal heart explodes in my hairy ape chest. Fun fact: I never had a girlfriend that liked metal, and now I have a wife who listens to stuff that’s so extreme and out there, I end up sounding like my parents and saying shit like “This isn’t music, it’s just crazy noise!” Life is funny sometimes.
The Sadistic Pleasure that Comes from Unicorning Kvlt Strangeo Bands // You Axed for It – One cold, gloomy day back in February 2015, I was reviewing a cold, gloomy release by Danish doom/death act Dwell. Their Vermin and Ashes album didn’t especially thrill me, and I was annoyed that they had opted not to include a band photo in the promo materials. Sure, I get it. They wanted to be dark and mysterious. Who doesn’t? I searched online for a suitable image of them but there were none to be found. I became quite vexed. Where the inspiration came from I cannot say but I decided to bestow upon them a bright, mega-cheesy unicorn image, in place of the non-existent band shot. As I contemplated how the vomit of rainbow colors clashed with the murky gray malaise of the album cover, it looked so wrong that it felt so right! And so a blog protocol was born. Send band photos or face extreme unicorn judgment!
The Joys of Initiating Unsuspecting n00bs into the AMG Meatgrinder // Taste the Skull Pit, Poser – When I joined AMG back in its embryonic, protoplasmic stage, there was no probationary period or brutal abuse (aside from assigning me metalcore albums). Things changed as the blog grew and we started bringing on new writers. Soon, a system of impressment, indoctrination and re-education was put in place, and ruthlessly weaponized in service of internet “fame” and “glory.” Each carefully selected wannabe writer, eyes glistening with the ghosts of their past, would serve a tumultuous probationary term, working in complete isolation under the iron thumbs of AMG management. If they somehow survived this experiment in terror, they would be cast into the general population in the Skull Pit, with a besotted cadre of jaded, glassy-eyed veteran staffers. That’s when the real initiation would begin! Imagine Lord of the Flies mixed with The Hunger Games and The Devil’s Rejects, and you get the general idea. Through ritualized humiliation, unreasonable deadlines, and confrontational teaching methods, we slowly transform these sniveling amateurs into barely functional hack reviewers. Believe in the system or be buried by it me.
I wish I had written …
White Wizzard – The Devil’s Cut Review. Yes, the infamous review that’s hung around our necks like a rotting albatross ever since it saw the light of day in 2013. Had I been tasked with doing the review, I would have given it the rating it truly deserved, which is a big, fat, greasy 3.0. Just like the album that came before, and the one that followed. Now, I have nothing against White Wizzard and I enjoy the retro 80s metal style they play, but let’s face it, nothing they ever did came anywhere near a 5.0 (whether in its “Perfect” or “Iconic” guise). My common sense, real-world review would have spared us all a great deal of embarrassment, as well as saving the effort and bleach it took to scrub the office down after the First Grand Sabbaticaling. If only…
I wish I could do over …
Amon Amarth – Sutur Rising Review. As a relatively new reviewer, I got the unexpected chance to weigh in on a new Amon Amarth platter, while I was at the peak of my feverish AA fanboyism. This proved a deadly combination and, before my better angels could caution restraint and moderation, I stamped this thing with a 4.5, and got the album cover tattooed on my dog. With time (and much hobo wine), I realized that I let the moment get the better of me. Despite the presence of a few killer cuts like “War of the Gods” and “Destroyer of the Universe,” Sutur Rising is far from Amon Amarth’s best work. I dutifully submitted a groveling apology in a Contrite Metal Guy piece and tried to move on with my life. 13 years on, this one still stands as my biggest rating misadventure and a source of bitter regret. I blame society (AKA: you, the reader).
I wish more people had read …
Retro-spective Review: Hall Aflame – Guaranteed Forever. The side project of Metal Church’s Kurdt Vanderhoof, Hall Aflame saw but one release in 1991. But what a party this thing was and still is! Adopting a style somewhere between The Cult and The Four Horsemen, Hall Aflame roar through a collection of wildly catchy, burly rockers, making for a highly replay-able album, with only occasional reminders it’s made by the brain behind Metal Church. Cuts like “Shake the Pain,” Child of Medicine,” and “Money” are absolute monsters, and “Another Heartbeat” is one of my favorite songs of all time across all genres. The hugely ass-kicking vocals by completely unknown (then and now) frontman Ron Lowd alone are worth the effort it will take to track down this rare gem. The world continues to sleep on this killer, as evidenced by my retro-spective review scoring exactly ZERO comments. Don’t let this injustice continue. You need to hear this thing, especially with the recent news that Vanderhoof is releasing the long-awaited (by me at least) follow-up in May. You have my word as a Viking ape that satisfaction is Guaranteed Forever.
AMG is Now a Good Capitalist! In this gap-filler post from 2015, I posited the concept of AMG building a merch empire based upon goods of questionable quality (see our branded Uni-Friend and Sabbatical Sausage Maker pictured above). It got reads but, since I found the concept amusing, I wanted MOAR clicks. I credit this piece with motivating me to finally get a batch of actual AMG t-shirts printed up for the undeserving staff. If you see someone wearing one of these rare treasures and kill them, you take their place in the Skull Pit forevermore. It’s just like The Santa Clause, but much, much worse.
Dr. A.N. Grier
AMG and me
Back in the day, we’d be lucky to get two reviews a day at AMG. This led to me refreshing the site every few hours hoping for a bonus review for the day.3 I was obsessed with the writing and these gems I would never have found otherwise. Before I began writing here, I would do that regularly from 2010-2011. One morning I left the lab of my failing start-up and walked into my office to do some work. The post that morning wasn’t a review. Instead, it was instructions on how to apply to be an AMG writer. Without thinking—because I’d been up for roughly 40 straight hours—I submitted a review of 1349’s lackluster Demonoir. Weeks later, I was a n00b in these decrepit halls. And I’m still here regretting that decision, almost ten years to the day since I submitted my first review. It’s funny, now that I’ve gathered everything for this piece, that I found those early days the fondest of times. Those days when I still loved the writers, the readers, writing about metal, and well… music. Now I’m a broken soul, stalking the halls as a sex-depraved ghost,4 avoiding eye contact with Steel because his ape eyes make my pants tight.
But, in all seriousness, it’s been a wild ride and it’s odd to be one of the lucky few who have contributed to two-thirds of AMG’s existence. I’m proud to have kept the output so rounded, delivering correct scores and takes, and providing X-rated content for the younger generations. So, join me in celebrating AMG’s birthday, as I travel back to those early years when I became part of the family and discovered records that shaped the man known, for today at least, as Dr. All. Nostalgic. Grier.
AMG gave to me …
Mors Principium Est // Dawn of the 5th Era – As a n00b, Angry Metal Guy‘s review of Mors Principium Est’s Dawn of the 5th Era made me realize two things: I needed this band in my life and never release an album in December. Thankfully, AMG caught it (while everyone else was busting their asses to write their year-end lists) because it’s a stunning achievement. From that point on, I consider myself one of MPE’s biggest fans. That continuation of the At the Gates sound results in incredible performances and riff after massive riff. Not a single song on this album goes stale and I’ve been listening to it regularly for ten fucking years. I can never seem to find a melodeath group whose entire catalog I march through from beginning to end.5 But MPE is one of them. And, because you might be wondering, … And Death Said Live is their best album.
Voices // London – Back in 2014, I ranked an album I never reviewed. Weird, right? Not only was it a great album, but it was one of my favorite reviews from the illustrious Jean-Luc Ricard, who opened his thoughts with: “If you’re anything like me, you’re super awesome.” Still makes me laugh my ass off. Beyond that, Ricard conveyed the absolute nightmare that you experience when you listen to London. Though Akercocke has since reunited, Voices was an incredible substitute, which takes you through a journey that, somehow, Ricard was able to describe; because I sure as hell can’t. I was doing an oil change on my truck the first time I span it. Never have I taken so long to do that work but I constantly found myself staring off into space, literally frightened by the sounds erupting in my ears. The band has never been able to top London, but that’s OK. It’s one of the beautiful aspects of music—it’s permanent and will be there forever when you need it.
Trials // This Ruined World – When I joined AMG and worked side-by-side with Dr. Fisting, we hit it off. I love the guy and consider him a close friend (though he might not feel the same). When I found out that he started a band called Trials, I had to check it out. With two decent albums under his belt, 2014 saw the release of Trials’ best—and final—album, This Ruined World. I was hooked. And to imagine that without knowing about this band or this person, I might never have experienced his work in Bear Mace and the (to me, at least) incredible Black Sites. Though I don’t return to Trials often, mostly because I can’t pull myself away from Fisting‘s current work, I have a special place in my heart for This Ruined World. It introduced me to a fantastic musician and a good friend.
I wish I had written …
Origin – Omnipresent Review. When you join the crew, the hope is that you get to write that review for a big band. Those bands you grew up with, that released something at that point in your life, or which have such popularity that every other site overrates them. But, at AMG, you kinda have to earn that. Unless it’s, somehow, a popular dungeon synth group; you can just have that. So, when my most-anticipated album of 2014 dropped, I wanted it. But, there wasn’t a chance in hell I would get my hands on Origin’s Omnipresent. I bet you didn’t know I liked tech death, much less Origin. But, I do. I just know there are other, more qualified writers to cover that material. Thankfully, our wise and wonderful Kronos scored it correctly and wrote a fantastic review that describes it perfectly. Since then, I haven’t been as enamored with their material (mostly because this place has turned me into a hateful prick), but that album holds up and still gets many a spin.
I wish I could do over …
Resumed – Alienation Review. I remember when the review for Resumed’s Alienations was published. It was Thanksgiving 2014 and I was already six sheets to the wind when I realized what I was reading: the first double review in AMG history. It wasn’t a record that merited a double but Steel fucked up and double-booked it, thereby unintentionally beginning a trend. Though I couldn’t believe I wasted my time on this thing6 and subjected myself to uncalled-for ridicule, it started one of our most popular segments. Hell, it even led to our Unsigned Band Rodeö pieces. So, for better or worse (and by worse, I mean that year’s burned turkey), we can thank this worthless piece for contributing to AMG lore.
I wish more people had read …
Thine – The Dead City Blueprint [Things You Might Have Missed 2014]. In the process of writing the review for The Deathtrip’s stellar 2014 release, Deep Drone Master, Metal Archives led me to a release we never received. In walks Thine, a progressive rock outfit led by the same person who convinced Aldrahn to come back from retirement to front Deep Drone Master, not to mention drummer Dan Mullins, who returned for My Dying Bride’s newest release. Representing my first ever Things You Might Have Missed piece, I continue to return to this band’s swansong release: it’s beautiful and engaging, and is everything I ever wanted from an album of this caliber. My unpopularity as a n00b, combined with the new year beginning and everyone moving on to January releases, meant no one seemed to care. But I cared. I care so much, in fact, that I’m dropping Thine’s name again, in the hope that Bandcamp credits will be put to good use. You’re welcome.
Dr. Fisting
AMG and me
As a reader of the site’s earliest incarnation, the first thing that stood out to me was that AMG’s writers were clearly educated. Even back then, the reviews were extremely well-written. I don’t mean just in terms of spelling and grammar, but being able to express ideas coherently. If you’ve ever visited any other metal-related sites, you know that these qualities are rare. More importantly, AMG was clearly an independent operation, with no reliance on ad revenue or cozy relationships with record labels. This meant the site was free to post brutally honest reviews, which occasionally resulted in battles against the metal media’s narrative and even the fans themselves. I always enjoyed when some huge band would put out a half-assed album that got rave reviews everywhere else, and then the AMG writeup would take a well-deserved shit on it.
When I started writing for the site a couple of years later, I did my best to uphold those standards. Eventually, as my life and priorities changed, I chose to step back from reviewing to focus on other things. But it was an honor to ride with these guys for as long as I did. I got to review some fantastic records, talk shit about some terrible ones, and make some friends that I am still in contact with to this day.
AMG gave to me …
Pain of Salvation // Road Salt Pt. 1 – I don’t remember if I discovered this record from reading the site or from The Angry One Himself sending it to me (“here, you’ll like this”), but Road Salt Pt. 1 was a complete game-changer. At a time when I was completely bored of “modern metal” and its trappings, I related strongly to PoS’s new direction, in which chug riffs and rapping were replaced by analog ’70s tones and memorable songs. This record was in heavy rotation in the Fisting household, and became a significant influence on my own music.
Satan // Life Sentence – Having missed out on Satan’s original run, I was unaware of their comeback album until the AMG review heaped praise upon it. Lucky for me it did because Life Sentence is full of intelligent lyrics, clever riffs, and memorable hooks. The band has since made three more records, all of which have been varying degrees of excellent. More importantly, discovering Life Sentence sent me on a path to revisit the band’s earlier works, including the highly influential Court in the Act.
Anacrusis // Screams and Whispers – Anacrusis is another band I was completely oblivious to during their lifespan, but discovered much later via Grymm‘s excellent retrospective writeup. This album is incredibly ambitious for its time (1993), pushing thrash metal into new and more introspective territory. There are hints of industrial influence, occasional goth-y keyboards, and some very angular guitar work, even by 1990s standards. This is a classic record from metal’s lost years, and more people should hear it.
I wish I had written …
King’s X – Three Sides of One Review. Not to suggest that Huck didn’t do a fantastic job on the review, because he absolutely nailed it, but King’s X has held a special place in my cold black heart for many years. I should’ve been there for this. There is no good reason why I didn’t do this review (or the related Angry Metal Primer) other than my own laziness and poor time management. Life gets in the way sometimes. I wish I could do over … I regret nothing.
I wish more people had read …
Various reviews of Voivod and Failure albums. As several readers noticed, I made it a personal mission to preach the virtues of Voivod and Failure. I consider both bands to be absolutely brilliant and worthy of greater attention (particularly Failure, whom I suspect most AMG readers are unfamiliar with). I don’t know how many people read those reviews, but whatever that number is, it needed to be more.
#2024 #AMGTurns15 #AmonAmarth #Anacrusis #BlogPost #BlogPosts #Failure #HallAflame #KingsX #MorsPrincipiumEst #Origin #PainOfSalvation #Resumed #Satan #Thine #Trials #Voices #Voivod #WhiteWizzard
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CW: spoiler for the movie #LordOfWar
@BlackAzizAnansi This is objectively not the saddest movie moment of all time, but the #Hallelujah sequence in #LordOfWar — specifically the bit where Nick Cage on voiceover says that his wife might have forgiven him if the combination lock was his birthdate or her birthdate as the camera pans down to their kid and the song gets to its saddest bit — gets me every time. https://youtu.be/M3vejAvwjWU
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CW: spoiler for the movie #LordOfWar
@BlackAzizAnansi This is objectively not the saddest movie moment of all time, but the #Hallelujah sequence in #LordOfWar — specifically the bit where Nick Cage on voiceover says that his wife might have forgiven him if the combination lock was his birthdate or her birthdate as the camera pans down to their kid and the song gets to its saddest bit — gets me every time. https://youtu.be/M3vejAvwjWU
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CW: spoiler for the movie #LordOfWar
@BlackAzizAnansi This is objectively not the saddest movie moment of all time, but the #Hallelujah sequence in #LordOfWar — specifically the bit where Nick Cage on voiceover says that his wife might have forgiven him if the combination lock was his birthdate or her birthdate as the camera pans down to their kid and the song gets to its saddest bit — gets me every time. https://youtu.be/M3vejAvwjWU