#kilij

▪︎Miniature Sword ("Kilij").

Culture: Turkish

Date: late 18th-19th century

Period: Ottoman

The bonus sword of the day is the kilij.

If the end you grab cuts your fingers, it's usually the wrong end :->

AFAIK the grips of most swords in most cultures were never just leather wrapped over an otherwise-bare tang; they were made of wood, but also bone, ivory, horn and even stone (mostly jade).

Once the wrap’s in place it’s hard to tell if an apparently bare tang is actually bare at all, though leather or rawhide (maybe with fur still visible somewhere) gives a "rustic" or "barbaric" appearance that suggests something cruder than it really is.

Here's a leather example on a dagger from Albion Swords’ repros of weapons from "Conan the Barbarian" (1982). The link is to their page.

I don’t know what’s underneath, but the guard and pommel are separate parts and are certainly held on by more than the wrap, so maybe there are a couple of wooden slats under the leather as well.

This one (found here) is in deliberately aged cotton cord on a refurbished Chinese sword, and goes over a wooden grip fitted between pommel and guard-ferrule. It’s hard to see, but it’s there.

I don’t know if the underlay loop is on both sides, but it would make sense to add more bulk.

Here are three Kriegsmesser (”war-knife”) hilts, one a bare tang, then wooden grip-scales with rivets, and finally what looks like either a solid grip with a hole bored through it, or maybe a two-part sandwich secured with some kind of adhesive.

The reason why I keep going on about the need for something to fill out the space between tang and gripping surface is because - as in that first Messer pic - the tang of a sword may be broad or narrow in width but it’s no thicker than the blade.

Most photos of swords are “full-face”, so it’s hard to judge their cross-section,. but I found some examples which show the tang “in profile” and demonstrate why a strip of leather wound round it wasn’t going to be enough.

Oh, and those stone (jade) hilts I mentioned?

Take a look at these...

A beautiful Kilij inlaid in gold with Quranic verse,

OaL: 36.2 in/92 cm

Latest release in the Sword Studies series by Nick Thomas of the Academy of Historical Fencing. This one is on a fantastic Mameluke chief’s kilij given over to a British Coldstream Regiment officer in 1801. A wonderful historical artifact that played a part in key military events of the late 18th and early 19th Centuries.