Lake Neuenburg Arming Sword

1 review for Lake Neuenburg Arming Sword

1. Rated 4 out of 5

   peregrineeagle3 (verified owner) – January 8, 2025

   Firstly I love the way this looks. I bought this to have something shorter and a bit more refined to carry at faires than the stage combat longsword that I already have and it certainly delivers on those fronts. The balance point is about an inch past the first engraving up from the guard, or ~4″ from the guard. The symbols in the fuller are very nicely etched – they appear to be laser engraved (not inlaid metal as in the original artifact that this is based on). This does come with blunted edges, though they look like they could take an edge with some work. I do notice that the blade has a slight bow to it and the lines on the edges and fuller aren’t perfectly straight, but only on close inspection – for my purposes of using it as a costume piece, it looks great!

   One thing to note – the leather wrapping on the hilt and scabbard is BLUE. Not an issue for me at all, the blue tint was part of what drew me to this one, but the photos don’t represent it well. The description says they are black but that is inaccurate. The photos look vaguely blue but are much darker than in reality – this is much closer to an indigo blue, so be aware if you’re planning any sort of color coordination with an outfit.

   On the topic of the scabbard, it feels solid and nicely put together (and again, very blue). The sword has a good friction fit, easy to draw but not jostling around. The included straps are clearly meant for right hand draw, if mounted for left hand there might be some aesthetic compromises – I couldn’t find an easy way to reverse it while keeping the seam of the scabbard towards the inside. The major flaw of the straps, however, is that they are too far down the blade, well past the balance point, so the whole thing will tend to tip itself pommel down. Maybe I’m doing something wrong, but thankfully there’s more than enough space around the balance point on the scabbard to fit a separate sword frog. The straps are also quite long to the point of being impractical (for me at least), even at their shortest the scabbard hangs down close to my knee when hanging from a belt at my waist. This could be easily fixed with a leather punch, but again there’s not much practical use that I can see given where they fall relative to the sword’s balance. So if you intend to carry this, it would be a good idea to have a separate frog, baldric, etc.

   The packaging left a bit to be desired, the blade was well wrapped and oiled, but the whole thing was mostly free to slide around inside the box to the point that one of the quillions busted through the plastic wrapping and the box itself. It has a bit of surface rust from being exposed during shipping (it was delivered within a larger box so not exposed directly to the elements, but there is still a noticeable difference between the side of the guard that was exposed and the other). Nothing that can’t be cleaned up, but some cardboard blocking inside the box would have gone a long way.