Sword: The Scottish Claymore
The claymore (Claidheamh Mòr) is one of the most recognizable swords in history.This famous two handed battle sword was used by Scottish clansmen for hundreds of years. The Claymore as it was called, was feared because of its strength and size. It was the primary weapon used during the constant warfare that became the way of life for the Scottish clans. The name reffers to either of two types of Scottish sword; an older two-handed design used as an anti-cavalry weapon, and less correctly to a more modern blade, famous as the "basket-hilted" claymore. A uniquely Scottish hand-and-a-half style of sword, first appearing at the beginning of the sixteenth century, it is almost certainly a development of the Scots-Irish single hand style of sword. Shorter and lighter, in general, than the continental Two-Hander, the average Claymore ran about 50 inches (127 cms) in over all length, with maximum sizes reaching upto 72 inches (183 cms). Fairly uniform in style, the sword was set with a wheel pommel often capped by a crescent shaped nut and a guard with straight, down sloping arms ending in quatrefoils and languets running down the centre of the blade from the guard.
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The traditions of the Irish people are the oldest of any race in Europe north and west of the Alps, and they themselves are the longest settled on their own soil
- Edmund Curtis (A History of Ireland: From Earliest Times to 1922)
The Irish are one of the most ancient nations that I know of at this end of the world, and are from as mighty a race as the world ever brought forth.
For it is certain that Ireland hath had the use of letters very anciently and long before England; that they had letters anciently is nothing doubtful, for the Saxons of England are said to have their letters and learning, and learned men, from the Irish.
- Edmund Spenser (writer, and British Government Official in Ireland, AD 1596).
The renaissance began in Ireland seven hundred years before it was known in Italy. And Armagh, the ecclesiastical capital of Ireland, was at one time the metropolis of civilisation.
- Arsene Darmesteter, Professor of Old French and Literature
Ireland can indeed lay claim to a great past; she can not only boast of having been the birthplace and abode of high culture in the fifth and sixth centuries . . . but also of having made strenous efforts in the seventh and up to the tenth century to spread her learning among the German and Romance peoples, thus forming the actual fountain of our present continental civilisation.
- Heinrich Zimmer, Professor of Celtic and Sanskrit, Member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences
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Monday, July 4th, 2005
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