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Updated: May 14, 2025
As time went on, few people were to be seen about the streets, but there was a run on the gunmakers' and sword-smiths'. By day no cheerful shouts or songs rang out, but children of six or seven years of age would go hand in hand in rows down the street in the evenings, singing "Mourir pour la patrie," to its own beautiful, affecting melody. But these were the only gentle sounds one heard.
Sword-smiths not infrequently rose to dignities far beyond their class: some had conferred upon them the high title of Kami, written with the same character used in the title of a daimyo, who was usually termed the Kami of his province or district. Naturally they enjoyed the patronage of the highest, emperors and Kuge.
Apparently they had not done so in the age of the poet, but iron had certainly ceased to be "a precious metal"; knives and woodcutters' axes are never made of a metal that is precious and rare. I am thus led, on a general view, to suppose that the poems took shape when iron was very well known, but was not yet, as in the "Dipylon" period in Crete, commonly used by sword-smiths. Thus he says:
By religious tradition, immemorially old, the first sheaf of rice grown within the imperial grounds should be reaped and offered by the imperial hand to the divine ancestors as a harvest offering, on the occasion of the Ninth Festival, Shin-Sho-Sai.* Highest among these were reckoned, as we might expect, the sword-smiths.
But these rural smiths did not make sword- blades, which Prince Charles, as late as 1750, bought on the Continent. The Andrea Ferrara-marked broadsword blades of the clans were of foreign manufacture. The Highland smiths did such rough iron work as was needed for rural purposes. Perhaps the Homeric chief may have sometimes been a craftsman like the heroes of the Sagas, great sword-smiths.
Immediately the duke dismounted from his horse, went into his own room, closed the door, and remained there until nightfall. No one dared to enter that room or speak to the duke. When he left it, it was with the resolve to take a terrible vengeance upon the man who, he said, had broken his oath. He sent for armourers, and sword-smiths, and carpenters, and ship-builders.
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