Dwarven Longsword

The Foreigner

The longsword cuts, thrusts, and changes guard with an ease no dwarven weapon can match, but its weight sits near the hand and never at the tip, and to a dwarf that is holding a tool by the wrong end.

The dwarves did not invent it: they learned it from the men of the first ages. Everything a dwarf wields, pick, axe, hammer, carries its mass far from the hand, and the body learns early to throw a weight that falls of its own accord. A blade balanced toward the palm asks the opposite, and the dwarven hand never trusted it. So the longsword never took a place among true weapons of war: it stayed a foreign thing, down to its name, borrowed from the tongue of men.

Dwarven smiths forge excellent ones, for men: a commission honored with care, and never carried by the one who forged it. Of those they keep, they have made ornaments, for among dwarves, to be seen is to show one's Dürn. The flat of a blade is a field of rock-iron, good for engraving, for catching the forge-light, for counting at a glance. So they widened it, until a dwarven longsword looks, to a man, like a broadsword. On a true weapon the names of the forebears hide down the tang; here, because it is made to be seen, they spread across the flat where all can read them. It is worn at councils, at oaths, at weddings, and the broader the flat, the higher the standing. A dwarf draws it so that he is seen holding it.

Here lies the whole nature of this weapon: among men it is fought with, among dwarves it is worn, and what it cuts best is the eye of whoever looks upon it.