to be shorter blades in subsequent centuries but many of those NUMBER_TOKEN NUMBER_TOKEN NUMBER_TOKEN NUMBER_TOKENth century blades were originally longer than the average of what we find today they were NUMBER_TOKEN NUMBER_TOKEN NUMBER_TOKEN inches in a gas or blade length okay now that's not very often replicated by modern makers it's not particularly popular okay so people actually have come to the modern consumer has come to expect a katana to have a certain degree of curvature for the most part have a certain type of blade shape and to have a certain blade length which by european standard is quite short but what's funny is once we get in to the sort of later period so we say NUMBER_TOKENth century onwards often katanas had shorter blades than this so certainly once we get into sort of NUMBER_TOKENth and NUMBER_TOKENth century it's not uncommon at all for a katana to have maybe a NUMBER_TOKEN NUMBER_TOKEN inch blade now admittedly there are size differences and this goes for all of the swords we're talking about here uh a modern european user is definitely likely to have an average taller height than a say NUMBER_TOKENth century japanese user unquestionably okay but laying that aside if we're talking about making replicas of period weapons i find it interesting to note that with japanese swords we've settled on this kind of NUMBER_TOKEN inch or thereabouts average for katanas and it's pretty much standard for all the chinese-made modern katana replicas um but in period there were longer swords there were shorter swords and indeed there were swords of around this length as well so really i'm not complaining that NUMBER_TOKEN i'm not saying NUMBER_TOKEN inches is necessarily wrong i'm just saying that the other lengths particularly the shorter lengths of katana are under represented in the modern replication world now funnily enough this is also true of medieval replica swords uh if we look at the longsword one of the most popular forms of european sword around it is very common for modern replicas to have NUMBER_TOKEN NUMBER_TOKEN NUMBER_TOKEN inch blades on them historically we actually find a lot with shorter blades than that yes indeed long swords with or you know bastards with hand and a half grips many times they only have NUMBER_TOKEN NUMBER_TOKEN NUMBER_TOKEN inch blades and these are under represented in the replicas equally some of them are much longer some of them are more like NUMBER_TOKEN NUMBER_TOKEN NUMBER_TOKEN NUMBER_TOKEN inch blades and those are underrepresented as well so again it's about pandering or catering whichever way you want to look at it to the modern consumer and not really representing the spread of original artifacts i'd also say viking era swords are not uncommonly shorter than a lot of replicas are and indeed if we go to arming swords then there are a lot of arming swords which are sort of NUMBER_TOKEN NUMBER_TOKEN-inch blades they're not very well represented in modern replicas because modern people like an arming sword to have a blade of about NUMBER_TOKEN inches quite commonly and equally although they're not really popular in the modern world these earlier forms of arming sword used in the norman and kind of crusader area eras areas these often have hugely long blades that actually make them very unwieldy in the hand for a person on foot without a shield and they're not very well represented as well so
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