Viking Age
Perhaps the most distant recognizable cousins to the spatha were the Viking Age blades. These swords took on a much more acute distal taper and point. These blades had deep fullers running their length, yet still had single-handed hilts which sported a unique shaped pommel, flat at the grip side and roughly triangular early on, with the flat curving to fit the hand later. While the pattern of hilt and blade design of this type might readily be called "the Viking sword", to do so would be to neglect the widespread popularity it enjoyed. All over continental Europe between 700 AD and 1000 AD, this design and its variations could be found. Many of the best blades were of Frankish origin, hilted in local centres. These blades had significantly better balance. Many Saxon-era blades were largely ceremonial, due to the low grade of iron and the tip-heavy balance. Viking-era blades were refined weapons.
During Norman times the blades increased some 100 millimetres (3.9 in) in overall length, and the hilt changed significantly. Instead of the Brazil-nut pommel, a thick disc-shaped pommel was attached "on-edge" to the bottom of the iron hilt. In addition the upper guard grew substantially from the near-absent design predating it. Also the blades tended to taper slightly less than those found in the time of the Vikings.
Due to the combined Greek and Roman tradition of its military, or perhaps through the Varangian Guard's presence in Constantinople, the spatha had a place within the Byzantine Empire and its army. In the Byzantine court, spatharios (σπαθάριος), or "bearer of the spatha", was a mid-level court title. Other variants deriving from it were protospatharios, spatharokandidatos and spatharokoubikoularios, the latter reserved for eunuchs. One of the more famous spatharokandidatoi was Harald Hardrada.
Jan Petersen in De Norske Vikingsverd ("The Norwegian Viking Swords", 1919) introduced the most widely-used classification of swords of the Viking Age, discriminating twenty-six types labelled A – Z. In 1927 R. E. M. Wheeler condensed Petersen's typology into a simplified typology of nine groups, numbered I – IX.
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