The idea of a late Homeric poet trying to reconstruct from his fancy a prehistoric state of civilisation is out of the question. Even historical novelists of the eighteenth century A.D. scarcely attempted such an effort.
This was the regular state of things in the Highlands during the eighteenth century, when many chiefs, and most of the clans, lived far from any town. 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. Odysseus himself, notably an excellent carpenter, may have been as good a sword-smith, but every hero was not so accomplished.
In searching with microscopes for Homeric discrepancies and interpolations, critics are apt to forget the ways of old rural society.
The Homeric poems, whether composed in one age or throughout five centuries, are thus entirely uniform in allotting bronze as the material for all sorts of warlike gear, down to the solitary battle-axe mentioned; and iron as the usual metal for heavy tools, knives, carpenters' axes, adzes, and agricultural implements, with the rare exceptions which we have cited in the case of bronze knives and axes. Either this distinction--iron for tools and implements; bronze for armour, swords, and spears--prevailed throughout the period of the Homeric poets or poet; or the poets invented such a stage of culture; or poets, some centuries later, deliberately kept bronze for weapons only, while introducing iron for implements. In that case they were showing archaeological conscientiousness in following the presumed earlier poets of the bronze age, the age of the Mycenaean graves.
Now early poets are never studious archaeologists. Examining the [blank space] certainly based on old lays and legends which survive in the Edda, we find that the poets of the _Nibelungenlied_ introduce chivalrous and Christian manners. They do not archaeologise. The poets of the French _Chansons de Geste_ (eleventh to thirteenth centuries) bring their own weapons, and even armorial bearings, into the 'remote age of Charlemagne, which they know from legends and _cantilènes_. Again, the later _remanieurs_ of the earliest _Chansons de Geste_ modernise the details of these poems. But, _per impossibile_, and for the sake of argument, suppose that the later interpolators and continuators of the Homeric lays were antiquarian precisians, or, on the other hand, "deliberately attempted to reproduce from their inner consciousness an archaic state of civilisation." Suppose that, though they lived in an age of iron weapons, they knew, as Hesiod knew, that the old heroes "had warlike gear of bronze, and ploughed with bronze, and there was no black iron." [Footnote: Hesiod, _Works and Days_, pp. 250, 251.] In that case, why did the later interpolating poets introduce iron as the special material of tools and implements, knives and axes, in an age when they knew that there was no iron? Savants such as, by this theory, the later poets of the full-blown age of iron were, they must have known that the knives and axes of the old heroes were made of bronze. In old votive offerings in temples and in any Mycenaean graves which might be opened, the learned poets of 800-600 B.C. saw with their eyes knives and axes of bronze. [Footnote: _Early Age of Greece_, i. 413-416.] The knife of Agamemnon ([Greek: machaira]), which hangs from his girdle, beside his sword, [Footnote: _Iliad_, III. 271; XIX. 252.] corresponds to the knives found in Grave IV. at Mycenae; the handles of these dirks have a ring for suspension. [Footnote: Tsountas and Manatt, p. 204.] But these knives, in Mycenaean graves, are of bronze, and of bronze are the axes in the Mycenaean deposits and the dagger of Enkomi. [Footnote: _Ibid._, pp. 145, 207, 208, 256. _Evans, Journal of the Anthropological Institute_, vol xxx. p, 214.]