is explicitly recalled in phrases such as "excellent ancient sword", "ancient heirloom", and "old and grey". They might have magical powers: Excalibur shines In Norse mythology, similarly, a sword may shine like the sun, as in the Poetic Edda: "Surt from the south comes / With flickering flame; Shines from his sword / The Val-god’s sun." Swords may be heirlooms within a royal family, or may be recovered from ancient hoards of treasure, in either case having a lineage and story of their own. A sword-blade could be adorned with runes; these might attach power, history, and magic spells to the weapon, just as Sigurd was instructed to engrave runes of wisdom and victory on his sword Gram. The historian of arms Ewart Oakeshott described the sword as having "a potent mystique which sets it above any other man-made object". Swords had two attributes which made them especially highly prized: they were costly to manufacture, and effective as weapons. In Middle-earth Weapons of power Tolkien named many weapons, mainly swords, but also including Aeglos, the spear of the Elf-king Gil-Galad; Belthronding, Beleg's bow; Dramborleg, Tuor's axe; and Grond, the name both of the evil battering-ram from Minas Morgul, and of the mace of the first Dark Lord, Morgoth, in his Middle-earth writings. As in medieval epics, the sword in particular symbolised the heroism and position of its owner. As the Tolkien scholar Verlyn Flieger put it, the sword "proclaims the emergence of the hero"; further, "the fates of sword and man are linked, and the destruction of one signals the end of the other". Such themes can be seen clearly with Aragorn's sword Andúril, but they run similarly through Tolkien's accounts of many other named weapons. The swords Glamdring and Orcrist named in The Hobbit fit two strands of the Medieval pattern, as they are both ancient, having been forged in the First Age, and were retrieved from a treasure-hoard, having been held by the three Trolls in their cave. Reforging and rediscovery effectively pass old power to the new weapon and its new owner, and renew that power. These two swords actually each have three names (polyonymy): in the high and ancient tongue; a translation into the Common Speech, rendered as English; and a goblin nickname. Glamdring and Orcrist, and Bilbo's knife used as a sword, which he named Sting, gleam when Orcs are nearby; the ancient swords terrify