The keris Solok or Sundang
E. Banks’s short note describes the Keris Solok (or Sundang), a double-edged broadsword characteristic of Bornean Malays, and proposes its role as a possible ancestor of the straight Kayan and Kenyah cutting swords.
Summary
Banks documents the physical characteristics of the Solok: a blade approximately 18 inches long, either flat, elliptical in section, or grooved on both sides, with both edges sharp and either straight or bearing a varying number of waves. He catalogues the named varieties according to wave count—Andus (over twenty), Rantai (seven to twenty), Jenoya (seven), Apit Liang (five), Belinkong (three), and Rajah Laut (straight)—and describes the hilt, which is of wood or ivory with a characteristic downward recurved prong to prevent the hand slipping (p. 105).
Banks then advances a theoretical argument that the Solok, being almost the only double-edged cutting instrument in the Malaysian weapon tradition, may represent the ancestral form from which the Kayan and Kenyah straight, hollow-ground, single-edged swords were derived. He identifies transitional stages in the rare Kenyah Bayu (straight, grooved, double-edged) and the Usong But (with half the back of the blade sharpened), and argues that the Solok’s enlarged Janggut fretwork and the Lambai and Beladai Gajah near the hilt correspond to the fretwork patterns and finger guards found on old Kayan and Kenyah blades (pp. 105–107).