Now Homer describes this period of gradual overlap of iron and bronze. But he adds the strange peculiarity that the weapons, but for a single arrow-head[8] and an iron mace, mentioned as the peculiar fancy of a warrior when Nestor was young,[9] are always of bronze, while the tools and the masses of metal out of which they are forged are usually of iron. This fact has often been the subject of comment.[10] Of the critics mentioned in the note below, Helbig and Cauer think that the steady mention by Homer of bronze for weapons is a mere tradition of the epic, maintained by poets in the Iron Age. It would be interesting to find any such tradition in any other literature of the early Iron Age. But we do not find it. Moreover, the lays of the Bronze Age, when they mentioned tools, must have said that they were of bronze, as Homer occasionally does; but we are not told why later poets maintained the bronze tradition for weapons, but spoke of tools as iron. As in the case of the arrow-head it is called "the iron," so in the case of tools, and of knives (not used in battle); the wheelwright is said to fell a tree "with the iron," though Odysseus trims the wood of his bed "with the bronze." Achilles, it is feared, will cut his own throat "with the iron" (knife); the cattle struggle when slain "with the iron"--the butcher's knife; and Odysseus shoots "through the iron," through the holes in the axes. But no man, in battle, strikes with or dies under "the iron." This distinction could not have been uniformly maintained throughout several centuries by poets living in an age of iron weapons. Naber and Bérard, unlike Cauer and Helbig, give the obvious explanation that when iron came in, but its manufacture and the sharpening of it were ill understood, men would make heavy axes and other rural implements of iron, but would not trust their lives to iron weapons which were brittle or which "doubled up." This is the view which occurred to myself before I had read the works of Naber and Bérard; but I then knew no proof that a stage of iron tools and bronze weapons had ever existed. As Monsieur Bérard puts the case, "I might almost say that iron is the popular metal ... the shepherd and ploughman can extract and work it without going to the town."[11] It is probable that the princes who had lands remote from towns kept each his own smithy for rough work, like Highland chiefs in 1680-1745, who had the rough iron work done on the estate, but always imported their sword _blades_ from the Continent. The hilts were made at home, basket hilts.[12]