A job that exists 500 years too late

Who designed that sword? There’s a uselessly modern question. What am I going on about? In the words of Inigo Montoya “Let me explain, no, there is too much, let me sum up.” Designing a sword, maybe for a video game or movie, is a completely modern job but also is also kind of useless because the design is strictly for aesthetics and won’t ever be used. Medieval blacksmiths weren’t weapons designers, they simply made the swords that were common to their place and time. In fact, if you read any history of swords book, it boils down to basically “… and then after another century they made this part pointy too.”, not exactly a lot of design. Whoever imagines all the diverse and varied forms of fantasy swords for a Lord of the Rings movie, or a Witcher video game will invariably come up with dozens more refinements and design iterations of weaponry than a viking era swordsmith. So it is an odd thing, and I thought worth noting, that the centuries that have the most creative and prolific designers of swords are also the centuries where no one is using swords. Go figure.