The Sword of Antar
The sword Dhami, the chosen blade of Antarah ibn Shaddad, the pre-Islamic warrior-poet of the Arabian Peninsula whose exploits fill the medieval romance Sirah 'Antar. In the sira, Antar wins the sword in combat and carries it through the wars of the tribe of Abs and his long struggle to marry his cousin Abla, who appears in his poetry and in the romance as his lifelong beloved. The romance is literary, built up over centuries around the historical sixth-century poet, and the sword's named exploits grow with the telling, so that Dhami accrues its own mini-legend inside the larger epic. It stand