um…it’s a sword.
And it would look smashing with some sort of an environment.
ver’nice it is too.
Thanks guys, Hippie, you are correct of course. I will see if I can come up with something. Kind of drawing a blank at the moment though, maybe after some coffee…
Great! I looked at it for a while just to admire it, now I’m going to go play World of Warcraft. 
Finally a sword that resembles something that could be real. You did a good job on this, the blade does look very sharp and the hilt is cool too, i like the simple design; you don’t see enough of it here.
Very nice modeling and texturing. However the image is not interesting because of the lack
of an environment or something that the sword should fit to in order to make it more apealing to the eye…
Why not putting the sword in a rock inside a beautifull forest for example to make a quick excaliber-like scene ??
Or mount it on a polished dark walnut frame, on a castle wall somewhere.
Thanks guys, ExtraGuy, I was definately trying to take into consideration, things like, balance, funtionality, and traditional sword design elements too, and didn’t want to detract from the overall sword-ness of it, with a bunch of doo-dads, so thanks. And yeah, I will put a render with an environment once I get busy with the tree from curves script. Thanks for the comments.
Modron, you could use bump maps and RayMirror (if it doesn’t have it) for the crossguard and pommel to look more realistic, and maybe a scaled by Y axis bump map hard clouds texture for the handle wrap. Just a suggestion. Really cool model!