Heroes, Gods and Guardians: Hilts and Keris of Indonesia (Huntington Miller Collection)

Heroes, Gods and Guardians: Hilts and Keris of Indonesia (Huntington Miller Collection) emphasize the sculptural aesthetic and historical importance of this unique art form from throughout Indonesia—Java, Sumatra, Borneo, Bali, Lombok, Sulawesi—and beyond, namely keris. Put together over a period of twenty years, the Huntington Miller Collection of Keris and Keris Hilts is a tour de force. It is a story that spans centuries and the rise and fall of countless kingdoms and polities. The hilts range from minimalistic forms to the abstract to opulent royal weapons beautifully crafted to project prestige and wealth.

So, too, they carry with them the aura of mystery and magic of the exotic tropical islands of Southeast Asia, which captured the imagination of foreigners even before the beginning of the Age of Spices, when the perilous journey from Europe to Indonesia took a year to complete. With a terse and informative text written by an Indonesian art expert, Bruce W. Carpenter, this is a cultural and artistic voyage that delights the eye and stimulates the mind.

The history of the keris can be written from many perspectives, each of which, like the parable of the ‘Blind Men and the Elephant’, contains a grain of truth, yet fails to convey the whole story. Strictly speaking, keris can be defined as a type of weapon-specific to the Malay World, a rather amorphous term that includes most of Indonesia, Malaysia and Brunei and parts of the Philippines and Thailand. The original home of the keris is Java, a large and fertile island in the Indonesian archipelago. Fanciful descriptions of Java as a paradisical island in Pliny the Elder’s mammoth book, Natural History (77 CE), along with other reports, led some to speculate that Java was the home of the Biblical Garden of Eden.