"Nie miecz, nie tarcz..." : wędrówki bronioznawcze Cypriana Norwida

Cyprian Norwids’s (1821-1883) Album Orbis is a pictorial-text notebook dating from 1865-1883, composed of three albums in which the poet included numerous sketches, copies, newspaper clippings, book notes and his comments. as a work most likely unfinished and not typically literary, it remained aloof from the interests of literary historians. the article tries to show, from the point of view of cultural anthropology (using the example of a series of illustrations from the third volume of the Album Orbis) how norwid used the images of shields and swords to build a historical narrative, and how knowledge in the field of the history of armaments, which is distant from literary studies, the history of weapons, can be useful for understanding Norwid’s works and indicate potential interpretative leads.