The sword was the highest status weapon, only very high-status warriors should be allowed to fight with a sword or any weapon that takes skill or a lot of tooling to produce. Anyone that owned a sword would be either a professional warrior or a lord of some type. A large proportion of their life would be spent fighting with their weapons and training and the likelihood would be they would not be fighting with a sword if they didn’t have maille. A sword was probably worth the same amount of money back then as it would have cost to buy a whole farm. The Hird tries to limit the use of swords to the highest status warriors.

Examples of Sword finds

Two high-status warriors Ingvar and Bersi engage in sword combat