Good afternoon gentlemen,

I recently purchased this HJ Leaders dagger, and I believe it to be an original piece. However, there is a small anomaly that I have noticed and would really value the opinions of some of the advanced collectors/specialists on this forum.

The HJ insignia on the top of the pommel clearly has one line missing on the design, as though the craftsman piercing those lines got distracted and missed one out! Is this possible?

What do you think?

The dagger in general -from these not too good pics- does look original to me. Also what I can recognize concerning the used materials looks ok. Up to now I have not seen such an anomaly. But there might be several explanations. What I could see on disambled pieces the pommel seems to be two parts which are soldered and silvered afterwards. It could have happened that the soldering material ran into this one gap therefore it "disappeared". Another possibility is that the stamping tool (the emblem was stamped) got this small mistake and therefore made this small mistake.
Personally, when the dagger is original - which I do assume from these pics, I would not care much about this anomaly. Such things did happen. I once did own a totally original SSDeaths Head Ring which did miss a part of the Tyr rune as a result of the stamping prozess... otherwise this ring was unworn (did come with box, dokument and waterproof documentation directly out of the family).
Regards,

Wotan, many thank for your views, it's appreciated. I also believe this dagger to be 100% original. It conforms in every way to its type and shows the kind of wear that is very hard to fake. A previous owner, maybe the original owner, obviously loved the dagger, and wore and cleaned it regularly.
I personally think that the stamping tool may have just had this line missing. Personally I quite like these odd anomalies. It gives the piece some individual character.
Thanks again.