Glowing blue when orcs are around is handy, as long as it doesn't give away your location.

Sting was found in the same orc hoard as Orcrist and Glamdring, which Elrond explains to Gandalf and Thorin that their blades came from Gondolin, forged by high elves.

Gondolin was a hidden city of exiled elves during the long war against Morgoth, Sauron's boss and mentor. The elves learned their smithy craft on the island o' the gods, the undying lands, Valinor, where everyone sailed off to at the end of LOTR:ROTK. The fought the forces of evil for hundreds of years from their geographic redoubt. Still, they all got slaughtered eventually, along with all the other elven kingdoms of the first age. Elrond around back then, by the way, at least at the end of the first age, and is related to the elves of Gondolin.

I wish the prop makers had taken the next step and made them look like watered steel.

Overall, the props and sets of the films are first rate. All the ruins and old statues give the feeling that you are in a very old story. I'd have to go to the books and work it out, but ole Sting is several thousand years old, hundreds of leagues away from the land where it was forged, which is now sunk under the ocean, and not a touch of rust. They don't make 'em like that anymore.