Penguin's Art Palace

@parsely-bunny that's something I'd love to find out myself, if anyone has information- it's slightly difficult to research this online because of a flood of people trying to sell me belts, and the resources I usually use don't mention it.

It shows up in appropriate period art as a second belt, often worn much lower than seems reasonable, and not slanting upwards at the back in a way that necessarily suggests it attaches to the regular waist belt (which is nearly always present, even on depictions that don't share this sword belt). I'd still write it off as being one double wrapped belt, if it didn't often have a very different style than the top belt:

Note that I'm not 100% sure those actually are belts being depicted on that bust of St. Mauritius, but they seem to generally match these others.

This mythical secondary belt seems to be made of cloth (making it a sash, as @parsely-bunny points out) and is usually represented as being white and broader than the main belt, and rides further down:

This put me onto a better sourced 2003 blog entry that calls this type of swordbelt the Naumberger Typ Schwertgurt, points out its apparent softness and light colour in art, and mostly discusses the distinct x-shaped pattern the belt makes on the scabbard, visible in several of the images above.

Two modern interpretations, the first by Andreas Bichler, author of that blog post:

Bichler rallies against modern swordbelts of this type that use hard, thick leather, pointing out that this widens out too quickly and can't be tied well in his experience, and instead argues for a soft, supple leather as depicted here. He briefly mentions it being tied without a buckle and fed through two tear shaped openings, though he mostly discusses how the scabbard is fastened.

Here’s the page of penguin drawings I have so far, they’re all gentoo penguins so I think I might just do a page for each breed of penguin, I’ll probably add a couple more little drawings then be done with this page.