Some other things I made: viking age knives. Everything done by me except for the knife blades.
Ended up with two sheathes inspired from viking settlements on different sides of the Baltic. The reddish one is taken from Hedeby/Haithabu, and the tan one is taken from Novgorod.
The handle on the Haithabu knife is made out of hazelwood, the wire decoration which is seemingly very common on these knives are made with brass wire. I don't think there are any extant sheathes made with that kind of checkered pattern, but I felt like doing it, and it looks pretty damn good.
The Novgorod knife has a handle made of bog oak which is dated to be about 1800 years old. When oiled and polished the wood looks so good and is super smooth. Smells like a bog when you saw and file and sand it though. :')
The wirework on the handle is made out of silver wire.
Viking and vendel-type knife blades are very interesting to look at, they're made and filed down so that they are more or less wedge shaped in the blade cross section, so no real space for a secondary or tertiary edge. The back of the blade can also be really thick, upwards of 0.5+mm.
They are also most of the time not made out of pure steel, it's a steel edge sandwiched in iron, which is cheaper and easier to do. Like an axeblade, only the part that you are going to put an edge on needs to be made out of steel if you have it. On the blueprint below, the top knife is made with this technique, while the bottom knife is patternwelded instead.
The handle shape is also made with historical shapes in mind. They seem to be a bit longer and taper according to the blade. Lies very nice in the hand.
The main plan when I made these knives was not to make them look like the Haithabu/Novgorod finds, but instead to try to recreate a couple of knives from Birka. The find below is one of those.
One thing that came up in my research though was that all those classic shiny brass and bronze-ornamented knife sheathes that people reenacting the viking period typically wear are actually taken from female graves. Only the larger war knives that are found in male coded graves are ornamented in this way, typically not the smaller work knives. Since I tend to reenact more male coded kits as of now I thought I'd make them fit with the rest of the gear until I fix up the big war knife that I have got a blade for.
