Gotland Seax

Finally got another knife finished ( I have 6 in process -oi!).

It's a Gotland style seax - a knife that was popular around 600-1000 AD in northern Europe.  This one is similar to a couple others I've made, but is truer to the historical seaxes. The blade is just shy of 10" long.  It's 1/4" thick at the base and doesn't taper much to the tip.  Distal taper (tapering the thickness of the blade over it's length) is not a feature found on these types of knives.  It's forged from 1085 carbon steel.  The handle is 5 3/4" long and is made from stabilized curly maple and brass, with two leather disks.  Overall length is 16" including the pull ring.  It's a big knife.

The dark lines in the handles are bug/worm holes.  They ended up getting filled by the acrylic resin I use to stabilize the handles.  The slight concave area in the bottom of the handle is a feature I added.  To this day Scandinavian knives have straight handles and no guards.  That scares the crap out of me.  I asked a knife design expert at a conference about it.  He said it scares the crap out of him too, and the only explanation he could offer was superior knife skills.  In any case, I wanted something to let my hand know when it was approaching the blade.
The sheath is 10oz tooling leather with the archetypal brass work of the Gotland seaxes.  I'll probably put it up on Etsy once I get a nice pull chain for it.  

A Little Protection

Some friends and I decided to start hitting each other with practice swords again like we did when we were in college.  Being old farts we're downgrading the weapons to rubber LARP swords, but we decided we still need armor.  So here's my first attempt at a pseudo-viking helm in cuir bouilli leather.