Size Matters

My brother came over today and saw Viveka's War Knife in person for the first time.  "Holy sh!t it's huge!'  was his reaction.  So I thought I'd post this pic for a sense of scale.  I'm just a bit under 6' tall:

It's a BFK (Big F'ing Knife). Almost a Swedish wakazashi...

Viveka's War Knife

I once knew a woman of Scandinavian descent named Viveka.  She was long and lean, strong and sharp.  This knife makes me think of her, and so I named it for her.
(And yes, I do find it kind of pretentious to name a knife.  But then I ran into the problem of referring to individuals knives "You know, the big one with the carving of the dragons on the handle?...  No, not that one, the one I made after that."  Plus listing them on Etsy in a way people might remember is tough--"Seax #12"-- so I bowed to practicality and started naming them.)

Viveka's War Knife is a type of seax called a Baltic war knife because they are found all along the coast of the Baltic sea, and the assumption is that they were used for fighting, among other things.  I started out trying to stay closer to the originals that the Dog Seax I made last year.  The blade is 15" long and 1.25" wide (381 mm by 32 mm).  The spine is just under a quarter inch (15/64th or 5.8mm) at the handle and has a very slight distal taper out the where the point begins where it is 11/64ths (4.4mm).  It's made out of my usual 1084 carbon steel, hand finished to 600 grit.  The bevels are sloped so that before sharpening the edge was .5 -.6mm wide.  I'm going to have to do some experiments with it to see how such a radical change in width affects it's ability to cut.

The original handle i had planned was fairly simple, with the only carving on a small bone inlay.  But then I decided not to do that for technical reasons, and started carving.  The handle is cherry, and the carving is a mirror image on each side.  It's a composite pattern off of two viking animal brooches.  The spacers are brass and the white section front and rear are cow bone.  The runes...  well, I kinda f'ed them up.  Don't ask.  They are burned into the bone using a wood burner (something I wouldn't do again).  The handle is 7" long, so the whole thing is 22" overall without the ring.

The sheath took it's queues from the handle, and so ended up being a long project. It's 8-10 tooling leather with brass fitting I cut & stamped by hand.  The pattern along the blade section comes off of a sword hilt that is in a museum in Finland.  The pattern on the handle section is something I made up, but it's just variation of a very standard Norse/Celtic animal pattern.

While I like this knife a lot, I have to do a simpler knife next.  All those patterns & little metal bits take a lot of patience and make you a bit loopy after a while.  I'll probably try this blade again with a simple wooden handle and a plain sheath.  But first I have a sgain-dubh to do, which at 3" should be a nice change of scale.