Ok, I went and built a scabbard covered in waxed linen. The core is made of poplar plywood with the strips along the edges of the sword being made of birch plywood for strength. I covered it like the illustration in
Geibig's book (Abb.28,1) but instead of the wrapped linen tip I put a leather chape on it and wrapped the tip with a 2mm thick 1.5m long leather ribbon which was inspired by an article in Oldtiden VII, page 165 by Jan Petersen entitled "Baandformet omvikling av sverd- skeder i vikingetiden" which has an illustration of a sword found at Rypdal Farm in Romsdal, Norway that seems to have had the entire scabbard wrapped by a 9mm wide leather strap. I have no historical model for the leather cover on the scabbard mouth. The suspension method was copied from the Ballateare sword and since I prefer to have a baldric I copied several of the suggested baldric reconstructions for this sword and found that the one I chose is the only one that really works, at least for me. The inside of the scabbard was lined in sheep fur even though most of the surviving scabbards seem to indicate that a linen lining on the inside of the scabbard was more common.
I rather like this scabbard. For one thing it only weighs about 0.5 Kg complete with baldric as opposed to 1Kg for my previous all birch leather covered efforts so it does not pull on my shoulders and hips and does not dangle as much as the heavier scabbards do. It seems that no matter how much leather-grease I put on my leather it always ends up soaking up some water but the waxed linen is completely waterproof if you rub some wax into the seams when you are done sewing it up. Sewing waxed linen is also a lot easier than dealing with leather because the waxed linen can literally be moulded around the scabbard and will retain the form it was moulded into once you let it go. The waxed linen was not glued on, it was just sewn tightly around the scabbard without any attempt to permanently bond it to the wooden core. So far it has not shifted a single millimetre. I puzzled a bit about why the scabbard in Geibig's book (Abb.28,1) had strips of linen on the scabbard rather than just covering the entire thing in a single monolithic piece of linen. After talking to some women who make a lot of reproduction clothing I was told that work clothes were sometimes made in 'sections' so that you could quickly replace, for example the elbow, belly or shoulder sections of the garment when they wore out. This lengthened the lifespan of the garment and saved fabric while the garment looked less untidy after repair than if you just slapped a simple square shaped cloth patch on it. I now think that the scabbard was covered in strips of fabric to enable quick field repairs of a punctured or torn section of the covering by simply replacing the damaged strip of linen. I leather wrapped the tip of the sword mainly to
shield the waxed linen. As a small bonus, apart from being completely waterproof, lighter and easier to repair in the field, this scabbard is also considerably cheaper and quicker to make than a completely leather covered one.
The one thing I'll do differently next time is not glue the halves of the scabbard together like I did this time to see how that works out.
A final point is that my sword now somehow looks 'right' in this scabbard as opposed to the leather covered one I built before with all it's bronze decorations where this sword always looked out of place:
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