Greetings All,

I am in the process of building my first scabbard for a recently purchased SL Albion Gotland & am looking for some information via pictures or illistrations of the strap bridge / strap slide found on the outside of some viking age scabbards used for suspension purposes. I have not been able to find any historical visual references to this item, only modern sword/scabbard makers interpretations. Anyone have any info or pics of this item? Maybe I have the terminology wrong?
Any help would be greatly appreciated. :D

Cheers,

Andrew

Hi

Scabbard suspension for the Viking age.

Page 18 - 25 of this PDF...pretty much covers it.

Tell me if the link doesnt work

http://www.nvg.org.au/documents/vv/vv_issue_30.pdf

Cheers

Nick

Hey Nick,

Thank you for the great link. Great illustrations of scabbard fittings & scabbard suspension.

Anyone else out there have any pics of the "strap bridge" alluded too?

I am looking into carving one out of wood or antler & would like to base it on a extant example if available.

Thanks,

Andrew

Consider duplicating the inner and outer cloth layers shown in the diagram on page 21. Felt made from a high % of wool works well on the inside. You need to oil modern felt fabric before sealing/ gluing it up since modern felt has the natural lanoline washed out of the fibers. Sticking an oiled blade into it later does not necessarily wet all areas, and it may not re-insert exactly the same way each time and storage orientation...... Laminating a fine cloth around the outside improves the bending / break point strength by roughly a factor of four. ( I did around 10 trial cores and broke several of them, tried storing swords in lined and unlined cores for several months. I finally settled on this construction as the only type of core I will make for my own collection.)

The article on scabbards is excellent.-

About the bridge, a nice, useful and elegant solution is one provided by Patrick Barta:

http://www.templ.net/pics-weapons/124-viking_...rpus-v.jpg

http://www.templ.net/pics-weapons/110-viking_..._viewv.jpg

Hope it's what you're looking for...

Andrés-

Here are some originals I will just go through and post whichever ones I see, they are all slightly earlier vendel or migration era rather then viking. All of them are Skandinavian.
Best

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