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Forum Index » Historical Arms Talk » When did leather first appear on sword grips?
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Carl Goff
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Posts: 196 Location: Florida
Thu 13 Nov, 2008 12:36 pm
For grips in general...

Probably about a week after Ug the Neolithic man first tanned a piece of leather. Og the Neolithic man would've looked at the hilt of his stone knife and said "Hey...this thing's really uncomfortable to hold. I wonder if wrapping it up in some of that brown stuff Ug made out of a deerskin would help?"

It seems reasonable to speculate that the process would have carried over to swords/spears, depending on the individual's personal taste, resources, and in the case of swords, style of grip (as mentioned above.)
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Darren Tully
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Posts: 49 Location: Dublin, Ireland
Thu 13 Nov, 2008 2:14 pm
Jeroen Zuiderwijk wrote:
Darren Tully wrote:
Yeah we do know that stone age man did use leather fro clothing and jewlery but unfortunatly such artifacts are very rare
as they degrade too easily logically it would make sence to use leather or some form of fabric to make a grip it helps you keep control of the weapon and stops the handle from hurting your hand but untill any early examples of swords using wrapping on the handels are found we can only speculate
Bronze age swords at least had very ergonomically designed hilts, which have no benefits from a leather cover, only have the downsides from it. The only exception would be that someone with small hands would get a sword made for someone with large hands. The metal hilted variants generally had very decorative hilts, so they were definately not meant to be covered.


I'm not going to denie that fact because your right, but the point I was making was that with the evidence of man from earlier periods than the vikings using leather for cothes etc I wouldnt be surprised if an earlier example of a leather wrapped handle was found but untill that day it is only speculation nothing more
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Pat K.
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Posts: 6 Location: Otautahi , Te Waipounamu , NZ
Mon 17 Nov, 2008 4:31 am
Carl Goff wrote:
For grips in general...

Probably about a week after Ug the Neolithic man first tanned a piece of leather. Og the Neolithic man would've looked at the hilt of his stone knife and said "Hey...this thing's really uncomfortable to hold. I wonder if wrapping it up in some of that brown stuff Ug made out of a deerskin would help?"


"and it will stop the thing getting frozen to my hand in this long Northern Ice Age " :D
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