Interesting if gut was used - it's certainly a tough material, instrument strings were made from gut for a very long time and I believe some manufacturers still produce them.

I could see perhaps a stomach being large enough, but I don't know if it is as tough as gut.

As a sidenote, I do recall reading a long time ago that gut was sometimes used as a seamless grip cover for swords.

If a patchwork of gut was used for a shield facing, it seems like a lot of effort to go to if shields are seen as disposable when there are a wide variety of alternatives - but I'm not completely satisfied that they were truly disposable, in the very short-term at least.

Thanks for getting back to us so quickly Matthew.

Jason

The complete shield is covered with a single sheet of gut. As I understand this it is stomach hide. It is glued and stitched on to the boards to my understanding.
It is raw hide and translucent so that paint can be applied to the boards and show through. Pig bladders was a traditional cover for lanterns because of its translucent quality.
In the find there were generally no traces of the raw hide because of the conditions in the bog.
But I think there were minute traces of thin raw hide under some of the metal mounts of the shields.

I cannot now remember if this was something I was told by the archaeologist Xenia Pauli Jensen, or if I read this somewhere in the many Illerup pages.

In general the research done on the Illerup find is very thorough and professional.
The idea that the shields were gut covered should not bee seen as a complete fantasy.

My personal opinion is that the use of thin gut hide saw many uses. I think that many of the wood hilts of the spathae in this find were originally covered with gut. The metal nails and the narrow reinforcing bands as well as the groves cut in the wood, suggest that thin raw hide as applied over the wood to provide greater resilience and perhaps water proofing.
The idea that some of the the hilts were gut or raw hide covered is not to be found in any published research. It is my own theory.
There is some evidence that later period seax grips may have been treated in a similar way.

I had to nominate this topic as a spotlight topic. It has turned out one of the best shield-discussions I´ve seen and also we get new jawdroping stuff from our most learned forumites. Sorry for the OT!

I'm new to this place as well, but thought I'd chime in with some of my own experience in doing living history & experimental archaeology. On the first page of the thread, the question of a distinction between parchment & rawhide was raised; as someone who has made parchment 'from scratch' (from dead deer & goat to finished writing surface) the main difference between parchment (before applying the powdered "ponce" to it) is that skins for parchment are stretched and dried under tension for thinness and evenness. Either way, rawhide is very tough stuff, although if over-dried it does tend to crack. Rawhide with a light coat of grease or oil will retain enough flexibility to resist cracking, as well as being somewhat water-resistant so that getting wet or even changes in humidity (the bane of bodhran players!) won't affect it quite as much.

Referring to 'gut', modernly it usually referred to intestinal strips, but for covering a shield, if I wanted an unbroken piece of gut to cover something as large-ish as a shield, I would go for taking & using the rumen of something cow-sized.

Just my $.02. :)



Rebekah

Hi Rebekah. Pardon my ignorance, but what is rumen?

Jason

The rumen is the first part of a ruminants digestive system. They swallow the food, then regurgitate it (the cud) and chew it again. Most artiodactyls (cloven hoof animals) are ruminants (cud chewers) with the exception of pigs.

I have begun experimenting with using gut and thin translucent rawhide to cover wooden objects like spear shafts and knife and axe handles, and I hope to get a hold of some cow gut some time soon for the Hjortspring shield I am working on.