Making an authentic Viking shield, Part 2

Hi guys, welcome to the second part of my little video series on how to make an authentic viking shield. In the first episode I was talking about how I work the wooden board and there have been a couple of questions regarding the wood. Now this here is poplar wood. Most viking shields appear to have been of some kind of pine or fir. Now what is also important is that viking shields were made from split planks. So the tree trunk was split radially and these boards were then thinned down by use of accordion tools to produce the planks. The planks of shields like this are about seven millimeters in average. Usually they are somewhat stronger in the middle section in the center and then in cross section there is a distal taper towards the edge. Now with some shields there's not so much of a regular taper but more of a taper closer to the edge which almost looks like they sharpened the wooden edge to produce a really really fine edge. So that the overall delicacy of these boards is quite surprising and many people think that a shield like that wouldn't be very solid wooded so it's probably not good for blocking solid hits with a Danax or with whatever. Sure you can't destroy everything right but the fact remains that the boards were as delicate as they were. So if we reconstruct combat then we should look at the authentic material and use this and find out how this was used rather than saying oh well this shield doesn't live up to my sword related hobbies so it's useless. So if we are reconstructing actual combat we have to create the tools the weapons as authentically as possible. Here I have a complete hide. This is a goat hide and it has been in water overnight so it has been watered and now it's soft and supple. Because this is supposed to go onto a flat shield board I will put it onto a solid straight flat board and fix it and let it dry so that as it dries out it will be all straight so that I can easily glue it and attach it to my shield later on. So finally this is the parchment. It has been wetted and stretched and I'm now in the process of thinning it down. When you get the parchment what you have to make sure is that the grain side that is the site where the animal's hair and fur originally was that this is still a part of your rawhide of your parchment. You can see that one side is the flesh side that's the one where you have remains of tissue left and then when you look here you can still see where the fur originally was and this is the toughest part of the skin. It's like with your own skin the outer part is the most resilient one and this is what you want to have on your shield. A lot of the stuff that you buy when you purchase rawhide for your shields like this kind of stuff I purchased from a supplier for living history equipment and it traditionally goes around reenactment shields. Mind you in regards to actual finds from archaeology there is only very little that is left of the organic material of shields so usually we're only left with bosses, clamps of edges and other metal fittings. This is what usually survives and sometimes there are some fragments that are rusted to the fittings or to the boss and then this is what the archaeologists use to determine that this was a shield covered with hide and sandwiching an inner layer of wood and then maybe hide on the other side. So to my knowledge there's absolutely no evidence for linen on viking shields. Linen was used on shields. It definitely was used in the medieval period. There are a couple of surviving shields in Marburg University Museum and they oftentimes have a combination so there's elimination of parchment linen wood or it could be parchment wood parchment and there's one at least that I'm aware of that is only covered with linen but not for viking shields. So there's some evidence for hide on viking shields in a grave in Birka for instance but then what we're talking about are just tiny fragments and the problem with these fragments is it's really hard to tell whether this is raw hide or leather. There are methods to determine whether a particular piece of hide is processed or treated leather or raw hide or parchment but this works with modern samples with stuff that was lying in the ground for a thousand years and such methods are not very reliable because the hide will interact with the soil and whatever is surrounding it other organic material and then it's really hard to say whether or it's really hard to run these tests plus you have to take samples and when what you are left with is a tiny fragment anyway then usually such tests are not considered worth the effort. Okay so when we look at this kind of raw hide it's much tougher because it's much thicker so this feels a lot more like paper however in the long run it not necessarily will be more resilient than this because this has been split so the actual skin is not complete anymore the top layer which is this material has been taken off that's the most valuable part of an animal skin the nice smooth grain side the most resilient part and then what you get is this rather homogeneous material however it does not have the toughest layer the outer layer anymore so this is inferior to this but if you put something like this onto your shield it adds a lot a lot of weight and of course if you want to make an authentic shield that doesn't really make much sense so what i want to put onto my shield in order to give it a really good facing that is resilient but at the same time doesn't add much weight will be this high and i'm right now in the process of thinning it down thinning thinning it down means that i smoothen the surface i start with the flesh side and that gives me the benefit of having a rather even layer on my shield plus the thinner the parchment is the less it will start to absorb moisture as it is being glued to the board because if you i had that problem with other shields in the past that i was using rather thick hide and then when i put on the hot and liquid hide glue then the material absorbed a lot of the moisture and thus expanded and that produces bubbles and then some of the moisture would go into the shield board and it will start to warp so it comes with all kinds of problems now if it's thin as paper as this stuff will be and partially already is like here this is a really thin material then it's much easier okay but we go through the process of gluing this to my shield board in a later video right now i want to show you how i thin this down so basically you have a number of a number of tools that you can use you could use this leather knife just for you can see already here how this produces little scraps of the tissue that is still clinging to the inside of the shield here and by the way all this stuff that comes off right you see you see this i collect all of this in a little container which i somehow cannot see right now but all the scraps and all the stuff that you scrape off you can or grind off you can use to produce your own hide glue which i will address in a later video so don't just throw it away collect all the rest and collect the scraps of any raw hide that are that are being left over so you can use a scraping knife and by the way if you just listen to the difference of sound between this so you can hear there's a lot of this the surface is rather uneven as compared to this yeah so here's still a lot of tissue that we don't really want to have on the nice inside of our shield so you can use a knife you can use a whetstone just grinding over the surface which is quite time consuming and laborious but it is definitely what i'm going to do for for the final treatment but of course in the age of power tools you could also use a sander and make your life easier so i'm constantly in the process of thinning down another hide so again the grain side is the one that i want to preserve because it's the toughest part and the flesh side so you can see all this residue and remains of tissue this is what i'm thinning down because i don't need all that and i want to have an even thickness and rather thin hide to reduce overall weight i found that thinning down works best with a really really sharp knife like this leather knife and then you can actually scrape down quite a bit of tissue with each stroke and this skin remains this tissue i keep so that i have stuff that i can make my own hide glue from this will be boiled down like all the parchment and rawhide scraps i keep to make hide glue from when you do this make sure make sure that you keep your knife at an angle because you don't want to cut into the hide i managed to do this once or twice like here oh no not that's not the one yeah like here um where i actually cut into the material also make sure that the surface underneath is super flat and that no remains of of this hide go underneath because then as you scrape over the hide if there is just a just a tiny piece of hide or whatever it will show through the hide and you will probably make a hole in your hide like here this one is not so bad so that's not really a problem but take your time doing it you could also do it like this but i find this more tedious plus um when you do it then the scraped off remains of the hide and the tissue they stick to the blade and make it less efficient so i find that going with gentle and long strokes produces the best result and then i put back the hide or put the pipe into whatever container i have to collect the scraps all right learning by doing see you next time