Ferð - a Viking knife

This project description contains quite a lot of detail, mainly to provide a record for me and to document how many random events and decisions came serendipitously together to create the finished item.

Background

Walking along the harbour front in Aarhus in Denmark in May 2026, we came across several people on Pier 2 chopping long planks from a large oak tree. [1] We discovered they were building a replica Viking ship from plans made available from a Danish museum that had already been through this process. The oak was estimated at 160 years old.

Only when we got back to the apartment did the idea occur to me to make a Viking-style knife from one of the small offcuts. [2] We returned and were able to get a small off-cut from the chopping that looked as if it might contain a knife handle.

Handle

I decided to follow the traditional design of a Viking utility knife: from the side it resembles an elongated barrel and has no finger guard. (Fighting knives had rather different designs.)  Unhelpfully, the oak piece was slightly curved so I first cut off the right-hand third of the fragment.

The oak offered almost no surplus. Before each cut I found myself picturing the completed handle concealed within the blank, the spokeshave gradually revealing it while always respecting the narrow margins allowed by  the timber. Although the spokeshave was an effective tool,  I had to take care to follow the grain direction to avoid tearing.

The cross section is somewhat plectrum-shaped but the shape is slightly narrower at the bolster end which means it sits comfortably in the fold of the second knuckle of the forefinger. The slightly more rounded profile of the pommel end is better for the palm of the hand. The transition from one profile to the other is unnoticeable and it’s remarkably comfortable in the hand. The handle was lightly sanded but the length-wise spokeshave marks have been left, adding to its tactility.

I drilled a hole through the centre of both ends, widening the hole at the blade end to accommodate the narrowing tang.

Bolster

For the bolster I used a piece of 6000-year-old bog oak in keeping with the sense of history implicit in the project. The bolster has a secondary purpose in allowing me to create a tapering slot that hugs the shape of the blade – easier to do in the 5mm thick piece of bog oak than in the oak handle.

Pommel

When we visited ARoS Art Museum , we used a cashless payment for the locker for our rucksacks and got a 20-krone coin back when we retrieved our bags. This was the only currency I saw in 12 days and it felt tied to ARoS, a site of such stimulation and creativity so it felt natural to include it in the knife’s story. The 20-krone coin is made from aluminium bronze which is often used for ship propellers and marine fittings so this coin is a perfect fit for the project. [3]  On the reverse is the Royal Yacht Dannebrog, not quite a Viking ship but perfectly within the spirit of the project.

I sanded off the obverse of the coin then drilled and needle-filed a rectangular hole that closely matched the profile of the end of the tang.

Three small dots making an equilateral triangle were tapped into the pommel just above the tang hole. [4] The idea of these was to nod towards Nordic runes and to suggest the upper-case A of my surname. It also hints at a Δ symbol representing rate of change. This seems pertinent in my 70th year when one anticipates a slowing down. It is often suggested that it's a slowing rate of change in life events that make time appear to speed up as we age. [5]  Given that I have returned from Denmark with a long list of projects inspired by what I experienced there,  it remains to be seen whether this slows down time.  [6] 

Blade

I already had a Laurin Metalli knife blank that looked ideal: a Finnish-made stick tang blade made from 80CrV2, a high-carbon, tough steel popular among Scandinavian knife-makers. The blade has a Scandi grind (single-bevel edge) and is progressively induction-hardened so that the edge at 63 HRC is supported by the softer steel (52–53 HRC), thus reducing the overall brittleness. Interestingly, there is a faint line that marks the transition from the one hardness zone to the other (though it's not easy to see in this stock photo).

Assembly

The bolster was pushed up the tang until it pressed up against the end of the blade. Slow-setting epoxy adhesive was used to glue the bolster to the top of the oak handle and to fill the void between the tang and the hole through the handle. The coin was slipped onto the tang, reverse first, and glued down. I like that another ship is forever hidden in the knife handle.

After the glue was dry, I shaped the bolster and pommel flush with the handle. I then filed down some of the tang sticking out of the pommel and peened the tang. In this process, the projecting tang is gently hammered with the round end of a ball pein hammer until the steel mushrooms over the pommel, locking the assembly together mechanically. [7]  The technique predates modern adhesives by many centuries and remains one of the most elegant methods of knife construction. [8]  

The handle was given 4 coats of boiled linseed oil over four days. This feels more appropriate than a modern topping oil and though the wood may darken more with time I'm comfortable with this given the relatively light-toned wood I started with.

Name

The search for a name took me down a number of rabbit holes and I used AI to help with recommendations. I had already used ChatGPT to bounce some design ideas off so it was already familiar with the back-story which informed its suggestions. The one I finally went for was:

ferð

an old Icelandic word that uses the Icelandic letter ð (eth) and translates as journey, voyage, travelling, expedition, course. The pronunciation approximates  furth as in the first syllable of further.  [9]  

Afterword

What made this project interesting was both how much improvising there was and  the lucky coincidences and accidental discoveries I made along the way. I was discussing serendipity with ChatGPT and it suggested a variation on the Gary Player quote [10]  “The more attention I pay, the more serendipity I find”.

I plan to make an accompanying sheath from leather scraps picked up for free from the Tsonga show factory on the Midlands Meander in Kwa-Zulu Natal. This will continue the theme of re-use, travel and happenstance.

Footnotes

1. The volunteer group building the ship is Vikingeskibet Imme Bifrost (literally Viking Ship Imme Bifrost, ie the name of the ship). The oak from which farð has been made came from a community whose explicit aim is to keep maritime traditions alive by combining craftsmanship, teaching, sailing, and shared experience. In that sense, farð carries not only material from that place, but also a small piece of its philosophy: that objects gain meaning through the stories, skills, and people connected to them. This is what all my heritage projects are about.

2. While birch, mountain ash, alder, and lime may have been more commonly used for Viking tool handles, oak's use in ship building may have meant it was sometimes also used for knife handles.

3. Aluminium bronze is a golden-coloured alloy of 92% Copper, 6% Aluminium, and 2% Nickel. Compared with older bronzes, aluminium bronze offers much higher strength, excellent corrosion resistance, attractive gold colour, good wear resistance and resistance to seawater. 

4. A side effect of this was to raise the rim of each divot very slightly so I had to sand off a very thin layer of the pommel and repolish it.

5. It's a common phenomenon that time seems to go faster as we age. Some of that perception may be due to a reduced number of life events (primary school, secondary school, university, jobs, marriage, houses, children, etc). Perhaps this is why continuing to learn new skills matters . I am perhaps lucky to have a wide range of hobbies and interests and am always investigating new areas of interest.

6. With so many of my projects involving head-scratching challenges, perhaps time simply drags with the frustration.

7. Given that I used epoxy glue to secure the components of the knife, one could argue that the peening was unnecessary but it adds a pleasing level of historical authenticity as well as adding belt-and-braces security.

8. The end of the tang was a lot harder than I had expected and after the first round of peening, I filed the top off the mushroom and repeated the peening/filing until I got the desired result. 

9. Whether the th belongs to the first or second syllable of further is a moot linguistic point.

10. “The harder I practice the luckier I get”