Hi it's Tod of Tod's Workshop and Tod Cutler here and today i'm at Bushfire Forge with Owen
Bush. Amazing school of bladesmithing but more importantly I'm here with this amazing sword.
This has got a blade which is pattern welded by Owen and we're going to show you what pattern
welding is all about and what Owen's really well known for. He has created a sword the blade of a
sword with the hilt work and the scabbard work by another craftsman he's not here called Petr
Floranac and between the two of them they have made this amazing sword i haven't seen it all
right I've just heard a bit about it and i've read a bit about it Owen, you haven't seen it
either? I haven't seen the finished sword, no. I'm looking forward to it. So Owen's seen the blade
but not the whole thing so this is going to be a reveal for both of us but basically this sword
has come into existence because of this book A Song of Steel by J C Duncan and we'll come
back a little bit to it because it really plays into what this sword is all about it is a Viking
sword but with a slight twist on it so Owen what is in here so the interesting thing about
this sword is that it really it was a combination idea of taking that Norse idea of what a sword is
the pattern-welded blade showing the virtuosity of the smith and the virtuosity of the warrior
and combining it with elements of a later medieval kind of vision of a sword. The original objects
were definitely acts of quite incredible creation, pattern welding in particular i mean well well
this one's got some special pattern welding from my point of view. I think if that's not an "in"
to actually unwrapping this Owen, what is? So I've seen the blade on this obviously because
i made it yeah i guess i finished it a year and a half ago and then it went off to Petr it's really
really nice to actually see what someone else can bring to it the other thing about having someone
else work on it is it's easy to say it's lovely which you can't really say about your own work
right would you want to look at it first or should i no i'd like to if that's OK
Yes he inlaid it didn't he yeah he did, I like it a lot
it is a beautiful thing it's much much nicer than the pictures.
It's a pointy little fellow isn't he. Yeah well the idea was that it was it was a Norse
blade but it's also a crossover in that it's an early medieval style sword. I like
the feel of it a lot. Yeah we'll hand over yeah okay i do i like it a lot that's nice
That is that is a thing. Very sharp point for a Viking sword, really interesting blade i mean
there's so much complexity in what's going on the pattern welding on the blade, bronze inlaid runes,
more runes on the on the very nicely carved bronze hilt work, intertwining beasts on one side,
lovely, really typically viking. A bit of rune work on the other and then a warrior waiting
in the doorway. I'm guessing he's waiting in Valhalla for the owner of that sword. That is
lovely. I think the funny thing is, I see so much of Owen's work because we're good friends
and i forget that actually this really is quite extraordinary. It's a pattern welded blade and
we're going to come to that we're going to talk about that because pattern welding is fascinating
in its own right but we've got a stripy core in the middle here. What's going on with that?
Meteoric iron, bloomery iron that I've smelted myself from ore i've dug myself. So part of this
has actually come from space? From the dawn of time. But this is meteorite and
well ore, rocks, that you've dug yourself. Did you catch the meteorite? Oh, okay just checking. Well
that's it i mean that's pretty that's special yeah it is i mean i think it brings a lovely imagined
magic into the piece if we're talking about swords and their roles with people, certainly
one of the roles of of swords in the Viking age was to have something you could show off about
you know when these these great men these warriors were were talking around a mead hall about the
things that they'd done and the objects they'd done it with to put out a sword that had this
in the middle of it is something pretty special. You obviously work very closely with Petr
on the design and the layout and the symbolism of it if you talk through it but starting at the top
here we've got a warrior standing in the doorway of the gates of Valhalla so basically that is
just an endless rock and roll party pretty much isn't it and you're not going to get
in unless you're holding a sword or a weapon yeah unless you've died so you have to be holding that
to get into the Valhalla so we've got the guy there greeting you once you are dead and then
what do we got going on from there well it's also a permanent reminder that what you're doing if
you're a warrior is you're involving yourself in the potential to die. It's all about status and
honor and what you are yeah absolutely how you are viewed by our reputation and these kind of things
and just just having symbols that remind you that you are a warrior and your job is to kill and your
job is to die. The symbolism in Viking culture and the really strong symbolism in Christian culture
afterwards from a sort of early 21st century it's very hard to imagine the real importance of these
things beyond just little luck tokens they're really life beliefs. I mean i think it defines who
you are, they're not just working tools they are a spiritual thing in their own right because the
the reputation, the honor, the afterlife, the future of the warrior is bound up in the sword so
it's not surprising that they name them you know we all name things that are important to us and so
here we've got "The Light of the North" which you know that it symbolizes, i've read the book, you
know i know what it's about, and it symbolizes the future hope of the of the Viking the Norse Nations
and it it's inlaid, it's named, so one of the nice things about making a sword that's a character in
a book and also in this case uh sort of almost an avatar for the book it's a representation of
an awful lot of stuff that's gone into it is that it gives you a really fertile
um starting place to try and make your own work. So i've put a lot of different elements
into the sword blade to try and represent, in my mind, elements of flowing ice in the core.
Meteoric iron to be the "Light of the North", a burning meteor right across the sky and then
flames going in there and Petr has done some some amazing work which again is all is all symbolic
so we've got the doors of Valhalla, a warrior there to meet you at the doors when you die,
the sigl of the the main character is a dragon so we have a dragon, and the sword is a
dragon's tongue or a dragon's fire the Light of the North coming out of the
the mouth of a dragon so we've got um one of Odin's ravens on the end of it. I just love
seeing the finished object i'll be honest with you this is a real treat for me um working as a person
who does a lot of collaborations, I make the blade which is the first part of making a sword
and then sending them off and and having Petr to finish them occasionally they come back to me
and i get to play with them covet them and walk around you usually you don't get to see the
finished object no sometimes it goes straight off to its own because it's just more sensible to do
it that way so it's really really nice to um and i'm i am a little smitten which is a strange thing
to say about one of your own sword blades but it's lovely and as far as i remember yeah there's a
as part of the storyline there's a break and a join in it as well so it has a purposeful
fail and fix oh really um which i think is just here a little overlap of material.
So you literally you broke the billet and then re-welded it together again?
Brave man. But the blade itself not the inlay there are six different steel
irons six six different versions of iron and steel and if you go across the blade there's
probably something like 1800 layers or something like that going through it. That's enough, yeah.
And then the the core of this sword which is is lots and lots of striated lines it's a combination
of materials that would be a soft part of the blade to allow pets to inlay it and also from a
functional point of view a lot of these swords have hard edges and soft cores um so you don't
snap them this this sword was a particularly um an amazing commission in in that sense because
it combines a lot of things and it's one of the the poshest things we've made together certainly
one of the nicest ones if not the nicest one. I'll have a chat about the patent building because i'd
like to try and explain some of the pattern that's gone in. Yeah i mean that's interesting because i
don't do patent welding as you know but i've known you long enough to know quite a lot about process,
but you know how you manipulate plasticine i think it's a fantastic thing because you just sit there
working patterns out don't you by by weaving cutting some of it in steel and then some of
it in plasticine um and that gives you your ground work before you commit to the steel. Yeah pattern
welding as an undertaking is complicated and it can be heartbreaking because it doesn't always
work so playing around with plasticine which is a few minutes to try and work out our pattern
can really save you some some failure yeah you can have your failures quickly so we look at one
of the simplest patterns so i've got two colored plasticines here so i'm going to make up a nine
a nine layer bar and this is effectively how you would do it in the forge but with metal
yes absolutely i'm just i'm taking different different um steels or steels and iron with
different qualities and putting them together and then forge welding them and forge welded
them just by squashing them this is plasticine that i did heat up and it's cooled down now
and it joins in a very similar way to the way that the metal does we're using pressure
and contact to make it into a single piece of plasticine and once i've got it forged
down into a single piece of plastic and we're going to twist it and warmed up
So you know in the modern context we think of welding you know getting your electric welder out
but of course they were welding in forges so yeah so it's a solid-state fusion it's hammer welding,
forge welding, fire welding, lots of different words for the same thing and it's a way of
joining material pre-modern electric welding so i've forge welded these together now
put a bit of heat in there with my hands and i'm just going to twist the bar so if i just twist it
so my belief is that with the pattern welding that it originated as a proof of engineering quality so
if the swordsmith makes you a sword and you see twisted bars down the middle of it from making
my own steel my own bloomery steel to make bars that will twist is quite an undertaking you have
to do a lot of processing oh is that right yeah a standard bloom if you forge it out into a bar
and then twist it it's very likely it won't twist that well you'll crack it or rip it right off
oh so it's got to be relatively pure and if you process it and forge it again and again right
um you can get it to a state where it will so you're not having to trust that the sword you're
looking at has been well made because the core is made of iron that's been twisted 25 times now
so you know it is yeah now the patterns change as you look through the material
if i was to cut into this though you'll start to see what's going on inside and what's going
on inside is very complicated the trick with pattern welding one of the tricks of pattern
welding is to try and visualize what's happening inside the bar so you know what will happen on
the face of the blade so on the surface we just have a diagonal striping as i cut through it
we'll start cutting into those overlapped helixes and it changes quite dramatically fantastic so
you start getting crosses if i take another cut you can see how it changes it goes to the middle
so this is a very simple pattern it's just nine layers but you get some quite wonderful
and complex yeah so you've just cut it in a different place and you end up like here with
a completely different pattern set yeah and if you're looking at old swords obviously part of the
job of the swordsmith is to try and reinterpret what you're seeing on the face of the blade
to make it and reproduce it yourself trying to imagine how how far someone's cut into a blade if
it's a blade with a fuller whether the fuller has been forged or grounding because that'll affect
how much material you're taking off and some of these blades it's not as simple as having a bar of
steel another bar of steel some of them have bars of steel on both sides yeah so you know there's
that so you actually can have different patterns on each side of the blade because it's been
forge welded down the center line of the blade and this is a traditional quite simple low layer
um sword called i say simple i'm saying that now with 25 years of experience behind it the
light of the north has some swirling fire storm patterns going down it if i cut through again
that's that's what we're looking at this is the pattern the firestorm is the pattern that's going
on in this this line of the core here so if that whole billet you probably use 20 percent yeah,
the bit that is good is the outside thirds, of the middle third. Of course it is. On this particular
pattern and you also have to make enough of it to then put it around a sword blade yeah
so it is it's it's looking for things that fit the storyline with this sword really trying to
take pattern and make it into something that has a symbolism um but in that sense it's exactly the
same as would have been done in my mind by the smiths who are making you know original pieces
in the in the Viking age or Saxon smith doing the same kind of thing is that you are trying to put
something looks amazing so a warrior can be proud of their swords so they can slap it out on the
table and show off to other warriors who'd be like oh woah, odin's blood i've never seen a sword with
flames like that! and they can all have arguments about how it's done. But basically in Europe we're
doing very sophisticated metal manipulation for blades 800 years before they've done it in Japan
more yeah i think they're very culturally similar the Vikings and the Samurai these warrior cultures
with very ornate beautifully dressed and armored and weaponed mythologized weapons yes the Vikings
and Saxons were doing a much more complicated version than you ever see on any of the Japanese
swords so this idea that the Japanese sword is the most amazing or "best" sword that's ever made. I
think they're one of the prettiest, yeah I'll certainly give them that. They've got beautiful
lines... The whole thing about the hamon as well, the quenching lines. But technically,
they're they're as good as a small element of what went to the Viking and Saxon ones.
I mean one of the things i really like about this whole piece actually is
every single element of it has been considered every single element of it
has some mythology some story some life behind it you know it's not just connecting one bit to the
next bit. It's it's a grand old undertaking it's a nice thing to be involved in yeah
and it's nice to do something that is i mean it's almost like an avatar for the book it's a
representative object that's in a book but you know like a physical symbolism of it yes yeah
translation brings its own brings its own magic to it doesn't it yeah well thank you
so much Owen for showing us the pattern welding process give me a tour of the sword really and
you know it was nice to to see that with you seeing as yourself and Petr were so integral
to the making of it you know but of course you know the other partner in the making of this was
J C Duncan and "The Song of Steel" because that sword would not have existed without the book
and you know it it is a great book it looks at the cultural side of of Norse life and that is
something that i find absolutely fascinating because we know Vikings for chopping people
up and and raiding and all that kind of stuff and yes there's a bit of that in the book but
really the book is a lot deeper than that and that, for me, is what made it very interesting.
So anyway, go read it, it's well worth it but again Owen, thank you very much for the sword
for showing us that, well actually i'd love to take it but i can't, so thank you very much and
goodbye