Guides
Plain answers on steel, handles, sharpening and what to buy for what.
Know what you are buying
Damascus and plain 1095 are not the same thing under two names. They behave differently, want different care, and suit different jobs.
These are written to answer the question before you spend the money, not after. No affiliate links and no pushing you toward the expensive option.
Steel at a glance
The short version. Exact hardness figures and what they cost you are on the steel and hardness page.
| Steel | Holds an edge | Rusts | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Damascus | Very well | Yes, needs oiling | Display, gifts, collectors. The pattern is the point. 58 to 60 HRC. |
| Plain 1095 | Very well | Yes, needs oiling | Working blades, camp axes, hard use. 54 to 58 HRC. |
Choosing by what it is for
To hang on a wall
Damascus, and the longer the better. Pattern and presence matter more than edge retention.
To take camping
Plain 1095, a bearded axe or a full tang fixed blade. Accept that you will oil it.
To cook with daily
Plain 1095, dried the moment it leaves the sink. A kitchen blade lives near water, so the habit matters more than the steel.
To give as a gift
Damascus, engraved. The pattern makes it unrepeatable and the mark makes it theirs.
Buying guides
Which piece, for what, and why.
Axe vs Hatchet: The Difference That Actually Matters
Haft length, head weight and how many hands, with sensible size ranges, where the bearded hatchet fits, and which one you should…
Battle Axe vs Bearded Axe: Which One Do You Want?
Buy a bearded axe if you want one axe you will actually pick up and use. The beard gives you a long…
Best Bowie Knives: A Buyer’s Guide to the American Classic
How to choose the best Bowie knife: what defines a true Bowie, types compared, steel and handle advice, legality notes, and honest…
Best Damascus Chef Knives & Kitchen Sets: What to Buy (and Skip)
How to choose the best Damascus chef knife and kitchen set: which pieces matter, quality checks, honest verdicts on set sizes, and…
Best Damascus Fillet Knives: Flex, Length and Blade Care
A good Damascus fillet knife is thin, springy and long enough for the fish you actually catch, not the one you talk…
Best Damascus Hunting Knives in 2026: A Field-Tested Buyer’s Guide
How to pick the best Damascus hunting knife: blade shapes compared, full-tang and real-pattern checks, honest downsides, and field care tips.
Best Damascus Pocket Knives for EDC: A Practical Buyer’s Guide
The best Damascus pocket knives for everyday carry: folder styles, lock types, legality basics, real-vs-fake Damascus, and simple care habits.
Best Fillet Knives for Fishing: Length, Flex, and Steel Explained
How to choose the best fillet knife for fishing: blade length by species, flex explained, steel and handle advice, and sharpening tips.
Best Skinning Knives for Deer Hunting: Styles, Steel, and Technique
What makes the best skinning knife for deer: blade shapes and lengths compared, steel choices, technique tips, and who should skip a…
Best Viking Axes in 2026: A Hand-Forged Buyer’s Guide
Which Viking axe is best in 2026? Compare bearded, battle, and throwing axes, learn what to check in steel and haft, and…
Best Viking Swords for Collectors: What to Look For
How collectors choose the best Viking sword: authentic proportions, steel and tang checks, display vs battle-ready types, and care advice.
Buying a Drinking Horn: Sealing, Capacity and Care
Buy a natural ox horn of around 12 to 20 fluid ounces with a food safe interior seal and a stand or…
Buying a Viking Helmet: Fit, Steel Gauge and What to Avoid
For nearly everyone, the right buy is a riveted spangenhelm or a one piece conical helm in 16 to 18 gauge mild…
Chainmail vs Plate vs Lamellar: Three Ways to Armour a Body
Chainmail is a mesh of rings that stops cuts and passes the shock straight through to you. Plate is a shaped shell…
Choosing a Shield for Display: Size, Mounting and Materials
For a shield that is going on a wall, buy a round shield of 24 to 30 inches, planked or plywood faced,…
Damascus vs High Carbon Steel: Which Blade Should You Buy?
Start with the thing most shops will not tell you. Damascus here is high carbon steel with a pattern welded into it.…
Display Sword vs Battle Ready: What the Words Mean and What You Need
Battle ready means whatever the person selling it wants it to mean. There is no standard, no test and nobody checking. In…
Gifts for Reenactors: What They Actually Want, by Period
A reenactor wants kit that fits the period he already portrays, and nothing else will do. Buy for the Viking age man…
Groomsmen Gifts: Engraved Axes, Knives and What Actually Gets Used
The groomsmen gift that gets used is the one with a job. A folding knife rides in a pocket for years. A…
How to Buy Your First Sword Without Wasting Money
Buy the boring one first. A hand forged carbon steel single hander with a full tang, a fitted scabbard and a stand,…
How to Choose a Viking Axe: Head, Haft and What It Is For
For most buyers the right Viking axe is a bearded head on a haft of about 19 to 24 inches, hand forged…
How to Choose a Viking Knife: Seax, Steel, Tang and Handle
A Viking knife is an easy thing to want and a hard thing to choose, because the phrase covers everything from a…
Hunting Knife vs Skinner vs Bowie: Which Do You Need?
Hunting knife, skinner, or Bowie? Compare blade shapes, strengths, and weaknesses, and find out which knife fits how you actually hunt.
Karambit Knives: What They’re For and How to Choose One
What a karambit knife is, where the claw design comes from, what it is actually used for, and how to choose one…
Katana vs Wakizashi vs Tanto: Length, Use and Which to Start With
Start with the katana. It is the one everybody pictures, it fills a wall, and anything shorter bought first tends to look…
Knife Laws by State: Blade Length, Carry and Automatic Knife Rules for All 50 States
A state by state summary of US knife carry law: blade length limits, whether a fixed blade can be carried concealed, how…
Kukri Knife Guide: History, Shapes and What to Look For
How to choose a kukri: the shapes, the sizes that actually work, steel and hardness, tang, sheath and sharpening the curve.
Mace vs War Hammer vs Flail: What Each One Actually Did
A mace is a weighted head on a rigid shaft that beats through armour by impact. A war hammer concentrates that impact…
Renaissance Faire and Reenactment Kit: What to Actually Bring
What people actually look at, what you will still be wearing at four in the afternoon, and what the gate will confiscate.…
Round Shield vs Kite Shield: Shape, Period and Which Suits You
Buy the round shield. For nearly everyone it is the right call: lighter, cheaper, easier to hang, and Norse to anyone who…
Seax vs Bowie: Two Big Knives, Two Different Jobs
Buy a Bowie if the knife is going hunting or into hard camp work. The guard, the clip point and the deep…
Viking Axe vs Medieval Axe: How the Shape Changed and Why
A Viking axe has a thin, wide, light head on a long haft, built to cut fast at a shield wall. A…
Viking Axe vs Tomahawk: Which One Should You Buy?
Put a Viking axe and a tomahawk side by side and most people can tell them apart at a glance. Ask which…
Viking Seax Knife Buyer’s Guide: History, Types, and What to Look For
What a seax knife is, the broken-back and langseax patterns explained, and how to choose a hand-forged Viking seax you will actually…
Viking Wedding Gifts: Ideas That Are Not a Novelty
The Viking wedding gifts that survive the first year are household objects the couple would have bought anyway, made properly and marked…
Norse & history
The people, the symbols and the arms behind them.
Are Horned Viking Helmets a Myth? Where the Picture Came From
No. No Viking Age helmet with horns has ever been found, anywhere, in any grave, bog or harbour, and people have been…
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla: What It Got Right About Norse Kit
Assassin's Creed Valhalla gets more right than most Norse fiction, and the thing it gets most right is not the gear at…
Baldur and the Death That Started Ragnarok
Baldur is the god everyone liked, killed by a plant nobody thought to ask, using a brother who could not see what…
Elder Futhark: Every Rune, Its Name and Its Sound
The Elder Futhark is a 24 character alphabet used across Germanic speaking Europe from roughly 150 to 800 AD. The full table…
Excalibur: The Legend, the Sources and What Collectors Actually Buy
Excalibur is a literary object, not an archaeological one. No sword of that name has ever been excavated, and no chronicle written…
Famous Vikings: The People Behind the Sagas
Ragnar, Ivar, Bjorn Ironside, Erik the Red, Leif Erikson and the rest, with what the annals record and what is saga invention.
Fenrir, Jormungandr and Hel: The Children of Loki
Fenrir the wolf, Jormungandr the serpent that lies in the sea around the world, and Hel who rules the dead are three…
Fenrir, the Wolf Who Waits
Fenrir is the wolf the gods raised in their own yard, bound with a ribbon, and lost to anyway. That is the…
Freya, the Goddess Who Takes Half the Slain
Freya takes half the battle dead. Odin takes the other half, and she chooses first. That single line in Grimnismal quietly rearranges…
Gungnir, Odin’s Spear
Odin's spear is called Gungnir, and it is the one piece of divine kit in the Norse material that also seems to…
Hnefatafl: The Viking Board Game and How It Is Played
Hnefatafl is the board game the Norse played before chess reached the north, and nobody can prove they know its rules. Its…
Jormungandr, the Midgard Serpent
Jormungandr is a snake so long it lies in the ocean with its own tail in its mouth, encircling the inhabited world.…
Mjölnir: The Meaning of Thor’s Hammer
What Mjolnir means in Norse mythology and Viking life: the name, the forging myth, hammer pendants, and the symbol today.
Odin the All Father: What the Sources Actually Say
The god of poetry, wisdom and the battle dead: his many names, the tree, the eye, the ravens, and how much of…
Odin’s Ravens: Huginn and Muninn in the Sources
Huginn and Muninn are Odin's two ravens. They are named in Grimnismal in the Poetic Edda, where Odin says they fly over…
Ragnarok: What the Sources Actually Say About the End
Ragnarok is the end of the world as Old Norse poetry tells it: a winter that will not break, a battle in…
Runestones: Who Raised Them, What They Say and Where They Stand
Runestones are memorial stones raised by families in Scandinavia, carved in the sixteen stave Younger Futhark. Most date from the eleventh century,…
The Arms of Vikings and The Last Kingdom, Rated for Accuracy
Both shows get the big shapes right and the details wrong in the same places. Round shields, spears, single edged knives and…
The Axe Ragnar Lothbrok Carries in Vikings, and What It Really Is
Most people searching for Ragnar Lothbrok's axe mean one thing: the bearded axe that Travis Fimmel's Ragnar carries through the early seasons…
The Dane Axe: The Long Axe of the Huscarls
A Dane axe is a broad bladed axe on a long haft, swung with two hands, at its height in the tenth…
The Nine Realms of Norse Cosmology
The nine realms are the most famous thing about Norse cosmology and the least well supported. No surviving source lists them. Not…
The Norse Goddesses
The Norse goddesses are harder to write about than the gods, and not because there are fewer of them. Snorri lists fourteen…
The Norse Gods: Aesir, Vanir and Who Was Actually Worshipped
Norse myth has two families of gods. The Aesir are the group around Odin, Thor, Tyr, Frigg, Baldr and Heimdall. The Vanir…
The Real Axe Behind the Leviathan: Norse Sources and Screen Invention
The axe at the centre of the 2018 God of War game was invented for that game, and it does things no…
The Seax: The Knife Every Viking Carried
The seax was the single-edged knife every Viking carried. Its history, types, construction, and role in daily Norse life.
The Swords of Middle Earth and the Real Blades Behind Them
The swords of Middle Earth are built from real medieval literature and almost no real archaeology. Tolkien was a professor of Anglo-Saxon,…
The Valknut: Where It Appears and What We Actually Know
The valknut is a knot of three interlocked triangles. Unlike most Norse symbols sold today, it really is Viking Age: it is…
The Viking Drinking Horn: History, Fittings and How to Use One
A drinking horn is exactly what the name says: the hollow horn of an ox or a cow, cleaned out, polished and…
The Viking Spear: The Most Common Arm in the North
The spear was the arm a Norseman was most likely to own. It shows up in more graves than the sword, it…
Thor in Norse Myth, Beyond the Hammer
The belt, the gloves, the goats and the stories, plus the place names, personal names and amulets that show Thor was the…
Two Swords on the Back: The Witcher Setup and Why It Is Fiction
Two swords strapped across the back is a modern invention, and the geometry gives it away before the history does. A blade…
Types of Daggers: Rondel, Bollock, Dirk, Stiletto and More
A dagger is a short blade built primarily to thrust, usually with a point strong enough to punch and a grip made…
Tyr, the God Who Gave His Hand
Tyr is the god who saw what needed doing, worked out what it would cost, and did it anyway. Everyone else at…
Ulfberht Swords: The Mystery of the Best Viking Blades
Around 170 Viking Age swords carry the Ulfberht inscription. What made their steel special, and why medieval fakes were common.
Valhalla, What the Sources Actually Say
The hall of the slain as the poems describe it: the roof of shields, the doors, the einherjar, and why half the…
Vegvisir: The Icelandic Stave and Why It Is Not Viking Age
The Vegvisir is an Icelandic magical stave, eight branching arms around a centre, and it is not Viking Age. Its only early…
Viking Armour: Mail, Lamellar and What Norsemen Actually Wore
Viking armour came down to a mail shirt, an iron helmet and a round shield. Most men who sailed on a raid…
Viking Axe History: Bearded Axes, Dane Axes and How They Were Used
How Viking bearded axes and Dane axes were made and used, from farm tool to battlefield legend, based on real archaeological finds.
Viking Beard Rings and Braids: What They Were and How They Are Worn
What the evidence actually shows about Norse grooming, why beard rings are a modern object, and how to size, place and wear…
Viking Helmets: What They Actually Looked Like
A Viking helmet was a rounded iron bowl, usually built from riveted panels, often with a nose bar and sometimes with a…
Viking Names and What They Meant
How Norse names were built from a fixed set of elements, what the common ones meant, the bynames, and which popular names…
Viking Shields: Construction, Colours, Size and How They Were Used
A Viking Age shield was a round board of thin planks, usually 75 to 95 centimetres across, with a hand hole in…
Viking Ships, the Longship and What It Could Do
The Viking ship is the only piece of Norse technology that was genuinely ahead of everyone else in Europe, and it is…
Viking Symbols and Their Meanings
Search for Viking symbols and you will find the same dozen designs on pendants, tattoos and axe heads, each with a confident…
War Hammer and Mace: How Blunt Arms Beat Armour
Blunt arms beat armour by ignoring it. A sword edge has to cut something to do damage, and mail will not let…
What Is a Bearded Axe? The Viking Axe Shape Explained
A bearded axe is an axe whose cutting edge hangs well below the eye. That long lower lip is the most recognisable…
What Is a Katana? Construction, Curve and the Parts Named
A katana is a Japanese single edged sword with a blade longer than about 60 centimetres, a gentle curve, and one defining…
What Is a Kukri? The Curved Nepalese Blade Explained
A kukri is a Nepalese knife with a forward curving blade, the edge on the inside of the curve and most of…
What Is a Scimitar? Talwar, Shamshir and Kilij Explained
A scimitar is not one sword. It is a European catch all for the curved, single edged sabres of the Middle East,…
What Is a Tanto? The Short Japanese Blade and Its Modern Point
A tanto is a short Japanese blade, traditionally anything under one shaku, about 30 centimetres. That is the classical definition and it…
What Is a Wakizashi? The Short Sword Beside the Katana
A wakizashi is a Japanese short sword with a blade between roughly 30 and 60 centimetres, about 12 to 24 inches. Anything…
What Norse Mythology Actually Is
Norse mythology is a set of stories about gods, giants and the end of the world, told in the Scandinavian north and…
Yggdrasil: The World Tree and the Nine Worlds
Yggdrasil is the great tree at the centre of Norse cosmology, an ash whose roots and branches hold the worlds together. It…
Steel & craft
What the metal is and how it is made.
Full Tang vs Partial Tang: Why It Matters in a Knife
Full tang vs partial tang explained: how each construction handles stress, when hidden tangs are fine, and how to verify what you…
Knife Blade Shapes Explained: Drop Point, Tanto, Gut Hook & More
Every common knife blade shape explained - drop point, clip point, tanto, trailing point, gut hook and more - with strengths and…
Real vs Fake Damascus Steel: 5 Checks Before You Buy
Five quick checks to tell real pattern-welded Damascus from etched fakes: pattern continuity, repetition, feel, sanding, and seller transparency.
The Steel Glossary: 1095, 15N20 and What Forge Welding Actually Is
Why 1095 and 15N20 are the standard steels in pattern-welded Damascus: what each contributes, why they weld and harden together, and buying…
What Is a Gut Hook Knife For?
What a gut hook knife is for, how the hook opens game hide without piercing organs, and how to choose, use, and…
What Is Damascus Steel? How Pattern-Welded Blades Are Made
What Damascus steel is, how pattern-welded 1095/15N20 blades are forged, and how modern Damascus differs from ancient wootz.
Care & sharpening
Keeping an edge, and keeping the rust off.
Axe Throwing for Beginners: Grip, Stance, Rotation
Learn to throw an axe: two-handed grip, square stance at 12 feet, smooth release, one rotation. Fixes for common problems and safety…
Caring for a Hand Forged Kitchen Knife
A hand forged kitchen knife needs three habits: wash and dry it by hand straight after use, never leave it wet or…
Caring for Chainmail and Steel Armour
Maille does not so much rust as patiently wait for you to forget about it. Keep it clean and dry, oil it…
Damascus Steel Care: Oiling, Rust and Keeping the Pattern
How to look after a Damascus blade: the routine after every use, the right oils, removing rust without stripping the etch, sharpening,…
How to Display Swords and Axes on a Wall Safely
Hang a sword or an axe from fixings driven into a stud or into rated wall anchors, never into bare plasterboard. Use…
How to Remove Rust from an Axe and Restore It
Restore a rusty axe with a vinegar soak, steel wool, and oil. Full step-by-step process for light to heavy rust, plus prevention…
How to Sharpen a Knife with a Whetstone
Whetstone sharpening made simple: grit choices, the correct angle, raising a burr, and stropping to a razor edge. Beginner-friendly steps.
How to Sharpen an Axe: Step-by-Step (File, Stone, Strop)
Sharpen any axe in three stages: file out damage, refine on a stone, and strop to a shaving edge. Tools, angles, and…
How to Skin a Deer with a Skinning Knife
Skin a deer in 10-20 minutes: hang it, make the right cuts, and pull the hide free. Step-by-step guide with knife tips…
Sharpening a Curved Blade: Seax, Kukri, Scimitar and Katana
Sharpen a curved blade by holding the angle constant while the edge changes direction under the stone. Work in short sections, sweep…
The Complete Knife Care Guide: Blade, Handle and Sheath
A complete Damascus steel care routine: cleaning, oiling, storage, rust removal, and how to re-etch and restore a faded pattern.
Still not sure?
Tell us what it is for and we will point you at two or three pieces. We are not paid more for the expensive one.