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[we-are-viking]

Thank you!

Viking warrior by Adam Sacco

@vikings-til-valhalla @we-are-viking

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Ivar! A mighty norseman and blacksmith! 🐗

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[we-are-viking]

Thank you, friend! This is disappointing news. I understand there's a cleric here. I'm sure I can... convince them to share some wealth with me!

A New Viking Joins the Collective

From the sea they come, blades in hand. Their history, a saga of blood and glory. They come in many forms; berserkers, poets, explorers. Are they raiders, or are they heroes? Are they friends or are they foes? Perhaps it doesn't matter. Whatever else they are, they are Vikings and they sail onward. To those who they call friends, they are mighty allies indeed. Everyone, please welcome @we-are-viking to the Collective.

[we-are-viking]

Barbarian: So if I kill Fighter, I get to kill all of you?

Paladin: Kill Fighter, and you'll have to kill me. Cleric: Kill Paladin, and you'll have to kill me. Rogue: Kill Cleric, and you'll have to… negotiate strenuously.

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Sif: Oh no, why hasn’t he texted back? Did I say something wrong?

Thor: (frantically googling “how to spell georgus”)

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Runestones in the National Museum of Denmark, Copenhagen

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Valkyrie

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Scholars are divided and evidence is sparse, but some 10th-century accounts suggest Vikings might have sported tattoos. Read more…

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Viking Ships off a Rocky Coast by Michael Zeno Diemer

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Asvig by Akeiron

[we-are-viking]

This was a great answer, but a small thing I think is worth adding is that the type of weapon can also determine how much hand protection is necessary. If you have something like a Basket Hilted broadsword, the guard of the sword itself will protect your sword hand very well. This makes a gauntlet on that hand less important, whereas say an arming sword leaves the hand largely exposed. However, if you pair a sword with a shield, suddenly things change. The hand behind the shield is fairly unlikely to be hit, as it's behind the shield. Using the two weapons together means that you protect both hands. But if you let even a small gap appear, your sword hand becomes a valid target again unless it's covered in another way.

Are there any significant effects of a character swordfighting or fighting with other weapons while wearing fingerless gloves VS wearing no gloves? How about with normal gloves?

The short answer would be, it's not a huge difference, until it is. When you're looking at most melee weapons, gloves will provide a little bit of protection to your hands, sometimes at the cost of a little bit of grip on the weapon itself.

Somewhat obviously, if you have a plate gauntlet that's protecting your hand or fingers, that will provide more protection, same thing if you're wearing chain gloves. In fact, chain gloves can be pretty useful in specific situations to protect your hands against cutting impacts.

However, as I mentioned, you lose a little bit of grip. This isn't a huge difference, but it can start to impact things like your ability to engage in fine manual dexterity with the weapon. For example, if you can quickly reverse a knife with one hand without thinking about it, you might not be able to replicate that feat while wearing a heavy glove. You can think of this as more of an armor familiarity issue, though. If you train, and practice, while wearing gloves, this should be a pretty minimal loss.

Archery is a case when you really want those heavy gloves. The fletching can scrape up an exposed arm, drawing can scrape up your fingers. Having gauntlets, and even bracers to protect your forearms, can dramatically reduce the amount of cuts and scrapes you suffer from your own arrows. You really do not want fingerless gloves while using a bow, and in some cases, you may even get archer's gauntlets that are just finger protection, leaving the hand itself exposed. (This is for the draw hand, not the bow hand.)

Fingerless gloves work best in situations where you'll expect to take hits across the palm or back of the hand, but need your fingers to operate controls. Firearms are a prime example of this, where most shooters would rather have their finger directly on the trigger, and it's much easier to operate things like fire control settings, mag releases, and bolt catches, when you can actually get the tactile feedback from it. (Also, if you have normal to large hands, a lot of guns don't really accommodate the increased bulk of the glove on top of your hand.)

It should probably be mentioned, that I am assuming the gloves in question are heavy leather, or some similar material (there are synthetic work gloves now.) So, if you're thinking about something like a thin fabric glove, that's mostly going to be a cosmetic change. It will probably protect against some minor nicks and scratches, but won't offer much use as armor, while a heavy leather glove will provide a little more protection. Something like chain or plate gauntlets can offer some significant combat protection, and depending on the design, you can even minimize the loss of grip on your weapon. In a modern context, there are even work gloves with rubberized inserts on the palm and fingers to increase grip, though I'm unsure exactly how useful those would be in a combat situation. Fingerless gloves do have practical applications (I used to wear a pair for years at an old job), but they're not uniformly better, just specialized to different tasks.

-Starke

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Painting of an Anglo Saxon warrior (female) that I made for myself a few years back! Got inspired by Germanic and Celtic regalia, an almost endless source of inspiration for these type of characters..

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The helmet of Vendel 1. Photographed at @historiska Stockholm a while back. This is by far my favorite helmet and also the grave I am reconstructing in my living-history project. More on that very soon.

This helmet, much like many other helmets from Vendel and Valsgärde, is covered in so called pressblech images. These gilded foils show different designs of what is believed to be (part of) an initiation ritual. Some of the elements show likeness to continental European designs and designs found in England. Objects like this belonged to the absolute elite of Early Medieval martial society and were among the most valuable items in material culture.

The gold adorned helmet is dated to around 625AD and was excavated in the 1910’s by Hjalmar Stolpe, who would later also write the excavation reports of the famed Viking burial site at Birka.

The grave, a boat burial, also contained two elaborate swords (more on that soon), a shield, smithing material, a horse, horse equipment, a spearhead, skeletons of dogs, beakers, food preparation material and grooming accessories. Needless to say it was a very elaborate grave.

At the burial site ar Vendel now stands an old church with a churchyard.

I like to think the spirits of these long gone elite warriors now reside in the great halls of the Historiska museum in the afterlife. The helmet is on display in what they call the Gold Room.

More coming soon.

Photos of the drawings are from the original report. Last photo courtesy of the Historiska museet.

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Real Vikings punch Nazis. Every time.

I know it’s not hard to point out reactionaries hypocrisy when it comes to like safe spaces or hug boxes or whatever but genuinely how much of an echo chamber do you have to exist in for you to think this is a reasonable thing to say