The Hedeby Quiver

28 Dec 2022 - mvj

For my new leather project, I want to make myself a quiver. I already (write-up coming soon-ish) made my own arm bracer for my archery, but now that I have my own bow and will be buying my own arrows, I also need a quiver and a carrying case.

So why not just make it myself?

Better yet, why not make it myself and teach myself at least 2-3 new crafting techniques from scratch while I’m at it?

The Quiver

While the bow I’m shooting is Chinese (Manchu), I hail myself from Stockholm, Sweden – and one of my finds when preparing for this project was an archeology thesis describing archery remains at Birka outside Stockholm. Notably, a thumb-draw thumb ring was found at Birka.

I’ll take that as motivation enough to pick up Viking style quivers to go with my Manchu style bow and shooting style.

Reading around a bit, I settled in on a particular reconstruction project as a good baseline for me to follow, modify and extend. The reconstruction is of the quivers found in Hedeby in Denmark (and published in Willy Groenman van Waateringe: Die Lederfunde von Haithabu), and is done by Wayne Robinson, who blogged about it at The Reverend’s Big Blog of Leather. Robinson:

The Plan

So I’m going to do a Hedeby-inspired quiver, with wet formed leather (and I also want to play around with cuir bouilli - water-hardened leather), following Robinson’s pattern analysis and tweaking it all over. My plan is to do the bulk in 5 oz cow leather, and the collar as well as an added “lid” construction in a nice lambskin I have left over from my earlier projects (possibly getting more lambskin if it turns out I don’t have enough for this).

But instead of using masking tape and a pre-made last to figure out the pattern, I can of course not keep myself from going far more high-tech with my approach.