Handmade Broken-Back Seax Knife with Runic Blade and Leather Sheath

What Is Our Broken-Back Seax Knife?

Our Broken-Back Seax Knife is a handmade reproduction of the defining blade form of Anglo-Saxon and Viking-age northern Europe. The blade carries a runic engraving along the flat, and the carved grey wood handle is fitted with a horn spacer, a brass ring, and a dark end cap. A handmade leather sheath is included.

The blade measures 9.2 inches with a 14.2 inch overall length, which places it between the hadseax carried by nearly everyone and the broad seax that served as a heavy camp tool.

What Makes a Seax a Broken-Back Seax?

Look at the spine. It runs straight from the handle, then angles sharply down toward the point, so the back of the blade appears to have been snapped. That angle is the whole definition of the type.

The shape is not decorative. Keeping the spine full-width along most of the blade puts mass behind the cutting edge, which is what lets a seax chop. Dropping the spine steeply at the end produces a fine, well-supported point for detail work. One blade that both chops and does close work, which is precisely what a single knife had to do when it was the only one you owned.

Broken-back seaxes appear heavily in Anglo-Saxon and Frankish archaeological contexts, with the form at its most common through the 8th and 9th centuries and in English use into the 11th. Several of the finest surviving examples came out of the Thames in London.

Why Are There Runes on the Blade?

Runic inscription on a seax blade is historically grounded rather than invented for the tourist trade. The most celebrated example is the Seax of Beagnoth, a 9th or 10th century broken-back seax recovered from the Thames and now held in the British Museum. Its blade carries a runic inscription naming its maker, making it one of only a handful of signed early medieval blades known to survive.

Inscribed and decorated seaxes were prestige objects. The quality of a person's seax advertised their standing, and the most elaborate rivalled swords of the same period for craftsmanship. A plain working seax and an inscribed one occupied very different social positions.

The engraving on this blade is cut by hand, so character spacing and depth vary slightly between pieces.

What Are the Specifications?

Compare the steel against carbon, Damascus, and tool steels in our knife steel guide.

What Were Seaxes Actually Used For?

Worth separating the reenactment picture from the archaeological one. Seaxes turn up across Germanic, Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Slavic contexts throughout the early medieval period, and the great majority of finds are working tools rather than fighting blades.

Scandinavian evidence points chiefly toward hunting and meat processing. A blade in this size range handled butchery, woodwork, leather, cordage, food preparation, and whatever else the day demanded. The seax was the general-purpose knife of its era in the same way a folding knife is