Personalized Viking Blades

Personalized Viking Blades: a Buyer's Guide

Every blade in this collection can be engraved to order with text of your choice, a name, a date, or a short word, up to twenty characters, on the flat of the blade or the handle. You choose Roman inscription capitals or Elder Futhark runes, the engraving is $15, and it adds three to five days to a piece that is otherwise hand-forged from carbon or stainless steel. The result is cut into the steel, so it is permanent and does not rub off.

What to engrave

The most popular choices are a name and a date, a wedding date, a birth year, a set of initials. A short Norse word or motto also works: browse ideas in our Old Norse translator or our Viking quotes. Or engrave a single rune for a concept such as protection or strength, each of the Elder Futhark rune meanings stands for an idea as well as a sound. Keep it under twenty characters so the letters stay bold and legible.

Latin letters or Elder Futhark runes

You can have your text in plain Roman capitals, or transliterated into Elder Futhark, the twenty-four-character runic alphabet the Norse actually wrote in. Because the futhark has no exact match for every Latin letter, some are shared: C, K and Q all become ᚲ, and V and W both become ᚹ. To see how your name will look before you order, type it into the preview above or use our full Rune Translator, and read our guide to Viking runes for how the futhark systems work.

Which blades take an engraving

Any piece with a clean flat or handle: our hand-forged Viking seax and Viking-styled knives and Viking axes are all here if they have somewhere to cut. Fully patterned blades (Damascus, for instance) are left out, because there is no clean surface to take the text. New to the form? Our guide explains what a seax is, from the size types to what separates a serious blade from a wall-hanger.

Caring for an engraved blade

An engraving on carbon steel stays crisp for life as long as the blade is looked after, wipe it dry, keep a thin film of oil on the steel, and store it out of its sheath. Our guide on how to care for a seax knife covers oiling, sharpening and storage in full. Stainless-steel pieces need less attention and hold an engraving just as well.

A personal Norse gift

An engraved blade is one of the more memorable gifts you can give a partner, a father, a groomsman or a history lover, something with their name or a date that matters cut permanently into forged steel. Every piece ships oiled, sheathed and tracked. Engraved orders are made for one person and cannot be resold, so check your spelling at checkout: we engrave exactly what you approve.