Forging Viking Style Hammers

I’ve been investigating traditional methods for forging hammers over the last few months.  When tool steel was an expensive commodity, such as in the Viking era (and even right up to the mid-nineteenth century) hammers were not normally made of a solid billet of this costly material.  Rather they had faces and peens of the high carbon tool steel welded to soft iron bodies (either bloomery iron or wrought iron).  This had the advantage of making the punching and forging of the hammer eye easier since it was done in the softer material.  During my research I studied the shapes of some hammers from the Viking era.  While some were fairly crude others were quite beautiful – with langets over the hammer eye that were quite reminiscent of Viking axes.  The following pictures form a short slideshow of the process as I have re-discovered it to make the Viking style hammers for my shop.  I will be teaching this method of hammer forging, along with a few others, in 2014.

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