The Armour Archive

First: I know that whatever (presumably) leather garment the body at Sutton Hoo was dressed in was almost certainly not a leather cuirass. However, I think that a leather cuirass tooled with some Sutton Hoo designs would be kind of cool for SCA fighting. Has anyone tried anything like this? If so, please post pics!

Thanks!

Well, if'n you like Anglo-Saxon-style art motifs that much and you do 'em, more power to your artistic ability! If no one shows you any pix, it'll be up to you to start drawing designs for your own self.

If you can't think where to start, first, try copying any and all of the Sutton Hoo decorations, to make yourself familiar with their style. There's other stuff around of that period, such as monastic-type work from Lindisfarne and the Holy Isle there, like the rather later Book of Kells (c. 800AD) of Irish or Hebridean origin, which is a nice set of works for inspiring borders -- though for someone who wants to learn how these are done from scratch, both George and Iain Bain are the go-to. George Bain's book is the cheaper, while his son Iain came up with a better method of laying out interlace to fit tidily into an available area or place.

Once you've copied the original Sutton Hoo artworks, you can start dreaming up independent stuff in their style and manner that really looks like something they would have done. Thus, you're not stuck with just stamping in borders of repeated volknutts (those triple triangle things) -- and wondering if that's really right.

People love them some interlace with all those mazy strips weaving in and out, but key-patterns are just as, er, northern, and are handsome in their angularity used in borders-tooling. They ought to be considered.

What I'm saying here is that you've got a lot of artistic freedom here because there is so little hard evidence left of what they did in those dim and distant times.

If you make use of runes, concentrate upon genuine Anglo-Saxon runes; they are distinct from the runes used by other tongues -- though related, right enough; just that certain runes (e.g., Ea-rune) are markers for Anglo-Saxon rather than Norse.