Anglo Saxon Belt Purse with Steel Striker – or “Tinderbox”Wiglaf Sigeberhting – MKA Leif Johnston – Leif@resourcecompany.com

While reading Gale Owen-Crocker’s book Dress in Anglo-Saxon England, I was taken by a sketch of a pouch with an integrated “fire steel.” I thought that would make an interesting topic of research that would lead more generally to fire making without matches that might evolve into a potential class. So before you is a “tinderbox”, of sorts, based on my research. There is an attached striker or fire steel integrated into a leather pouch based on Owen-Croker. The pouch proper has been designed with an intuition about what you would want such a pouch to do – mostly keep the tinder dry, the flint and steel handy and let me make a fire straightforwardly. There is a full discussion of the pouch design in the attached paper on making a fire without matches.

The concept of a tinderbox – a box in which a fire is started (or more correctly tinder is ignited/smoldered by a spark) is a fairly modern one. Since most of the leather pouches from my period graves are badly deteriorated, there really aren’t full plans to base the design on, but it seems unlikely that the leather bag was used to nourish the fire if the striker is mounted to it. Since the spark caused by an attached striker can’t be caught in the pouch, the fire starting techniques must have been different.

Making a fire with a flint and steel required that the steel be a high carbon steel since the flint essentially cuts the steel shavings that ignite from the friction and create the sparks. That said, if the steel is held in the dominant hand and attempts a glancing blow at the flint in the non-dominant hand, then the sparks created are going to tend to fly upwards and so the spark catching device should be placed above the flint. An interesting discussion of flint and steel fire making techniques is available at the VikingAnswerLady.com, likely the best information source I found.

What would be used to nourish a spark? While I grew up making matchless fires in the boy scouts using Native American methods with tinder like cattails, the suggestion for Europe goes back to the Iceman found in the Alps. He apparently had a bag with flints and some of the fungus tinder polypore, touchwood, or Fomes fomentarius. The fungus was charred to make it easier to sustain the transient sparki. Apparently, a spark could be maintained on a charred piece of this fungus not only long enough to start a fire but to carry a spark a great distance to restart a fire later. Since I haven’t yet found this fungus, I am working on the cattails and char-cloth methods I have used in the past. The Viking Question Lady suggests the techniques are equivalent to the use of the charred fungus, since when the fungus is beaten till soft and when charred, it takes on a character similar to felt.

The sketch in Owen-Crocker’s book was based on a piece reconstructed from Krefeld-Gellup Germany, so I wanted to find Anglo Saxon versions for my piece. The Ashmolean Museum has this piece.

To make an Anglian style, I thought I would make the bird forms match the decorative pieces of the Sutton Hoo Lyre, shown below. These forms are the basis for my overlap catch mechanism.

Sutton Hoo Lyre Birds Attachment Plates from Raymond’s Quiet Presshttps://www.quietpress.com/Images4/Y-20L.JPG

In searching for which started me down a discussion of language. It was a very interesting line of research to consider what words and concepts go into a discussion of firemaking. Therefore, the object is a tinderbox of sorts, but that name in our language is somewhat prejudicial. What is/should be the right name brings to focus many linguistic differences.ii I sought to focus on the somewhat elusive nature of fire making and therefore make a purse to hold fire making components. This is a somewhat challenging discussion to engage in

Touchwood or Tinder Polypore from http://botit.botany.wisc.edu/toms_fungi/dec2001.html

http://www.hr-replikate.de/katalog/bilder/nr0072_norm.jpg

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? http://botit.botany.wisc.edu/toms_fungi/dec2001.htmlii In researching the topic, I expected a few Google searches to yield riches, but I was wrong. Fire steel or striker are logical choices for the object that strikes a flint to produce a spark in American English. I could find many colonial variations of a blade with the extended C shapes looping back completely. I was able to find a British firesteel reference at an antiquities dealer for an 10-11th century firesteel that had been for sale, but the picture was too dark to decipher. Interestingly, I found that a British version of the same word was “strike-a-light” and with that I found references to the Ashmolean Museum and to an ancient dug item from the UK metal detector finds website. Trying to explore for the right Old English word left me at a bit of a loss. I knew that Danish used Fyrtoiet for tinderbox since that is the title of the Hans Christian Anderson Fairy tale. But that doesn’t relate in any of the OE glossaries I could find. That made me think about Old Norse as a branch in and I found that in Old Norse the term “fire worker” eld verki. I haven’t been able to connect the Old Norse to Old English yet.

SourcesOwen Crocker’s Dress of Anglo-Saxon England is a standard source for early clothing and wearable information. In this case it is not likely the best source.

Dan Brown, Firesteels and Pursemounts from Bonner Jahrbücher des Rheinischen Landesmuseums in Bonn is likely the best source but unfortunately out of print and unavailable to me.

There are two new books out that seems to focus in this area by Brett Hammond British Artefacts Volumes 1 Early Anglo-Saxon and Volume 2 - Middle Saxon & Viking I have not yet seen either of these books, but they were commonly referenced but the artifact sales sites.

Viking Answer Lady website by Christine Ward provides a wealth of information on steels and other fire starting techniques that are in period including bow drills and solar lenses at http://www.vikinganswerlady.com/fire.shtml#FireSteels.

Information on mushroom and fungus can be found in a variety of places. I have used Tom Fulk’s Fungus of the Month write ups that can be found at http://botit.botany.wisc.edu/toms_fungi/dec2001.html.

Notes