Weight of a center grip shield

By Arttu Peltoniemi

As one travels the swamps of academic research and in the hills of reenactor discussions on the internet... One learns to know a lot of common opinions about stuff. One common opinion is that shields are heavy. 

It is not known how much the originals weight... Information about the most well preserved finds is still quite not precise or available. For example the best example of well preserved find would be the Shutton Hoo shield and its weight information availlable is 3-5kg...  (https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/H_1939-1010-94)  

As I (Arttu) am in the process of designing training equipment for "center grip shield combat" I would love my weapon simulators to represent reasonable weight and dimensions of original finds. Dimensions are quite well documented in archeological record, but weight remains a question.

I have constructed few shields. They are constructed to represent so called viking age shields. (see examples for hypotheticly thin one here: https://hirdmenn.blogspot.com/2020/06/making-of-our-first-viking-shield.html
and maximium strong here: https://hirdmenn.blogspot.com/2022/01/fat-little-sister-making-of-sturdy.html) The weight difrence between these two is quite somethings as the hypotheticly thin one weights 2,025kg and the maximium thick weights 4,3kg. The hypothetical light one only has thin rawhide on the front facing, where as the thick one has almost 1mm thick tanned leather on both sides of the shield. The light one is made of 6 mm thick spruce planks thinned down to  ~3 mm thickness on the edge from 20 cm distance as the thick one is made of 10mm thick spruce planks and thinned down to 3 mm thickness from 10 cm distance. The thin one has a wooden boss made out of gnarl and the thick one has a big iron boss. Both shields have gone thru some amount of testing and have come thru from the other side as good shields. 

(Playlists of thin shield tested here: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRDL6wPnRyPhX1_cLByFLlKY0dY49oH6Z 
And for thick vs thin shield tests here: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRDL6wPnRyPg_13mTWWTaPN5sUKk5wSY_)

Other builders have also come and build their (even better) constructions and told the weight of those. The one build by Rolf Warming and their team weights 3,8kg  (discussion with Rolf Warming). 

Thus the thinnest construction I made is not supported by the archaeological record, as it is thinned down from too far away and only has leather on the front side, I decided to build one more.

This time again from spruce and 6mm thick planks as supported by available information about the Tiran Bog find (see here: http://members.ozemail.com.au/~chrisandpeter/shield/tirskom.html) I bought pergament thin rawhide from https://www.keminnahkatarvike.fi/ and then made the board using as thin hide glue I dared. Now the board was ready and it weighted 2,3kg after 2 weeks of drying.

See album here: https://www.instagram.com/p/CfHdvBDD6_q/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

Other components one needs are the boss, the handle and 6 nails. This time I bought my small thin boss from https://truehistoryshop.com/ and ask it to be 11 cm from the inner diameter (without the flange). Now this is not the smallest possible as the smallest possible is ~9cm but this is quite common measure for the shield boss. It has the height of 5cm and thus is at the lowest of boss heights. It weighs 0,228 kg

Lucky me has small hands.

The nails I have are made by local smith Timo Miettinen and they weight about 6g each. So 6 of them are about 36g. Last component is the handle that has respectful weight of 53g. 

Fits the boss nicely.

So here we are. 2300g + 228g + 36g +56g = 2620g and thus comes to be talked about as 2,6 kg.

This shield board has taken some testing (with different bosses,) and one can see that here: https://youtu.be/kjlVgOQg2n4 And other test that was done to a wooden boss, but I missed with my spear and got to see it penetrate the board here: https://youtu.be/GmYSaxqayuc ) As I now have some experience with testing shields I would say a bit thicker hide could make this shield slightly better but this works. How it reacts to blows is similar to other good shields.

As this one is about the same diameters as the thick shield construction, and the diameters are based on the statistics about so called viking age shields, we can safely say that the weight of round shield with 83 cm diameter made of spruce planks can vary from 2,6- to 4,3 kg.

Interestingly Tom Jersø,  the craftsmen on Rolf Warming's shield project, said: "the high-quality radial split pine wood we used weighed about 15% more than a modern lumber trade wood." Their shield was lighter than our heavy construction by 0,5 kg. There are differences in the construction, but 0,5 kg is a huge difference in weight, although quite a lot can be in the boss.

I would like to point out that spruce was quite rare in viking age scandinavia, but not quite so rare in Finland and Estonia. (According to facebook comments. They seemed legit.) To find out more about weights we could build more stuff from different trees and play with variables like the boss, nails and handle. One thing I thought a lot about when making my thick vs thin shield tests was to make the glue similarly thick to both shields. (That was hard.) The variation is huge and perhaps affects hugely on the martial application of shield usage. In our thin vs thick shield test (read about them here: https://hirdmenn.blogspot.com/2022/12/testing-thin-and-thick-shields-against.html) we concluded that the thickness of planks does not make the shields more resistant to weapons. Since then few people, including Roland Warzecha, have pointed out their experience that heavier shields have benefit in shield binds as heavier, top heavy, swords do in blade binds. I also have experience that a heavier boss makes the shield more controllable, since the weight concentration comes closer to the center. All this been said there were heavy and light swords. During the viking age sword weight seems to vary from 0,7 kg up to 1,5 kg. (From memory.) Thus it is not surprising that as there were need for different sword constructions there were interest to have different kinds of shields to give different kind of martial benefits. 

All this been said I am still happy about my shield simulators having a weight of about 3 kg. Read about them and thinking behind them here: https://hirdmenn.blogspot.com/2022/11/the-martial-art-around-center-grip.html See them used and tested here: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRDL6wPnRyPgI9HgnXk7XhLNh5YnW8nd2 

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