Hello Everybody, I cannot contain my excitement for todays offering… It is one of my favourite (if not the favourite) hilts I have built. And I have sort of built it twice! Twice! Let me explain…way back in January you may recall I teased a hilt for Thor, where I described it as a “crossguard” design. This first design sat on my computer system for a while as I had a backlog of other hilts I had to post first but I was straining not to post it straight away. Unfortunately I should have because whilst producing some images for this post my laptop and external memory card glitched and because the folder where the saber files were saved was open, the glitch erased that folder! All my work vanished as if it fell through the Bifrost Bridge when Thor destroyed the bridge in the movie. My original design looked a little like this as seen in the teaser images I had uploaded to WordPress…
The first was a picture of the saber embedded in a lump of rock to mirror the events of the film where Thor’s hammer, Mjölnir, fell to Earth and landed in a piece of rock in New Mexico. The saber landed in the field outside my cave workshop 😀 The second was an edit of a screenshot showing Thor holding my saber. But alas this saber died when my laptop crashed. However I wanted to test myself and see if I was a worthy saber designer and attempted to recreate it, or even dare I say make it better. Here are a few work in progress pictures..(not many as I didn’t want to risk losing these too)…
Viewers with a keen eye will spot this new saber is again a “crossguard” but it is now a little more streamlined as the first iteration was a fraction large. But Thor is big so I didn’t reduce the dimensions too much. As this was a saber for the son of a God I had to make it special so this hilt was to feature an etching to give it a regal decoration befitting his stature and position. And this etching pattern can be seen in the second and third test pictures where I tried the textures out. The pattern caused me all sorts of problems getting the design to line up with parts of the hilt. But worse was trying to find the right image to print into the handle…I spent many hours looking through wallpaper patterns on many home décor websites to find a Damask wallpaper. So much was the effort I developed Migraines for while afterwards! I then added gold accent parts around the emitters, the body of the hilt and on the pommel. These were to represent the architecture of the world of Asgard, Thor’s homeworld. A Celtic Asgardian Knot is used as the activation switch and is modelled in a matching gold. Phew! Enough talk, how about some Glamour shots? Here you go..
From these pictures you can see the etching covers about 85% of the hilt and my eyes really hurt when I finally finished lining all of it up, but it was worth it. But I haven’t finished yet…OH there’s more to this design yet! Being late giving a God a gift would normally be a bad thing so I needed to make up for the delay…so I didn’t just give Thor one hilt…I have a second complementary hilt to make a matching pair. And here is the matching hilt…
A Shoto is a smaller saber held in the warrior’s non dominant (or weaker) hand and is used primarily for defence, so you would block an attack with the Shoto while using your main weapon to attack your opponent in reply. But having two sabers mean you can have a nice pair of weapons which hopefully look beautiful. I hope I have appeased Thor and built something really beautiful. I will let Thor and you my loyal readers/viewers/followers decide.
Thor is about to star in the final instalment of the Avengers series of films, the film is called “Avengers: Endgame” and is released on the 25th April in the UK and around the globe soon after. The film also features Iron Man!
WOW! That was a very heavy,long post, sorry! But I really hope you liked the design. I learnt a lot in creating this hilt and I won’t make the same mistakes of forgetting to back up my data again. I need to thank you all for checking this hilt out and for your support, you kept me going when I was feeling down when I lost the original saber. I hope you will return to FTSabersite for future posts where I will be returning to the world of Star Wars and go space mining with Red Dwarf! Till next time…
“New Asguard Saber” and “New Asguard Saber Shoto” are For Tyeth Editions and are ©Copyright of For Tyeth/FTSabersite 2016-2019. They were inspired by “Thor” who appears in the Marvel Comics Universe (MCU) and was created by Stan Lee, Larry Leiber and Jack Kirby. “Thor”, “Mjölnir” and all other names, logos and related material is Trademark/Copyright of Marvel Studios and Paramount Pictures 2011-2019.
FTSabersite 
finally viewing your images on my laptop – weekend was hectic. There very good, i can see why its your Favourite so far.
Hello Neil, I hope things have calmed down for you. Thanks so much for the kind words. I really had to work for this design but I’m glad I did. It was truly a learning experience.