Mounting a horn hilt on a seax with a rat-tail tang

[FullerH]

A friend asked me to post this for him. He has been studying the archaeological finds of scramaseaxes and finds that none of them have full width tangs with scales being riveted to the tang to make a hilt, this is the general way that re-enactors have made their seaxes, but the archaeological record does show a large number of seaxes with rat-tail tangs, some of which are full length and some of which are only partial length, usually half length. He says that these are frequently found with the decayed remains of horn hilts around the tangs, but there is no hint as to how the horn was attached to the tang. Do any of you have any ideas on how this might be done with some degree of historical verisimilitude?

I had initially posted this in the Sword Discussion Forum, because it dealt with historical type matters, but I have deleted it there and noted that I have moved it here.

 

[Fox Creek]

If it was apparent there was no pin through tang, or if tang was not peened over at the but, then the tang was simply cemented into the handle. This is very common for more simply made knives(I do not want to say primitive since that implies crudity). A closely fitted tang glued in with a natural pitch/wax thermosetting adhesive is very strongly bonded to the handle with out mechanical attachments being required.

 

[Fox Creek]

AND I might add, that if there were significant hollow space in the interior of the handle, the same resinous substances would be used to fill the void. The same approach is used even today on some of the native made kukris from Nepal made in the traditional manner.

 

[Osbourn]

Usually, if the norse used a rat-tail tang, then it was a through tang that went the entire length of the handle and pommel, and they would peen over the end of it to secure the pommel/handle. They also had extremely strong hide and hoof glues at their disposal, and it's pretty certain that these are what they used on the shorter tang sax' examples. I usually still pin and epoxy antler handles on mine, just because a handesax or scramasax will often be used as a hard-use camp knife, but I will sometimes wrap leather around the pinned area because I haven't seen any with holes in their tang, and it kind of bothers me to have a glaring inaccuracy like that.