Hu takes the Vinland Saga’s famous daggers from screen to steel.
Anime and knifemaking are seldom mentioned in the same sentence. However, with a pair of striking daggers, an online knifemaking sensation has skillfully forged together that creative gap in cold, hard steel.
Jesse Hu is a multiple Forged in Fire champion and a prolific YouTube creator. When his online fans demanded a rendition of Thorfinn’s daggers from the popular animated Vinland Saga series, the adventuresome smith didn’t back down from the challenge. However, he set stringent goals for how he wanted the fictional blades to materialize.
“I have seen a lot of people make their own versions, but I haven’t seen any that truly captured their energy from the anime,” Hu said. “I felt it was possible for me to make a pair of daggers that fans would feel I directly pulled from the screen.”
The results are a spot-on set of daggers boasting 81/2-inch blades of 80CrV2 steel with carved Ringed Gidgee handles and one with a 1/2-inch-thick brass guard. Hu’s carving emulates the animation’s leather-wrapped look. While there is little actual Viking in the daggers’ overall design, the maker’s choice of wood for the handles did inadvertently bring a touch of the historic accuracy to the fantasy knives.
“One thing I discovered from a friend was that there were a bunch of carved wooden handles on Viking-era blades,” Hu related. “But I only heard about this after I had finished the daggers.”

The greatest challenge in bringing the two-dimensional blades into the physical world came from the inconsistency of the source material. In the anime series, Thorfinn’s daggers can change from scene to scene, forcing Hu to hit a moving target.
“Some pictures made the handle look rectangular in cross section as opposed to ovular; some made the central fuller look really thin and others quite thick,” he said. “I had to pick and choose from all these images to create something that felt accurate to all of them.”
Studying frames from the series and interpreting how the ink daggers’ ratios translate to steel was a painstaking process. Hu estimates he invested two weeks bringing the anime knives to life. Given the dedicated following of Vinland Saga, he figured the time invested would have paid off—had he not decided to keep them for himself.
“A cool piece doesn’t always mean a smart business decision,” he quipped.
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