Ý-Bogi: Traditional Viking Yew Longbow

The End of an Era

After over 10 years of making custom bows in Norway, with the world’s best ancestral yew from British Columbia in Canada, we are now permanently ending the sale of these bows to the public with immediate effect. This decision does not affect bow currently on order which are expected to be delivered around the due dates.

The primary issue is that our birth rate within the organization has been much higher plan planned for the past decade (Average of 14.2 boys per male). This means that we have more boys coming of age and who need a bow and at the same time, limited production capacity, both from a manpower perspective (it takes time to make a bow) and material perspective (the right ancestral yew is very difficult to get, especially without killing the tree). This has forced us in the past couple of years to contract out the making of some initial training bows for our boys, or even hire bow makers to make these. Because every bow we sell to the public is a bow we cannot make for our boys.

Today, there is no longer any bow maker we are aware of that meets our standards, in Europe or North America, even for initial training bows for our boys. But even if we were to find someone who meets our standards at this point (very unlikely), dealing with third parties has consistently been a massive headache. Contracted-out initial bows for the boys, even for training, also miss the spiritual and traditional aspect of a weapon we, as their fathers, would make for them with our own hands. It is also unfair for some of our boys to get an initial bow made by total strangers, while others get it from their own fathers. Furthermore, we do not believe members of the public in general appreciate the sacred aspect of Yew bows, how ancestral yew is finite, what is involved in sourcing the materials, or making the bow, the same way our own boys and guys here do.

With our offsprings taking precedence over members of the public, and our boys being much more appreciative of the sacred aspect of Ý-Bogi that men at large, we will now exclusively focus on our own people and only produce bows internally for our boys and within Skjǫldrinn.