The elvish longbow

A while back I was contacted by a guy who wanted an elvish longbow. Most of us, I assume, would agree that elves never existed and, logically, neither did their bows. Instead, the costumer wanted a bow out of The Lord of the Rings movies. Not just any bow in the movies, but the bow Háldir and his men had in the battle for Helm's Deep, in The Two Towers movie. And he wanted it to be 45-50 pounds to 28 inches. Here's a pic of the "original".

This order gave me a lot of challenges. The bows in the movie were not made by bowyers, they were made by artists. Bowyers tend to think "how can I design this bow to be as good a bow as possible" whereas artists tend to think "how can I design this bow to be as good-looking a bow as possible". See the difference there? Furthermore, and I hate to break this to you, but the bows in the movies where mass-produced pieces of plastic with almost no draw weight in them at all. In fact, when shooting (hehe) the movies, the arrows where added in digitally afterwards with the actors "shooting" without arrows during filming.

So how to make this bow as good as possible and out of natural materials? Well, it was possible to get pretty close to the original. The wood I used was elm (ulmus glabra) with the added-on tip "petals" made from hazel. The gilded vine is made from thin leather, and the handle is jute thread.

It took a lot of pretty careful steaming to get the right shape. The artwork, especially the vine, was very time consuming to make – luckily, I outsourced that particular part to a couple of friends who are not as artistically challenged as myself. The stain is dark brown leather dye.

One problem that I did not think of until the end was that because of the "petals" at the tips, it's impossible to slide a narrow string loop over any of the tips. So how to make a string? I could have made one string loop permanently on the bow and made a timber hitch or a girth hitch at the other end, but after consulting with the customer it was decided that the best thing was to make a normal string – with one small loop in each end – and girth hitch both. That was the only possibility if I wanted to keep the option of being able to completely remove the string from the bow.

Overall, a time-consuming and interesting bow to make. I learned a lot, and a lot of it the hard way. For example, I started making the bow from ash first, but the ash was simply not up to the task when it came to some of the more severe steaming that had to be done. Also, the tiller was challenging. First, I thought I would just make an elliptically tillered longbow – basically an ELB – and steam-bend that into shape. I thought that would result in the right tiller. But with the steaming done, the tiller looked terrible. It seems the angles all over the place that the steaming resulted in changed the allocation of stress in the bow. In the end, I had to make the bow far more whip tillered (had it been straight) than I originally thought.

Many a time while working on this bow I found myself looking at it and sort of shaking my head in disbelief – I'm making elvish longbows now. For a living. This is awesome!