Your bows look great. It is obvious that you are a very good bowyer and that you get so much out of wooden bows that many glass bow makers cannot.The tiller is spot on for a bow with stiff lever ends.
I don't think they are Holmegaard bows, though.
Two old elm bows were found in a bog near the Danish town of Holmegaard.
Both in fragments and only one complete.
Both bows have in common that they were built from a sapling, the round outside of the elm is the back of the bow and the belly of the bow is the inside of the elm scraped flat.
In both bows there is no real stepped taper in the width of the limbs.
Exactly how the bow was tillered can only be surmised in retrospect.
A few thousand years later, fragments of a children's bow made of elm were also found in Denmark, which has the main feature of an extreme width tapering of the limbs in the last third of the limbs.
This bow is called the Mollegabet bow after the place where it was found.
Based on the Mollegabet bow, this thin end is formulated as a non-bending lever.
Holmegaard and Mollegabet bows come from Denmark are several thousand years old (the Holmegaard a few thousand older) and are both made of elm, but they are different bows. Perhaps the Mollegabet is a further development and improvement in design in terms of performance, just as it can be argued that the lever ends of the Mollegabet may be the forerunners of the Syahs in composite bows.
Quite a bit has been written about the Holmegaard bow, and quite a bit has been revised (keyword: backwards tillering), just as there are many construction sketches marked Holmegaard bow but showing a Mollegabet bow.
I have seen the Holemgaard bow and one-to-one copies of the find in museums in Denmark and Belgium and have also talked to some archaeologists researching the bow.
The first bow I built is also in this Neolithic style and made of elm. The bow is now more than 25 years old and is rarely shot...
In the beginning I also called it a Holmegaard. I was proud to have built a bow based on the oldest archaeological find. Then at some point I called it the Mollegabet style and praised the Mollegabet as a further development of the Holmegaard with a design that could hardly be bettered even by computer calculations....
Today I just say Neolithic bows from Denmark.
P.S.The design principle that I see behind the Holmegaard is, on the one hand, efficient construction (a sapling can be felled and processed with stone tools faster than a large tree),
On the other hand, the durability of white wood: the tensile stability is approx. 4 times greater than the compressive stability, which is why a narrow or, in this case, rounded back in cooperation with a wide flat belly is sufficient.
One can discuss for a long time about the perfect tiller for such a bow. The version with stiff, non-bending lever ends is more efficient, but the uniform bend over the entire limb length is ultimately easier to manufacture and probably more durable. With which premise the bow makers in Holmegaard used to build their bows, none of us can say with certainty today.
Furthermore, we do not know if there were more and possibly other types of bows in Denmark at that time.
Last but not least: We should be happy about the beautiful bows here and not argue about names.
