Blades

As seen on my Old Tools list from Thomas Conroy:

Swords and even bayonets often have a groove, properly called a “fuller,” along the blade to lighten the sword and to increase its stiffness, a very useful thing when the blade is three feet long and you don’t want it proportionately heavy. Sometimes the fuller is full-length, sometimes short; sometimes it is an inch wide and fairly flat, sometimes a quarter-inch wide and quite deep. Sometimes the fuller is doubled or trebled. On kindjals (a Caucasus double-edged shortsword or large knife) there are narrow fullers on both sides, so deep that they must be offset so that they do not cut through into each other. On a sword there are real functions to fuller. Lightness and rigidity.

Some moronic savage down the years was probably asked what the fuller was for and, being too dumb to admit he didn’t know something, came up with the name “blood groove” and the idea that it let the blood run out when you had stuck the sword in someone. Once this was established, a non-functional fuller on a knife was an obvious attraction for the kind of customer who goes in for wavy-triple-bladed tail-finned “art knives” that make him feel like a savage and not a nerd (hey, how do you think I know this? Been there, done that—though my taste in swords was always pretty restrained). There is a big chunk of the handmade knife market that loses sight of the concept “form follows function”—and another, much less vulgar, chunk that has been simplifying and shortening hunting knives for decades because a 12” bowie (basically a shortsword) was never good for much except fighting, and lost that use once the revolver was invented. If I recall correctly (I’m not a hunter, this is all theory) Bob Loveless and those influenced by him had the skinner down under five or even four inches a couple of decades ago, all right near the hand where you have control of it and know where the edge is even if you can’t see it.