I've been paging through your sword related tags with great enjoyment as someone who barely knows which end to grab. Do you have anything lined up about hilts and grips? How common is it for them to incorporate wood, is that to make it lighter than if there was a bigger tang that just had leather?
If the end you grab cuts your fingers, it's usually the wrong end :->
AFAIK the grips of most swords in most cultures were never just leather wrapped over an otherwise-bare tang; they were made of wood, but also bone, ivory, horn and even stone (mostly jade).
Once the wrap’s in place it’s hard to tell if an apparently bare tang is actually bare at all, though leather or rawhide (maybe with fur still visible somewhere) gives a "rustic" or "barbaric" appearance that suggests something cruder than it really is.
Here's a leather example on a dagger from Albion Swords’ repros of weapons from "Conan the Barbarian" (1982). The link is to their page.
I don’t know what’s underneath, but the guard and pommel are separate parts and are certainly held on by more than the wrap, so maybe there are a couple of wooden slats under the leather as well.
This one (found here) is in deliberately aged cotton cord on a refurbished Chinese sword, and goes over a wooden grip fitted between pommel and guard-ferrule. It’s hard to see, but it’s there.
I don’t know if the underlay loop is on both sides, but it would make sense to add more bulk.
Here are three Kriegsmesser (”war-knife”) hilts, one a bare tang, then wooden grip-scales with rivets, and finally what looks like either a solid grip with a hole bored through it, or maybe a two-part sandwich secured with some kind of adhesive.
The reason why I keep going on about the need for something to fill out the space between tang and gripping surface is because - as in that first Messer pic - the tang of a sword may be broad or narrow in width but it’s no thicker than the blade.
Most photos of swords are “full-face”, so it’s hard to judge their cross-section,. but I found some examples which show the tang “in profile” and demonstrate why a strip of leather wound round it wasn’t going to be enough.
Oh, and those stone (jade) hilts I mentioned?
Take a look at these...