I went through a lot of design ideas not featured in this video! There was a very brief period of time when I considered making the sword a Lyre to reflect Bragi's favored instrument, but I decided that is so heavily associated with Apollo and Greek design in general. I then moved onto the mouth harp, which is where the first design comes from.
As you can see, this is pretty much slapping a mouth harp onto a viking sword grip and reversing the reed to allow easier access. I received a lot of comments about how phallic this looked.
From here, I considered different construction methods without doing any major changes to the silhouette. The option that got the most focus was constructing it similarly to a keyblade. This came with two a few problems. Firstly, the ability for the reed to be plucked and resonate with the blades was essential lost because of how thick the grip would need to be. Two, there wasn't any real way to grip the sword that allowed for protection, slashing, or maintaining the silhouette. And thirdly, it just made the sword look even more phallic.
So, I started looking at mouth harps, and found this one here
This Turkish style of jaw harp's body is much shorter, and reminded me of a hand guard. Keeping the reed as the tang, and slightly elongation the body of the harp, I got something pretty close to my final design. Adding the handguard however made the sword look more western European than nordic despite the blade shape and pommel design. So I added futhark runes to continue the reference to Bragi's tongue in The Sigrdrífumál.
