On the Thursday before New Year’s Eve giant sword maker Michael Craughwell spoke at the West Tisbury Library before an audience of more than 40 people. He wore a long-sleeved, black and white striped shirt and immaculate khakis with a smart phone strapped to his belt. His hair is a yard-length tumble of brown ringlets. He also wears a bushy, full beard making him look every bit the ancient Celtic warrior.

As Mr. Craughwell spoke he played videos of himself weilding giant swords. These videos have gained that rare distinction of being identified by the YouTube community as being potentially offensive. The swords are that big and that scary.

Behind Mr. Craughwell an enormous object lurked, suspended from an iron frame and covered with canvas. It was like waiting for the Mona Lisa to be unveiled by way of Dexter, the TV moonlighting serial killer.

Mr. Craughwell is 28 years old and a native of Galway City, Ireland. “I was raised on shows like Conan the Barbarian,” he said. “But it wasn’t until I saw Mad Max that I got inspired to create stuff on my own. Everything in that movie was made out of junk and I could get junk.”

As a teenager he assembled a suit of armor from cast-off metal parts. This ability to manufacture fantasy fighting gear out of rubble received an upgrade in art college when he discovered actual tools for welding metals. He began to fashion solid steel into blades like the ones he admired in the PlayStation game Final Fantasy 7.

Irish kids at the turn of the millennium, it turns out, owned more PlayStations than any other youngsters in the world. As Mr. Craughwell explained it in a recent email, “In Ireland, the combination of bad weather and zero great outdoors (there is no wilderness), means that 90 per cent of young males have to choose between alcoholism and video games, and most pick both.” Mr. Craughwell himself is a teetotaler. “The concept of drinking in moderation doesn’t exist in Ireland. About half my friends abstain also.”

His debut to the wider world arrived when he uploaded his first tree-bashing YouTube video. This showcased him staggering under a fifty-pound sword (an actual, real world sword weighs two to three pounds) and decimating a tree while Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana blared at high volume in the background.

“The clip was five minutes long, at least five times the attention span of anyone logging on to the Internet,” he wryly recalled. Nonetheless, the video went viral.

“A whole subculture of people started contacting me. I hear from a lot of goth geeks, many Asians, zero females.”

Mr. Craughwell’s swords are for sale. The weapons cost up to $750 and the shipping costs can be pricey too. A sword mailed from Ireland to the United States set the buyer back $450. Most of his weapons are custom ordered but others he engineers on spec. “I made an eight-foot, five-inch Samurai sword that I haven’t sold yet,” he noted.

Near the end of the talk Mr. Craughwell finally pulled the cover from the hanging sword. It was far scarier than anticipated. The four-foot long blade is topped by a metal skeleton ribcage and skull. The skull is then crowned by a foot-long metal cone with sharp decorative blades. Two horn-shaped arms extend from the skeletal torso. The entire contraption weighs thirty pounds.

This masterwork was commissioned by a video designer in Japan. When Mr. Craughwell ships it he will itemize it to the carrier as art, giant sword being just a bit harder to transport across borders.

The Irish expatriate explained that for the kind of grinding and welding he undertakes he found it difficult to locate studio space in Galway City, Cork or even Dublin for that matter. “Other than large-scale industrial warehouses, there’s no such thing as urban spaces available for metal sculpture.”

For a while he affiliated himself with a factory of 60 employees and a “Dickensian owner who I couldn’t come to any sort of agreement with. I made my stuff in secret but it was no way to work, always looking over my shoulder, hiding half-finished swords.”

On a trip to the States in 2007 he met Vineyarder Amelia Smith at a science fiction convention in Boston called Boskone. The two conventioneers fell in love, married, and now have two children. Nova was born in November 2007 and baby Christopher was born last August. For the first year and a half the couple lived in Ireland, but now the family of four is ensconced with Amelia’s parents and getting ready to move into a guest house on the property in Deep Bottom.

Mr. Craughwell produces other art as well. At the studio of Vineyard metal sculptor Barney Zeitz he crafts continuous-line weld drawings and wrought-metal furniture in addition to his really big swords.

And now for the fun part. To view the swordmaker’s mind-bending videos (now sized down to one minute or less episodes) log on to youtube.com/michaelcthulhu. And ignore the YouTube warning about offensive material. The giant swords are no more alarming than anything you’d see in the latest Narnia chronicle and that movie, the last time we looked, was rated PG.