Outside his studio, puttering about in the yard, Virgil England seems like any other guy -- trimming a tree, tending to his perennials, trying to get his Bernese mountain dog to quit barking as if she's about to take somebody's leg off.

But inside his Anchorage studio, once he's closed the door behind him, it's a whole different story. The place is a time machine.

This 25-by-32 windowless box of corrugated steel is a world of his own making, shut off from reality, where letting even sunlight in would be too distracting. This is an ancient world where armorers are the masters of applied physics, where dragons and hellhounds lurk and where he with the biggest bad-ass weapon wins.

England spends as many as 70 hours a week immersed in this alternate universe, creating tools of an ancient culture that never existed -- a time and place where reptilianlike bad guys drop in from a distant galaxy, where ritual assassination is sanctioned by the temple, where if someone steals your goat, dueling daggers settle the matter.

The Het Lands, he calls it. He knows this place in such intricate detail he can talk of its history, social order and warrior ways until your ears leap from your head and take off running.

Creating this ancient back-story is England's way of making the weaponry and equipage he crafts as authentic as fantasy can be -- the helmets, armor, daggers, swords, spears, battle-axes, war hammers and other conceptual fine-art pieces with an edge.

"I try to keep it within the 10th century," he says. "That gives me some parameters, some guidelines, some rules."

Putting himself inside an ancient armorer's head, working the way he would work, England uses only materials the Het Lands have to offer. That would be Damascus steel for the blades. For the sculptural handles, spikes, claws and other adornments, the list is long and exotic, including python, ostrich and stingray skin, fossilized sea cow bone, woolly mammoth ivory and cape buffalo horn, as well as bronze, silver, gold, emeralds, rubies and pallasite meteorite with naturally occurring gemstones in the nickel-iron matrix.

These are real weapons, not props, fully capable of disembowelment, lopping off heads and pulverizing bones. But he doesn't recommend any of that.

"Anybody who wants to be a knife fighter is an absolute fool," he says. "That's why they made running shoes."

Making fantasy art weapons may seem a bit dark. But no need to worry. Back in our world, England, 65, is the friendly sort. He likes kids, dogs and cats. And when he picks up one of his ominous daggers, he says things like, "When I pull this out, cabbage and lettuce cringe."

He does have other interests. Skiing hard in winter. Bicycling hard in summer. And touring hard on his Honda RC51, a street version of a limited-production racing motorcycle that he swears gets 45 miles to the gallon at 120 miles per hour.

"Aggressive touring is what you'd call it."

England typically has several projects going at once, not just blades, bonkers and whackers, but brooches and pendants and, at the moment, a 186-pound steel doorbell that he needs to figure out how to make go "gong" instead of "clunk." Some projects take months, some years. He moves from one to the other to the next and back to the first. He's the same with books. It's not unusual for him to have 10 going at the same time.

"He's sort of like a kid with a flashlight," says fellow bladesmith Steve Schwarzer of Florida. "The focus doesn't stay on one spot very long."

"Yeah, Virgil is one of the greatest artists I've run into," he says. "And I've been in this business 30 years."

It all started with hunting knives -- buying blades, fine-tuning them, slapping on cool handles and giving them as Christmas gifts. Then he started selling them for $35 apiece. Then he got bored.

Now, 30-plus years later, the price of an England piece can run somewhere between a new car and an Ivy League education. He's had shows in Seattle, Chicago, New York, Atlanta, Milan, Munich, Tokyo, to name a few, and his work is in private collections from France to Brazil, South Africa to Saudi Arabia.

"Virgil is at the top of that game all throughout the U.S., and the world really," says Phil Lobred, a big-time collector and former Alaskan who lives in San Diego. "He's a genius in his field."

England has gone from three-inch knives with moose-antler handles to making swords that take both hands to wield. When he set out to create a sword capable of slaying a dragon, he crafted a 16-pound, five-footer of Damascus steel, its ivory and bronze handle set with a 400-carat Nigerian green tourmaline crystal. Then he created the skeletal remains of a slain dragon, using prehistoric whale bone with a 15-foot-high wing made of reindeer rawhide.

England sold it to a retired Swiss industrialist for $160,000. And that was nearly 20 years ago.

To think he once wanted to write for a living, further proof that the sword is actually mightier than the pen.

England grew up in Oregon in an extended family of loggers, military veterans, musicians and crafters, people "who could do stuff," as he puts it, people who made guns, bows, fishing rods, knives, fiddles and guitars.

His father's side: nice, quiet, even-keeled Jesus people.

His mother's side: "Scandinavian berserker crowd. A radical bunch. ... When you sat down at the dining table, they were Barbarians. I've seen them come to blows ... and I mean literally stand up and start punching each other, over something like the mean temperature in Bogota in November."

The family took its National Geographics very seriously.

When he was 9, England's father died and life was never the same.

"I was extremely introverted," he said. "I never left my room. I read books, I mean voraciously. I closeted up because my life turned to (bleep) after my father died."

He escaped into historical fiction, sci-fi and fantasy, with a special fondness for the kinds of stories where the good guys show up, whack the living daylights of the bad guys and make everything right.

"I liked that. I liked that a lot."

And so he grew up to make swords. Exquisite ones.

"It doesn't have to be ugly to be functional," he says. "A Ferrari in my estimation is every bit as good a car to take to the grocery store as a Chrysler K car."

A burial axe he made has the face of a "Shantu" clan elder on its leading edge. A sword has a viper at the bottom of the handle with patterns in the steel blade like flames spewing from its mouth. England gives his weapons names like "Night Reaper," "Xtapos Soul Eater" and "Poker Flats Pay Dirt Dags."

They're beautiful. They're terrifying. They're meant to be both.

"It's all about intimidation," England says. "When you pull out whatever you've got, you want them to go, "Oh my, I obviously made a mistake.' "

Making weapons capable of slaying Seth Daemons, Dhalregs and dragons gets more than a little physical. England has been manhandling steel for so many years his shoulders and wrists are pretty well shot. But that isn't going to stop him.

"It's like being a junkie," he says. "I mean, it's really very much like that.

"Every morning, and this is not exaggerating, every morning I am truly excited coming out here. It doesn't matter what goes on outside these walls This is my safe haven. This is my shelter. This box right here.

"And that's why I don't mind being here 70 hours a week."