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Posted on 05/03/2008 8:48:06 AM PDT by HairOfTheDog
Welcome to The Hobbit Hole!
Sing hey! for the bath at close of day
That washes the weary mud away!
A loon is he that will not sing:
O! Water Hot is anoble thing!
O! Sweet is the sound of falling rain.
and the brook that leaps from hill to plain;
but better than rain or rippling streams
is Water Hot that smokes and steams.
O! Water cold we may pour at need
down a thirsty throat and be glad indeed;
but better is Beer, if drink we lack,
and Water Hot poured down the back.
O! Water is fair that leaps on high
in a fountain white beneath the sky;
but never did fountain sound so sweet
as splashing Hot Water with my feet!
OK. Will do.
I haven’t noticed that “making sense” is on the checklist for stuff that greeners/ELF/ALF do.
Thanks. I still think these kittens would fit in it, though mine is bigger. To take them to the clinic to be fixed, if we do them at the same time, since they’re ferals, they want them in separate live traps and I only have one.
You should get some large live traps set for those greenies...
Looks like The Hobbit script is underway:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/2065865/posts?page=1
Live traps? Too nice... I think the leg-clamp type would be more entertaining.
It’d be easy... just bait it with a little patchouli oil and a bong with some BC Bud in it... and [SNAP]. :-)
I’d leave a hacksaw within easy reach.
[sip]
Aw...aren’t they sweet.
*snort*
Sword Parts
There are of course the familiar parts, from left to right on the picture, of Blade, Guard, Grip and Pommel. The Guard is also called the "Cross". Some refer to the Guard as the "Quillions", but that may refer specifically to guards made with fancy loops and hoops, decorations and such.
The Blade is further divided into the "weak" and the "strong". The weak part is that from the point about halfway back and the strong part is from halfway back to the Guard. This comes from the amount of leverage you can apply to the blade. If you bind or parry another sword on the "strong" part, naturally you have much more leverage than if you bind closer to your point. If you bind your strong against your opponent's weak, then you get to control where the swords go.
[language note: The word comes from the german "binden" meaning "to bind" which is when the two swords are in contact, often ending up with the guards locked forcefully. When this happens, a grappling match is about to break out or one of them is about to break the bind and strike decisively. Either way, somebody's about to die. One wonders if this isn't the origin of the expression "to really be in a bind" when one is in deep trouble.]
The blade also has a "long" (or "true") edge and "short" (or "false") edge. This terminology originated with curved swords like a saber or cutlass where one edge is actually longer than the other since it's on the outside of the curve. This terminology applies still to double-edged longswords with straight blades, even though both edges are obviously the same length. In this case it depends on how you're holding it and where your knuckles are. The edge that lines up with your knuckles is the "long" edge. This would be the primary striking edge for the basic downward strike you'd make from high to low. The short edge would be the other one, on the "back" of the blade, that is, the edge that lines up with the webbing of your thumbs.
The short edge is just as useful as the long edge, perhaps more. There are some sneaky underhanded tricks involving strikes with the short edge. More on that another day.
Every blade has an optimal spot on the edges to strike with, just like every baseball bat has a "sweet spot". It's generally just several inches down from the tip. You can find this spot easily by holding the sword out in front of you with one hand, point up, edge-on, and hit the pommel with the heel of your free hand. The sword will vibrate visibly in your hand. There will be two "nodes" in the vibration that don't move. One will be (on a good sword) just at or above your hand no more than an inch or two out from the guard, and the other will be up several inches from the tip. That's the place to hit things. At that spot you get to take advantage of the natural harmonics of the blade, transferring little or no vibration back to your hands and more importantly, not wasting energy that's absorbed into the vibration of the blade. But that said, when you get a chance to cut-- you cut. The whole blade cuts just fine.
Many blades also have a deep groove down each side called a "fuller". In longswords this groove was generally narrow and about 1/2 to 3/4 the length of the blade. In Viking swords the fuller was usually wide, perhaps more than half the whole width of the blade and went all the way down just short of the tip.
Contrary to popular myth this is not a "blood groove" to let blood flow out of a wound more quickly. It doesn't work that way. The primary purpose is to make the blade lighter by removing steel. It also makes the blade stiffer, due to the round concave cross-section on each side. Not all longswords featured a fuller but had a diamond-shaped cross-section. Some had dual or triple fullers in parallel.
Another myth: Longswords were heavy and cumbersome. Not so. Most were only 2.5 to 3.5 lbs, not 10 or more as many people think. With two hands, a properly made one is amazingly lively, fast and nimble. That said, swinging one around for an hour or so-- with intent-- is a heck of a workout. But most sword fights didn't last very long... probably ten or fifteen seconds. Thirty seconds would be a long one.
Another myth: Armor made soldiers slow to move and unable to even get up if they fell down. Nonsense. Sure, chain mail or plate armor was heavy. But not that heavy. It was nothing compared to to what modern soldiers and Marines carry around every day. But more on that another day.
Types of swords.
Just some basics, nowhere near exhaustive, of course:
Longswords, from two-handed to hand-and-a-half (or "bastard" sword). Various lengths and styles. Generally used with both hands without a shield. Often, but not always, with armor or chain mail. Note the differences in grip length, overall length, blade cross-section and distal taper:
Oakeshott Type XIIIa
Oakeshott Type XVa
Single-handed swords, generally used with a shield or buckler (small shield, about 12in to 16in in diameter):
Oakeshott Type Xa
Oakeshott Type XVIII
Viking sword. Most commonly had this sort of "lobed" pommel, and a wide fuller running nearly the full length of the blade. Guards where usually short. Sometimes straight, sometimes curved out toward the tip:
Oakeshott Type Z
And just for fun... The Grosse Messer (German for "big knife", for obvious reasons). It's even bigger than it looks. I've handled one, and decided that it was just silly. If you don't get a good hit on the first strike, it's too heavy and slow to recover. You can't help but overcommit. But then again, if you ~do~ get a good hit, you're done with that job:
Well, that's probably enough for now. Some fun stuff, though, huh?
Interesting, especially since I don't have anything with a blade longer than 11".
What about hunting swords? Germans used swords with very long guards for boar hunting. Didn't want an angry porker running himself up your blade towards you without a big guard to stop him.
Though, I have heard of boar hunting with a spear. Number 3 on this list at your friend and mine, Cold Steel, is listed as a "boar spear":
Note that it's got a stop near the head to keep the squealing bugger well out of tusk range.
IMHO the swords you have been discussing are all from c. 1500 AD more or less. Do they also use earlier swords, such as the Roman Gladius and Gaullic Long Swords. Or Axes, such as the Frankish francisca.
It's not the size of the blade. It's how you use it.
I'm just sayin' is all...
Wait! I’m not packed!
Very cool. Thanks for the lesson. Must keep some of this in mind for future stories.
Please?
Good observation. The longsword techniques come from mostly 13th to 15th century "fechtbuchs" (fighting books) in german. The single-hand sword and shield or sword and buckler has some works a little earlier. It's not assumed that the Germans were the only masters but they along with the Italians seemed to be among the very few to write anything down and preserve it.
The archaeology of swords gets dicey because steel just doesn't survive well. There's more bronze-age swords surviving in museums in better condition than far later steel swords.
The Viking sword I pictured was a common design in use for a very long time, beginning in the 8th century all the way to the 11th or so, at which point the distinctions between the Norse design and the European single-hand start to blur, as might naturally be the case.
Before that, there is precious little written material to work with. We don't know with any certainty how the vikings used their sword and shield or if it was different from how the other later European writers put it down. It's probably reasonable to assume that there were many commonalities. Body mechanics and physics dictate what works well, so it is probable that most sword and shield, and longsword technique was similar.
We do have a growing curriculum on pole arms: spears, halberds, pole axes... that sort of thing. Those things of course go way back into lost time. The staff and the spear have been with us since Man first picked up a stick and sharpened it.
I'm hoping to get into axes, especially the Viking axe, but I've got a long way to go with what I've already got.
It's been said that the "dark ages" weren't dark, they merely went unrecorded. They're called dark because there's just not much detail surviving in the written histories, not because there wasn't anything happening. Sadly the same is true of any detailed treatise on fighting arts. What we know is gleaned from paintings, stories and legends, but it is light on detail.
With regard to the Roman gladius... interesting question. I don't know if anyone is developing a curriculum for that or not. There is probably enough material surviving to reproduce a fair fighting manual. But I don't know.
The organization I'm in does focus mostly on the medieval and renaissance period in Europe. Partly it is to rediscover and preserve an important western cultural legacy that has been lost or ignored for too long. Partly too, I suppose it's because that's where the available material starts. We'd love it if we had a fighting manual from 5th or 6th century Saxons or Normans... but they along with everybody else wrote down precious little. The fighting arts certainly existed, but were passed down from teacher to student; Captain to soldier, generation after generation and nobody thought to videotape it. Dang it. :-)
Quite. Somebody with a knife and a shield who knows how to use them is far more deadly than a noob with a longsword. Like me, for example. After my sparring with the instructor all I can say is that I died well. Several times. I think he'd have done just as well with a pocket knife. :-)
Must. Haz. Nap.
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