Posted on 01/24/2015 5:34:10 AM PST by Plainsman
For thousands of years, the bow and arrow was used for war. Those days are long gone, and most people today only know of archery through TV and movies. However, as the Danish archer Lars Andersen has proved, Hollywood archery has very little to do with actual war archery.
Lars Andersen originally started using bow and arrow to fight in pretend battles during Larps (live action role play) events, where he played a soldier in a medieval-inspired army. While Larps can be about anything – the Danish/Polish Harry Potter inspired larp College of Wizardry (cowlarp.com) recently got world-wide media attention and there wasn't a rubber sword in sight there – many Larps take place in fantasy worlds inspired by J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. And it was at one of these Larps, that Lars started to learn to shoot fast while moving.
In 2012, Las Andersen released his video, "Reinventing the fastest forgotten archery", where he showed how he had learned to shoot from old archery manuscripts. Using these old, forgotten techniques, Lars demonstrated how he was now the fastest archer on the planet, and after its release, the video got 3 million hits on YouTube in two days.
Since the 2012 video was released, Lars has studied and practiced, and he is now able to fire three arrows in 0.6 seconds – a truly stunning feat making him much faster than the legendary fictional archer Legolas (played by Orlando Bloom in the Lord of the Rings movies).
His newest video debunks several Hollywood myths and shows off not only impressive feats like grabbing and arrow in mid-air and firing it back, but also the ultimate archery trick; but you'll have to watch the video to find out.
Way Cool!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cr_1z3GwxQk
scholagladiatoria covered this topic weeks ago. It’s all for show with a child’s draw weight of 10-20#. Warbows and war arrows are more powerful and more difficult to shoot.
Got to see a demo by Howard Hill when I was a youngster. He was quite an archer, both for score and game.
One of the interesting things is, evidently he places the arrows on the other side, of the bow.
That keeps reloading much quicker.
Another trick is he already has several arrows out to begin with.
The guy is FAST.
Impressive. Most impressive.
The Mrs was up for an archery scholarship, but rather gave her time to our daughter.
Very impressive. How much “pull” on that bow?
I've read estimates of between 500,000 and a million arrows used by the English at Agincourt.
Consider the time involved in making an arrow by hand in those times then think again about those numbers.
“Consider the time involved in making an arrow by hand in those times then think again about those numbers.”
They were on a military campaign so the arrows were already made. I don’t know how many arrows were shot, but the archers did run out at one point and have to go pick up arrows from the battlefield.
Agincourt is one of my favorite battles to study. Henry V was a military genius and the French obliged with their stupidity.
Bernard Cornwell wrote a good historical fiction book about an archer in the military campaign.
http://www.amazon.com/Agincourt-Bernard-Cornwell/dp/0061578908
A friend of mine practices archery in his basement by snuffing out candles at 30 feet. He is a good archer but not good enough to compete.
The military arrows were made rather quickly using a pedal driven lathe. The fletching was attached using a jig still available from Basspro.
The bow is quite a lethal weapon.
The British spent years preparing for war. The motto was “six feathers from every goose”, to the fletcher for arrows. Every goose, for years in a country with millions of inhabitants. The Battle of Agincourt was not a casual encounter, both sides spent half a generation in preparation. There were 5,000 longbow men. That works out to about 200 arrows per bow. If you didn’t have enough arrows for them, why even bring them along.
Longbow men did act as light infantry, but generally only those sent through the wood to attack the French flanks, who when they ran out of all the arrows they could carry, would pick up abandoned arms - the battlefield was full of them - and make harassing attacks on the French flanks.
Just amazing. This is a guy who could take a bow and arrow to a gunfight and prevail.
That’s 200 arrows per archer. Any grunt knows this is very plausible. Armies are great at filling idle time. 20 arrows a day would be child’s play to them, and that’s 10 days to be ready for a big battle.
It make less sense that a massive army arrives with less than 200 per archer available.
I shoot my compound with fingers, thumb down. I do carry a release though I don’t use it much.
I started with a release but I would always forget or lose them, so I said ef it and went to fingers.
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