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WHAT IS A SWORD?
Let's not get all philosophical here. A sword is a tool for
killing people. Currently it is an obsolete tool -that's
pretty simple when you get right down to it. A tougher question
is what makes a specific weapon a sword? It has a blade, a guard
and a handle. Most have a blade more than sixteen inches
long. But an eighteen-inch long pizza cutter has a long blade and
a handle and a guard of sorts, yet it is definitely a knife. The
term 'sword' has proven surprisingly difficult to pin down an exact
meaning for- but we usually know one when we see it. Part of the
problem is that swords come in a baffling variety of forms, sizes and
shapes.
We can start with what a sword is not. A medieval sword is not a
big knife. It is not crude. It is not heavy. It is
not clumsy or poorly balanced. OK, there were isolated examples
that were some or all of these, but why talk about bad
swords? Early on when custom knife makers started trying to
make medieval swords, there was some tendency to make them like big
knives. This resulted in swords that were far too heavy that
didn’t work all that well. Some people didn’t care- some still
don’t. Fortunately, most of us learned pretty quick that that
wasn’t the way to go... Because of their length and the
energy with which they strike the target, swords encounter stresses
that knifes do not- they need to be engineered differently.
The medieval sword was a sophisticated and well-developed weapon.
It was the highly evolved product of at least two thousand years of
experience and experiment. Guilds of bladesmiths passed trade
secrets down from generation to generation, and the body of knowledge
demonstrated by surviving swords is awesome. There are some
examples that easily equal Japanese swords for esthetics and
craftsmanship. There is purity to these designs, a wedding of
form and function that is quite elegant.
Because of Hollywood and inexpert writers of fiction most of us start
out with the impression that these swords were heavy and slow.
Hollywood portrays fighting with medieval swords the way it does for
two reasons- at first they had no clue, but more recently it's because
realistic swordplay is too fast and subtle for the average audience to
understand or appreciate. In point of fact the stereotypical
medieval sword for one-handed use (Classified by Ewart Oakeshotte's
typology as a type XVIII) with a simple cross guard, a disc pommel and
a flattened diamond cross section weighs in the neighborhood of two
pounds. ‘Heavy’ Viking swords usually fell within the range of
2-1/4 to 2-3/4 pounds. Most two-handed swords intended for
battlefield use weighed 4-1/2 to 6-1/2 pounds- but were easily
manageable because their very long hilts allowed the user to spread
their hands far apart for leverage.
The perception of these swords as being clumsy and poorly balanced
comes from people that were familiar with fencing in the nineteenth
century writing on swords. They assumed that modern fencing was
the apex of swordsmanship, and tried to apply the standards of fencing
weapons to swords that were used very differently. They were
right in a sense- a medieval cut-and-thrust sword is a lousy tool for
modern fencing (it was, however, a dandy tool for hacking your enemy
apart on the medieval battlefield.) These 'experts' often went so
far as to state that medieval sword fighting was dependent entirely on
brute strength and employed little technique or skill. Many still
say this, even though by now they really should know better.
Studies of the writings of late medieval masters like Fiore show that
that they had highly developed and sophisticated martial arts. It
is a conceit of fantasy writers that a samurai warrior deposited in
medieval Europe would have run roughshod over the crude, unskilled
medieval knights. In actuality medieval European fighters were
skilled in many of the same unarmed techniques as the samurai, and
their sword-fighting abilities were no less sophisticated.