What makes a sword a sword? Is it its shape? No, this can’t be, because sword shapes – cruciform, crescent, etc – lengths, and styles vary greatly, by both time and space. Is it based on lack of projectiles? Maces, clubs, axes, and spears don’t shoot projectiles, but no one would call them a sword. What does a 17th century rapier have in common with a Roman gladius? What does an Iberian montante have in common with the arming sword featured in the I.33 manuscript?
What do they all have in common? Swords, quite simply are long, bladed weapons, often (though not always) with a point, designed to kill. There are a few ways swords can do this in the hands of their wielders, but the two most common ways are via cutting – using the sword to hew – and thrusting. The medieval longsword, used in Europe from about 1300-1500, has the best of both worlds in that it is a weapon designed to be able to both optimally cut and thrust an opponent.
In Cutting with the Medieval Sword, Mike Edelson pulls off the remarkable feat of getting at the very heart of what makes using a sword an art (as opposed to a sport), and does so in a way that is accessible to everyone – from those who have never picked up a sword in their life, to practitioners with years of experience.
Make no mistake – this is not a book for sport fencers; this is a book for those who wish to start or continue learning how to use a sword as it was used historically and martially – to maim or kill your opponent.
Assuming that your interest in HEMA and swordsmanship is at least partly martial, however, you will find this book an invaluable resource. The information is presented in a straight-forward, easy-to-understand manner, with copious illustrations and analogies that can be absorbed by everyone – even me, and I’m a notoriously slow learner when it comes to swords. There’s no need to be familiar with middle-high German, Italian, or Latin; when excerpts from manuals are included here, they have been translated (via the wonderfully talented Cory Winslow).
***
The book is divided into theoretical, practice, and calibration sections, which I will address individually:
Theoretical — This part can (and perhaps should) be a textbook used in all HEMA classes. It addresses all the concepts one should know when it comes to cutting with a sword (and there’s also a bit about thrusting, as well), and the appropriate body mechanics to make it work. Although the section is intended as a reference and does not have to be read chronologically, I’d still recommend everyone read it and then, for newer students especially, come back to it as terms and ideas become more familiar.
Personally, I was surprised to lear about the importance of regulating one’s breathing – I don’t usually remember to breathe when fencing or cutting, but here Edelson has explained in detail why exhaling with the strike is extremely important.
In fact, with all concepts here, Edelson has found a way to explain not just why a certain concept is important, but how it relates to cutting as a whole – for example things such as grip and stopping the sword may seem to be minor details, but a poor grip or inability to stop the sword at the appropriate point can be the difference between a successful and unsuccessful cut.
Practice — Contrary to popular belief, you don’t need a sharp sword to practice (although you certainly can), but a blunt or feder capable of producing good sword wind can often get the job done – details as to how to choose a good blunt are in the text. Cutting practice doesn’t refer to cutting tatami or water bottles (that’s calibration), but to the thousands and thousands of cuts one should practice in the air at home. The tl;dr here is that you want to make sure you’re training to cut through your target, and if you only ever practice against a calibration medium, you’ll just train yourself to cut and only cut that medium.
There are a wealth of drills in the practice section, many familiar to me as I train with the NYC branch of Edelson’s club, but some entirely new, and they are divided into foundational and core drills. Foundational drills are designed to get you the basic movements and skill sets; core drills further refine these and should become a regular part of your practice. Some the drills need a partner, but may can be performed solo, and some need only a wooden dowel to be performed.
Those new to HEMA or longsword instruction will likely find many of these drills helpful to do with their class, adjusting as appropriate to the experience level of their students.
Calibration – This is the section that deals with sharps and feedback materials.
First, Edelson goes into detail as to how to choose an appropriate sharp sword for one’s size – personally, I use an Albion Count and have just received an Albion Crecy – as well as what manufacturers to choose from. The adage “you get what you pay for” is especially true here; your Renaissance fair wall hanger is probably not going to get the job done.
Edelson then goes on to describe how to properly sharpen your sword; although instructional videos exist (the links are provided), this is an activity that should absolutely be done under supervision for newer students, and practice on kitchen knives or other swords you don’t care about first is recommended. That said, more experienced students will delight in the interview with Peter Johnsson provided here, which was a pleasant surprise for myself.
As for feedback materials, tatami is the best material currently available for test cutting based on factors of cost, weight, and diagnostic ability (ie, the ability to understand what you did right or wrong when you cut it). Edelson also addresses the positives and negatives of cutting clay, water bottles, pool noodles, and newspapers – tl;dr, if you can’t get tatami, clay is probably your next best cutting medium but there are some serious drawbacks.
Edelson goes into great detail explaining how to prepare tatami, including where to order it, what tatami to get (new vs old), how to roll and soak it, and what your cutting stand should look like. For newer students, learning how to spike tatami is also an important skill – mats spiked incorrectly can be artificially hard to cut. This is followed by suggestion patterns and diagnostics, so that you will be able to see what you did wrong.
This ends with a section on cleaning and repairing your sword; the short version is that except for routine cleaning and the most superficial nicks, repairs should be handled by professionals – which is one reason vendors such as Albion are so highly rated, as they provide this service.
***
While many of us participate in the competitive side of HEMA as a sport, it behoves us to always remember that ultimately what we are studying is a martial art. As a community, we have come a long way in the last ten years – from having a surfeit of feders and sharps to choose from, to having multiple vendors offering HEMA-specific protective gear – and this book should be included in the lexicon of game-changers.
HEMA is awash in primary sources, which is amazing, but there has been a gap in texts concerned with cutting, as opposed to set plays and techniques, and appropriate sword care. This fills that gap, and should be a recommended text for those in the community for years to come.
Cutting with the Medieval Sword goes on sale Tuesday 21 November.
This is a post for comic book artists preparing
their pages for their publisher or colourist. I’m aware that many
pros still don’t know some of this stuff, often because the bigger
publishers have production teams who will take the incorrectly sized
or shaped pages and adjust them before passing on to colourists or
for print. However, this a) is giving more work to people that you
can easily do yourself and b) reduces the amount of control you have
over how your work is printed. It makes sense to provide files that
will present your work in the best way possible.
My main sources for
this are Rejali’s Torture and Democracy
which brings together a lot of disparate sources, Fanon’s case notes on
torturers in The Wretched of the Earth
and Alleg’s The Question (both based
around the Franco-Algerian war). I don’t currently have a copy of Sironi’s book
on torturers and I’m still unclear on whether there will be an English
translation.
I’m making that clear
because her research is the latest
and she has a level of first hand contact and interview experience that Rejali
and Alleg do not have. Fanon dealt with torturers first hand in his work as a
mental health professional but he did not have the focus that Sironi has and he
didn’t have the opportunity to compare a large group of individual torturers as
Sironi did.
Generally speaking the
evidence is pretty clear. Torturers have a toxic effect on the organisations
they’re part of.
In extreme cases
torturers can actual cause fractures within the organisations they’re part of
to the point that members of the organisation violently attack each other and
try to kill each other. Rejali describes this happening in Brazil.
That seems to be at
least a possible/likely long term result of leaving torture unchallenged in an
organisation.
The Soviet Union
regularly purged its torturers (Bloodlands:
Europe between Hitler and Stalin by T Snyder). I’m not sure whether that
counts as the kind of internal fracturing that occurred in Brazil or an outside
attempt to prevent it.
Those are end points,
and they were both in systems where torture was not exactly hidden. They are
essentially what happens when the torturers ‘win’.
Torturers basically
form their own sub-culture within an organisation. It’s a toxic
micro-environment where they serve to encourage each other towards greater
violence and depravity.
This is because
torture, unlike genuine investigation, is a zero sum game. The torturer who was
in the room when the victim ‘talks’ is the ‘winner’ and gets all the praise.
Anyone else who abused the victim
previously receives no credit.
Contrast with
investigation where multiple people
can be praised for producing different pieces of evidence which are equally
valuable.
The result is that
torturers compete with each other. They are driven; by the environment they’ve
created, to come up with more inventive brutalities, to abuse their victims for
longer and to seek new victims.
The way one of Fanon’s
patients described it is: ‘It’s a
question of persona; success. You see, you’re competing with the others. In the
end your fists are ruined.’
It probably seems like
I’m focusing more on the torturers then the organisation here, but the effect
torturers have on the working environment is important because it seems to
affect other people coming in to the organisation.
People who are strongly
opposed to torture are weeded out or rejected as they trying to join the group.
They often either leave or are forced out.
The hiring/entry
practices seem to change, at least for the part of the organisation that
tortures. It skews towards young, impressionable, vulnerable people. In armies
and police forces that usually means very young men who have no real on the job
experience. You end up with a lot of people who feel they can’t object below a
lot of people who will loudly argue for horrendous abuses.
So you have a very
toxic, often hyper-masculine, working environment that encourages a lot of very
unhealthy ideas and practices in ways that reach beyond torture.
I suppose I would think
of that as an effect of torturers rather than an effect of torture.
Torture itself causes
something Rejali dubs ‘deskilling’. Essentially torturers show a marked
tendency to loss or ignore their previous skills. Police officers who torture
will torture instead of going through basic departmental practices. They
ignore evidence, fail to catalogue, collect, analyse and record it. They
basically stop doing their jobs and start torturing instead.
This massively hampers
the organisation they’re in but it’s often difficult to quantify exactly how it
does so. Broadly speaking in a policing context your talking about the sorts of
systematic errors that lead to: failure to catch a criminal, failure of trials
because of lack of evidence, convicting the wrong person etc.
Torturers are crap at
their real jobs basically. And that will, broadly speaking, make any
organisation they’re part of less effective.
There’s another layer
to this though. Because torturers will also consistently argue that they are
good at their jobs. They will argue that torture is effective and that they are
being hampered by bureaucracy and rules.
This is bullshit.
Torture does not work. But this is what torturers say and in organisations that
have allowed them to get a foothold they’re often listened too.
Torturers try to hamper
the bureaucracy and oversight systems of any organisation they’re part of. This
is a part of how they fracture organisations. They pit the people who
obey the rules against the people who are willing to break them and they do so
in a toxic environment that encourages and rewards incredibly high levels of violence.
Actively hiding things
from the organisation they’re part of doesn’t just serve to fragment it, it can
also hamper the organisation.
If the organisation has
anything to do with information gathering then torture causes additional
problems because it produces so much false ‘intel’. Torture produces more lies
then truth and in such a way that it’s impossible to tell which is which.
This hampers an
information based organisation in two ways. Firstly by mixing such a high
proportion of lies in with facts and secondly by wasting the time of genuine
investigators who try to follow up on those lies.
So to summarise. Torturers create a
toxic and violent working environment. They hamper the effectiveness of
organisations they’re in both by their actions and by derailing other people’s
work. They create schisms within organisations that lead to the fracturing and
fragmenting of those organisations.
This is all of course
ignoring the huge personal cost that torture has on the torturers and those
around them who don’t torture. Because torture causes serious mental health
problems in torturers and witnessing torture can be traumatising for their
colleagues.
All of these effects
add up. And they mean that whatever the organisation, any organisation that tortures will be less effective than one that
does not.
Everytime I watch good ol’ Sal work, I feel like I learn something. Seriously, these ten minutes can change your viewpoint on realistic defense. I’ve been thinking a lot about Fiore’s dagger (and the dagger/sword in one hand as an effective/simple stick or bastoncello curriculum, but that’s a different topic).
Sal here has a simple system: if the weapon is above shoulder height, explode through in Posta Frontale, suddenly retract out into a lock. If it’s below shoulder height, hit into it in Porta di Ferro (double thumbs down, wrists crossed a little) and suddenly retract into a lock.
Contact through Porta di Ferro or Posta Frontale from the Abrazare, apply the Strong Key, Middle Bind, 3rd Master of the Dagger (arm bar), or the Counter to the 1st Grapple on Horseback (overwrapping the arm at the wrist/forearm for a pain compliance, arm control, or arm bar/wrist lock).
Add in the Rule of Five Things (every tempo you should be striking, disarming, locking, breaking, or throwing), the main strikes of the dagger, performing our Porta di Ferro/Frontale entries with dagger in hand, and then longer range fencing entries and opening up the possibilities through the other plays of the dagger section. I’d add in the mandritto-cover-hook from below-turn to roverso side-mandritto chain, repeated striking on roverso side, interchanging between the two, and 1st Master 4th Scholar pass against the dagger, just to have a flow drill to find the other options in instead of just crashing all the time. Add in your knees, stomps, and groin kicks from the Largo plays and Abrazare. Then do all your striking emptyhand with the hammer fists and heel of the palm strike. One huckuva small system.
This reads concerningly like an arcane guide on how to either kill a demon or cause your enemies to bleed from every orifice through reference to ancient texts and masters
(A table of contents will be available at the end of the series. In the meantime, you can find previous installments in the space building tag and other original posts in the posts by pear tag.)
Part Six: Types of Planets
I wish I could say what we’re going to talk about next is a complete and perfect list of the types of planets that could form in your created systems. Unfortunately, we just don’t know enough about our galaxy and universe to be able to say that for certain. What I can say is that this is our current best guess.
As I said in Part Four, planets form out of the spinning cloud of debris around the star. As they pick up whatever happens to be in their path, they gain mass, and spin together into planets with specific elements creating their cores. From what we’ve observed so far, every planet has some kind of highly dense core, even the gas giants who boast thick gaseous envelopes around their cores. There’s a correlation between a planet’s mass and radius that helps us determine what a planet is most likely to be composed of. Check it out:
R in the above graph means radius, as measured in Earth’s radius, and M is a planet’s mass, as measured by Earth’s mass. The solid lines note homogeneous planets, that is, those that are comprised of a single material: Hydrogen, water, silicates, and iron. The dotted lines denote planets formed from mixes of materials, like Jupiter and Saturn as mixed hydrogen and helium planets, and water worlds composed mostly of water with silicates and iron in various percentages. These types of planets are not considered capable of sustaining life.
One chief characteristic of a habitable planet is that they’re thought to be considered “terrestrial,” and in order to be terrestrial, a planet has to be considered rocky and composed mostly of carbon, silicate, and/or metals. Those planets are marked on the above graph using the red-orange and green colored lines, varying from pure silicate worlds, Earth-like silicate-dominant worlds with iron cores, planets with silicate mantles and more massive iron cores, and those comprised of a pure iron core.
Take a look at at it another way:
These types of planets are classified by composition as:
Gas giants (or gas dwarfs, depending on their mass) – planets composed primarily of hydrogen and helium. Includes Jupiter and Saturn.
Eccentric Jupiters are gas giants with orbits that are not circular. All non-circular orbits are considered “eccentric” and can either be elliptical, parabolic, or hyperbolic
Hot Jupiters are one variety of gas giant that orbits close to the planet’s sun, causing the surface to be very high. These are close enough that their gases are being burned off, leaving a trail of material in their wake. Because of the required circumstances of forming a gas giant, they’re thought to have formed away from the star and migrated inward.
Hot Saturns are also called puffy planets, with densities similar or lower than Saturn but with an extra large radius.
Hot Neptunes are similar to the concept of Hot Jupiters in that they’re similar in mass to Neptune and Uranus and orbit close to their star.
Once these migrated gas giants–the Hot planets–have had their gaseous atmospheres stripped, their cores remain and they become Chthonian planets.
Ice giants – planets composed of substances heavier than hydrogen and helium, including water, methane, and ammonia. Includes Neptune and Uranus.
Terrestrial planets – planets composed of carbon, silicate, and/or metals, including: carbon planets, silicate planets, and iron planets according to what they’re made of. Includes all the inner planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars.
The water planets mentioned in the above charts are considered a theoretical type of planet called an ocean planet. There’s also theoretical desert planets and lava planets depending on what their surfaces are comprised of.
Dwarf planets are a step below true “planet” in terms of labeling, and are characterized by the following: They orbit a sun, are not a moon, are nearly round in shape (which requires a certain level of mass), and, most importantly, have not cleared the debris from their orbit. Includes Pluto. (Of course, these days, dwarf planets orbiting our sun beyond Neptune are considered “plutoids,” but that’s just a nicety and wouldn’t apply to any dwarf planets outside our own solar system.)
Some other ways of classifying planets are names that apply specifically to our own solar system:
Exoplanets or extrasolar planets orbit other stars, but not our sun.
Extragalactic planets are outside the Milky Way.
Inferior planets orbit our sun within the Earth’s orbit.
Superior planets orbit out sun outside Earth’s orbit.
Inner planets orbit our sun within the asteroid belt.
Outer planets orbit our sun outside the asteroid belt.
Finally, you can also classify planets based on what they’re orbiting:
Circumbinary planets orbit two stars.
Double planets, or binary planets, are two planetary masses orbiting each other.
What drew my attention to this research is the section on Modern European martial arts analysis of strike location and frequency for example, this strike location chart for contemporary longsword:
I’m not sure where the author gets the source data for the contemporary weapon use – see the link for other weapon categories.
Edit: the dissertation includes a mention of the survey sent to various listed HEMA clubs and organisations.
For comparison, here are the strike locations and frequency for the casualties in the battle of Uppsala in 1520:
The original research is a 2011 dissertation by Johann Keller Wheelock Matzke; Armed and Educated (PDF)
Aliquid de Magis 