If you are going to be swinging swords around in your backyard (and especially chopping into things) I highly recommend you put together some makeshift armor for your arms/torso/front of your legs and wear a helmet and face protection as well. Especially with heavy swords, things tend to bounce back or act strange occassionally and it’s always best to make sure you have some protection. Even just some cardboard would be better than nothing.
Source: Lots of swinging a sword around, and teaching people how to. I was captain of the fencing team in college and branched out into lots of sowrds/martial arts like Kendo, Mensur, etc. I also, unfortuantely, was in a real sword fight once (well, machetes, which is kind of a sword).
Yes, ElGuapo, we’re going to need some details on that one…
Thanks for the advice though! I don’t imagine I’ll be chopping lumber or slicing open defenseless bottles of water very often or anything, but it’s more the ownership of a good blade that appeals to me, one where I could engage in that activity, but generally do not.
Go outside and start looking around for a stone with a sword in it. There really is no other way to acquire one. At least one that doesn’t make you look like a poser.
So in 2001 I went to Nepal to hike to the base camp of Mt. Everest/climb Kala Patar/possibly Pumori, weather and my fitness level permitting. While I was there I made friends with some Nepalese and coincidentally also learned that some Maoists (a rebel group that was sporadically attacking the Nepalese government at the time … they’ve since taken over the country) was threatening the uncle of my Sherpa in a small town called Namche Baazar. So along with my Sherpa’s cousin (he wasn’t actual a Sherpa, he was Muslim, but he was my climbing guide so I called him my Sherpa) and some other guys, we confronted a group of Maoists that were crossing a bridge that were on the way to threaten his uncle. Short story, I ended up crossing machetes with one of them and fought off another one with a large piece of rebar after he caved in my thigh. This is part of a larger adventure I had in Nepal that is the reason I’m trying to start writing, because I figure I’m never going to get this story down on paper if I don’t write it out. I actually had a kukri knife as well but ended up not using it other than to wave it about menacingly in order to prevent getting flanked. So there is my swordfighting story. I guess I kind of fought in the Nepalese civil war, though not for the government. Ok, back to work.
God yes, anywhere in the world you can get into these types of situations. PNG is often as lawless and dangerous as your Nepal adventure, but i’ve also had to protect myself in random situations in Egypt and Indonesia before. The world is a very interesting place.
…after he caved in my thigh.
I really hope that wasn’t as nasty as it sounds! getting good, prompt medical care in far flung places IS the main cause of death or long term disability. And yes you should write these stories down, not everyone can have an adventure so reading about them can cure them of the wander-lust, and save them some trouble!
One of the most interesting things I saw in the British Museum recently was a reconstruction of the sword in the Anglo-Saxon hoard. Believe it or not, it’s some variant of folded steel too. When I was a kid, I thought the Japanese were the only ones who did it and it was what made katanas cool; turns out everyone did it, and from long, long ago too (see the Han sword reconstruction linked above - the pattern is incredibly refined).
The technique was “lost” to the West and Middle East roundabout the 1700s, obviously as swords started to fall into disuse as martial weapons. But prior to that, it seems like all the best killin’ cutlery in nearly every post-Iron Age culture was Valyrian Steel :)
Yeah, and even Medieval European steel swords could be very, very good–equivalent, in terms of metalurgy, to pretty much anything we could make today. Or, they could be absolute crap. The problem wasn’t knowledge, or even materials, but consistency and timing. They simply didn’t have the means to gauge temperature and time well enough to insure consistent quality. I mean, back then, these were not things to hang on the wall or learn as a hobby. They were pretty deadly serious about it.
Folding steel generally came about because of a lack of good steel. You hear about it with the Japanese so much because they simply didn’t have much of the stuff. European swords after a time were made of all good steel since they had access to so much of it. Basically they made the whole sword out of the stuff instead of just the edge. Early on they often used similar methods to the Japanese for things though.
While I believe that the best swords from Medieval Europe were probably better than most modern people assume, I have great difficulty believing that we couldn’t improve the technique if for some reason we had reason to begin producing swords in earnest again.
Well we pretty much have. A lot of modern swords are machined and would be superior to a historical weapon in pretty much every respect mostly because they’d be consistent in quality as well as able to be produced in a fraction of the time with no real losses.
Perhaps so; I was just going by the books I have on swords and medieval weaponry; I know very little about metallurgy I believe the stuff I read was referring primarily to the quality of hand-forged steel, not the ability of modern society as a whole to produce any sort of edged weapon using other technological methods. That is, in terms of a swordsmith making a sword by hand, the people six or seven hundred years ago were just as skilled if not more so than we are, as they had to do this stuff for real.
I’ve already been doing a lot of research on this, and all I have read is that machine-crafted swords are at least as good as hand forged, plus cheaper to purchase. You don’t get the marks on the blade where the hammer struck, of course, so if authenticity is a must, hand forged is the way to go - but no, I don’t believe I have read anything that says hand-forged swords are superior to machine forged.
Isn’t it mainly down to the quality of the steel, and that industrial processes are capable of producing the best possible quality?
i.e. there’s a range of possible industrial steels, and folded steel is better than most of them, but the best industrial is as good as or better than folded steel and has the same properties (something to do with crystals or something, long time since I read up about it).
