Geek chic.

Ah, and what does the well-dressed geek wear for a late Saturday lunch at the Storm Crow?

NASA cap - check.

Forbidden Planet t-shirt - check.

Academie Duello longsword apprentice green cord - check.

Book Nerd pin - check.

Table for two, please...

- Sid

The Book of the Sword, Part Five: Green Cord.

Fortified by some homework with the Duello TV longsword channel, and a solid re-read of some classic Robert E. Howard Conan the Barbarian stories, I headed off to my final Academie Duello longsword class on Thursday night.

The reason behind my prep work?  Very simple: although there's no test to establish competency at the end of the course, we were scheduled to spend the final class proving our skills in a practical fashion by dueling with each other and the students from the companion Introduction to Rapier course which has been running at the same time as our class for the last four weeks.  When our instructor Miguel had mentioned at our previous class that we'd be doing this, I was a bit apprehensive: my impression of the relative strengths of the two weapons led me to expect that rapier users would butcher us with speed and reach.

To my surprise, this turned out not to be the case.  The leverage provided by the two-handed longsword grip repeatedly allowed me to push aside the rapier and go inside the reach of the blade for a cut or an oblique thrust.  It also turned out that I may in fact have some minor skill in the area of swordplay, to the point where one of my fellow longsword classmates actually said, "Wow, you're good at this!"  I found that I was repeatedly outscoring my opponents by two or three to one, whether it was against longsword or rapier.*

At the end of the evening, there was a brief graduation ceremony,where we were presented with our Green apprenticeship cord by our instructors.  The head of the school, Devon Boorman, was in attendance, and cheerfully informed us that we now knew more about swordplay than 99.9 percent of the rest of the world - although they're doing their best to change that percentage, one student at a time.

Although Academie Duello offers a comprehensive list of options for people wishing to move forward in their study of the sword and achieve further mastery, I don't plan to continue - I'm happy to have received my green cord and become part of that .1% of the global population.

That being said, if you have any interest in trying something a little bit different, or have some curiousity about swordplay after seven seasons of Game of Thrones, I would unhesitatingly recommend an Academie Duello class.  The instructors and staff are uniformly friendly, knowledgeable and helpful, I found both the historical and practical information to be interesting, and hey, you get to fight with swords.

Arte, Ardore, Onore!

- Sid

* To be honest, I can't attach too much significance to this.  It's a bit like being the best walker out of a group of one-year olds.  It's an achievement of sorts, but Usain Bolt certainly isn't going to view me as a threat.

The Book of the Sword, Part Four: Lost in Translation

 

To end our third week of longsword training at Academie Duello, we spent a class working with sidesword and buckler. The sidesword was a successor to the medieval arming sword, which was a relatively short one-handed weapon worn by knights when out of armour, and marked the introduction of a more elaborate knuckle guard than the simple crossbar of the arming sword, following the Germanic habit of hooking one finger over the crossguard for additional control.  The knuckle guard provides protection for the exposed finger, and presages the development of the more elaborate guards that characterize the rapier.

The sidesword was also more of an everyday weapon than longsword or poleaxe.  Its shorter length allowed it to be a literal side weapon that could be worn during everyday activities.  Similarly, the buckler is a shield that's small enough to be hooked onto your scabbard beside the sword, rather than the full sized shield that would be used in actual warfare. (The term "swashbuckler"comes from bravos rattling their bucklers against their swords in order to announce themselves as they swaggered through the streets.)  Held at arm's length, the buckler is both a defensive and offensive weapon, used to block attacks as well as deliver blows when corps-à-corps.

My expectation for sword and buckler was that the buckler would be held in front as a defensive lead, with the sword extended beside it to allow for the two to be used together or independently, much as shown in the illustration below - although from perhaps a bit further away than these two gentlemen.  To my astonishment, we are instructed to hold the sword straight up over our heads as our starting position.  It seems a ridiculous stance for fighting, especially with a weapon that can thrust as well as cut, but Miguel reassures us that this is the approved technique as taken from historical documents.

 

Regardless, I'm sceptical.  Miguel pointed out in one of the earlier sessions that one of the challenges in reviving the art of swordplay is that there's no continuity of practise - swordplay becomes less and less common over time, finally falling entirely out of use as gunpowder takes over the battlefield.  Because of this historical break, modern scholars are forced to rely on a relatively small library of instructional texts in order to rediscover the techniques.*

Most of what we've been taught for longsword is taken from the Flos Duellatorum (Flower of Battle) a 14th century text by Fiore die Liberi, an Italian fencing master.  Other salles d'armes follow equivalent German texts, and there's enough similarity - and variation - to indicate a continuum of technique, albeit with a slightly different vocabulary and bias.

To my mind, the things that we've learned for longsword make sense.  There are standard defensive stances that involve short and long guards (posta breve and posta longa) in which the sword is extended directly in front of the body with the point aimed at your opponent's face, as opposed to the posta di donna or di fenestra, which positions the sword behind either shoulder for cutting or thrusting attacks - these positions are not unlike the way you'd stand if you were at bat in baseball, which seems a logical starting position for a longsword cut.

The hand-over-head sidesword starting guard seems to be a long way - literally - from a good place to attack or defend, and I was a little tempted to take a completely different stance during practice, although that would seem to defeat the purpose of taking instruction. Based on my own experience with instructional material and training, a small part of me wonders if the person who wrote the description that we're following just didn't have had a lot of experience actually fighting people - the old "those who can, do" problem.

- Sid

* If you've seen The Princess Bride, you're familiar with some of the authorities of classic swordplay.  During the duel between Inigo Montoya and the Dread Pirate Roberts, they discuss the various techniques for fighting under those conditions as per Bonetti, Capo Ferro, Agrippa, and Thibault - actual fencing masters from the Renaissance.

The Book of the Sword, Part Three: Flos Duellatorum

Behold the well-dressed student of arms - longsword, gorget for neck
protection, and souvenir Trinity College t-shirt from Dublin.
Fencing masks are added for actual face-to-face practice.

In last night's longsword session, we began for the first time to link together the various attacks and defenses as they would be used in actual single combat through a series of exercises that progressed from simply attacking a static opponent, to having the opponent dodge, to having the opponent defend themselves. It's the also the first time we've been given complete freedom in choosing our attacks and defenses, and it was interesting to see how people approached the opportunity.

Aaron, our substitute trainer for the class, compared this sort of combat to chess, where victory is based on the ability to plan several moves ahead.  I've already starting thinking in those terms, based on the simple attack/defend exchanges that we've had as part of our practice. 

If I have one complaint about the training, it's that there hasn't really been enough repetition to embed the full range of moves into muscle memory.  Out of the various cuts, thrusts and guards that we've learned, I've retained between a half and a third of them, and some additional time spent just doing military-style repetitive drill for each move would have helped me quite a bit.

However, I also realize that eight hours of training sessions isn't a lot of time to cover a wide range of weapons and techniques, and as such, some personal practise may be in order.  To help with this, Academie Duello also has a video subscription service called Duello TV, which offers a wide range of instructional videos through a variety of subscription-based and course pack purchasing options.

 

Conveniently, the Longsword Fundamentals curriculum is available for free on DuelloTV after you register, but I would still recommend that any interested parties sign up for an actual in-person class.  The videos will certainly show you how it's done without any investment of money, but having a knowledgeable instructor correcting your stance or answering questions is invaluable - not to mention a good supply of longswords, appropriate protective gear, and someone else to poke your sword at.

- Sid

The Book of the Sword, Part Two: Weapons of War.

 

This week marked the half-way point in my Academie Duello Introduction to Longsword course, and I'm please to say that I've begun to enjoy the classes more now that we've settled in.
 
Miguel, our instructor, has done an excellent job of familiarizing us with the various longsword techniques, and my fellow students have been quite accommodating when we've been practising as a group of three. The school also has some standard methods of rotating partners so that people get to practise with a variety of opponents.

After three sessions on longsword technique, we spent our last class working with polearms - which, interestingly, are considered to be superior to a sword in a combat situation.  Our instructor informed us that every time they've matched polearm against longsword, the polearm has been the clear winner, based on leverage and flexibility in attack and defense.  He compared a polearm to a rifle and a sword to a pistol in terms of their relative authority on the historical battlefield.

In case you're not a student of edged weapons, the term polearm is generic, covering a wide range of offensive options attached to the end of a pole, with the simplest of polearms being the spear.  More elaborate weapons are the glaive (sword on a stick), poleaxe (axe on a stick), and bardiche, which falls somewhere in between glaive and poleaxe with its extended curved blade (third from the left in the above photo).  Our exercises tonight were done with halberds, a combination axe blade with a spear point on the end and a hammer on the reverse.

We were cautioned to use extra care when practising against an opponent, even with our rubber-tipped mockups.  As Miguel pointed out, whereas a sword can be blunted and capped, a wooden pole is perfectly capable of doing damage all on its own.

The school is very aware of the potential for harm during practise, and as such everything is done at about a quarter of normal speed.  This can be a challenge to maintain, and also requires a certain amount of what Miguel refers to as "honesty" during the sparring process.

 If I'm lunging at someone's face and they move to the side as the start of a parry that will control my blade and allow them to lunge over top of it into my face, I actually have lots of time to redirect my sword to their new location.  However, in an actual fight, I'd be committed to my lunge, and as an honest opponent, I need to maintain that commitment in the same manner.  However, there are some moves, such as defensively snapping a lunge out of line, that simply can't be done slowly.  As I once read in a novel set on a glacial planet where the local wildlife even hunted at a snail's pace in order to preserve energy, regardless of how slow you're moving, there's only one speed for a jump.

- Sid

 

The Book of the Sword, Part One: Forte versus debole.

 

Last night I attended my first longsword class at Academie Duello, and found it to be a mixed experience, to be honest.

I've signed up for eight evening classes, one hour every Tuesday and Thursday evenings for the month of March, which I planned as a substitute for my normal visits to the gym on those nights. As requested, I arrived a bit early for the class in order to receive a quick orientation on the simple student login process and the setup of the studio. The exercise space is divided into larger and smaller practice floors by sword and fencing mask storage racks, with a small retail area near the front and a museum display along one wall.

While I was waiting for our session to start, I watched the students in a rapier class dueling each other, and I was surprised to see that muscle doesn't seem to play a large part in the duels. I would expect the duelists to forcefully push their opponent's blade out of line to either block an attack or to create an opening, but that doesn't seem to be happening.

I mentioned this to our instructor Miguel, who pointed out that it doesn't take a lot of effort to hurt someone with a sharpened steel weapon - apparently it only takes four pounds of pressure to pierce the skin. I can't argue with that, but I still feel that muscle has to have some application in the process.

The evening begins with a lesson on our weapon of choice. The longswords that we're using are in the style from the 14th to 16th century, about 40 inches long, with a 30 inch blade length and a simple crossguard. They're designed to be used with a two-handed grip, with the left hand on the pommel of the sword, rather than snug to the right hand on the hilt, in order to provide leverage and control. The school follows the Italianate model of swordplay, and as such all the terminology is Italian - the stronger part of the blade is the forte, or strong, the part near the point is the weak, the debole.

It's interesting to learn the techniques and the language used to describe them. There's a kind of poetry to the names of the moves: posta di donna, "the woman's guard";  the "boar's tooth" or dente di zenghiaro; porta di ferro, the "iron door" and so on, and watching the instructor do demonstrations shows a nuanced and graceful style.

It's a bit more challenging to try the exercises in person - not so much due to the complexity of the moves, but simply because it's extremely difficult not to mirror the instructor and do everything backwards. I also recognize that these are the building blocks of a martial art - stances, strikes, and blocks - but right now they're just disconnected fragments, which is a bit confusing. It may help when we go further down the path of blending the moves.

However, it's frustrating as well. By its very nature, fighting with swords requires an opponent, and, sadly, once again I'm the odd man out at the party, as with my ballroom dance classes many years ago in Toronto. I'm in a class of five with two couples, both of whom had one partner buy the sessions as a gift for the other.* The instructor had me working with one of the couples as a trio last night, but I feel more than a little self-conscious about interfering in their shared experience.

It's also not really a substitute for gym workouts, at least at this level - the only time I breath heavily is when I run to catch the Number 7 bus for my trip home.

However, early days, and I'm certainly not going to drop out of the class, but I'm hoping to feel a little less like a fifth wheel as we move forward. That being said, if I had one piece of advice for someone taking the course, I'd recommend that they go with a sparring partner.

- Sid

* I texted my wife Karli to confess that I had never thought to invite her, and she was kind enough to reply that it had never occurred to her that she might want to attend.