Re: (TFT) Is a sweeping blow physically cutting thru your target?

["Neil Gilmore" <raito@raito.com>]

> As someone who has studied the subject of ancient and mediaeval swords for
> many years, I can tell you that even Celtic swords could be of very high
> quality, as well as Roman, Norse, and any early Mediaeval sword you care
to
> name.

Duh. I had the chance recently to attend a gathering of smiths at Albion
Armourers, where we conversed on just this sort of thing. Peter Johnsson (a
smith from Sweden) put it best when he said that the smiths of that time,
even early, had hundreds of years of forging tradition behind them. Add to
that that the sword was the instrument by which not only wars were won, but
the personal safety of the most important people, and it's pretty crazy to
assume that any aspect of the sword was not done deliberately, and to the
highest possible quality.

And handling a thousand year old piece from the Oakeshott collection was
pretty cool, too...

> Now, some pattern welded Migration Era and early Viking Age swords tended
to
> have soft cores - HOWEVER the cutting edges were very, very good steel and
> quite capable of taking and holding a very sharp edge. They might take a
> set, but not necessarily a severe one. And they were eminently capable of
> terrible shearing blows. One detailed account describes a sword blow that
> sheared a man from the shoulder down to the waist (to which the slayer
> remarked "Verily, this man has no bones!" - now THERE is a triple damage
hit
> if I ever saw one...). For a discussion of pattern welding there are a
> number of sources: any of Prof. Hrisoulas' books on blade making,
> Davidsson's "Sword in Anglo Saxon England" and Pierce/Oakeshott's "Swords
of
> the Viking Age" among others.

I'm not so sure that I'd recommend either Hrisoulas or Davidsson for
discussions of period technique. While Hrisoulas is obviously a fine smith,
his books do tend to concentrate on the modern. And while I very much like
"Sword in Anglo Saxon England", it's more about the cultural impact of the
sword, with the pattern welding stuff just a snippet way in the back.
There's a pertty good book in German on the migration-era stuff, but I don't
have it here at work.

On the other hand, it always amuses me to hear both discussion on how
European pattern-welding and Japanese tamagahane were done to increase the
strength of the blade. Well, they were, but only indirectly. The problem was
that both sides had rather poor, heterongenous materials. Bog iron isn't the
best stuff, nor is iron-bearing sand. By pattern-welding, and doing tatara
smelts followed by folding, the purpose was to create as homogenous a
material as possible. You can bet money that if one of those old smiths had
access to even today's plain carbon steels, he'd jump at the chance to use
it. The techniques used were attempts to make the best blade possible out of
relatively poor materials.

Remember that a good part of the Industrial Revolution was based on
metal-cutting machine tools, and that before carbide tools they were made of
steel.

But the weapon is only half of the equation. Look at Flos Duellatorum of
Fiore De Liberi, wherein Fiore says that swords are useless for cutting
against armor. It's true that armor at that time was plate, but again
there's hundreds of years of tradition there. It seems to me that (looking
over the manuals I've seen), that there just weren't techniques out there
designed to cleave all the way through the human body. It's a waste of
energy to do more than kill.

Then again, it >is< a fantasy game.

Neil Gilmore
raito@raito.com
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