Medieval Swords - The Arbiter Longsword
The sharpness of European blades does vary somewhat. In point of fact you don’t even need a sharp edge to do tremendous amounts of damage with a sword. All of the force that goes into the striking of a blow is concentrated into a very small surface area. The natural inclination for softer materials is to be spread apart by the thin flatchett of steel.
Having said that it appears that many, if not most, European swords were kept quite sharp. Some originals, like their Oriental counterparts, are still exceedingly sharp and are easily capable of shaving hair, slicing paper, etc. Far be it for me to dispute my esteemed colleague Warty, but the overwhelming majority of European sword blades were in fact sharp from tip to tang. Comparatively few have ricassos or blunted areas near the guard.
The technique of “half-swording” or grabbing the blade with one hand is a highly specialized maneuver. By that I mean that it has very limited applications. There seems to be a current vogue amongst some students of western martial arts (wma) to sort of promote this technique in more of a multi-purpose light. In my opinion this is unwise. From my own 18+ years of practical experience with live steel combat training, half-swording does have a time and a place but they are few and far between. Half-swording also seems to have been utilized mostly by armored warriors.
The “technique” of grasping the blade with both hands and swinging it as a club, apart from a very limited possibility of having some shock value is pure ignorance in my opinion. Why grab your weapon by the offensive end and swing it like an awkward club, when you simply have to hold onto the part that was designed to be held and swing at your opponent with the sharp end? Your opponent only needs to catch or grab onto the hilt in some manner and pull the sword out of your hands. To paraphrase what I believe Athos said to Porthos “Only Porthos would be so intelligent as to devise a means to disarm himself…”
Only the largest swords, generally two-handers, were designed with large ricassos for half-swording. Often this large ricasso was teamed with a pair of hook-shaped projections to act as a sort of secondary guard for the hands when half-swording.
English Longsword
Remembering that a European sword is much like a sharpened flat spring, the majority of parrying and blocking would have been done with the flat of the blade and the two-thirds nearest the tip. Edge on edge contact, while sometimes unavoidable, is not the desired manner. Besides screwing up your edge, it is also easier to break a blade in this fashion. While that may seem to be a contradiction, it is not. Even though the width of the blade is greater than the thickness, the manner in which energy is transferred from one sword to the other and how the recipient of that energy manipulates it makes all the difference. Blocking with the edge submits the blade to a tremendous amount of shock to a very small area and the manipulation of that energy is confined to a rather small portion of the blade. Blocking a blow with the width of the blade, despite it being very thin, allows the energy to transfer more readily up and down the length of the blade therefore diffusing the energy in a more efficient manner and minimizing damage to the blade.
