Swords with wavy or 'flamberge' blades - Brief overview

Hey folks, Matt Easton here, scholar gladiator. So let's just talk a little bit about wavy bladed weapons or flamboyant weapons, as some people will call them. And, you know, I've been asked to talk about these types of blades since basically since I started my channel. And this isn't the video you've been waiting for. I'm sorry to rain on your parade or whatever, but I will do a big video like that. This is actually kind of practice for me to put some little images on one of my videos, which is something I'm learning to do. Yes, I am learning to kind of edit. I'm never going to be an edit heavy channel. Don't worry. It's really funny because so many people go, Matt, you need to learn how to edit or you need to do more editing on your videos. And then other people go, don't bother about editing. It's the content that's important. And so I just kind of go with the easy option, which is the latter. But back to wavy bladed weapons. And I have one behind me here. So this is a Morrow Criss, a really nice weapon that I love. And again, it's one of those things I bought with the intention of probably putting on my website link below to sell and then was like, man, this is really nice. I'm keeping this. It doesn't mean I'll keep it forever, but I'm certainly keeping it for now. There are many weapons that I don't want to collect. Small swords are a good example of that. But I like having one or two of them around and it's very useful for videos as I'm demonstrating here. Now, curvy blades or sorry, wavy blades rather really what I want to say in this video and a chance to use some pictures, which are going to appear is to say that many, many cultures around the world have used wavy blades. This is one of the most famous types, the large Morrow Criss sword. But there are equally the smaller Crisses, the dagger sized versions. So they tend to come from places like Malaysia and Java and Indonesia. And so we find these wavy blades quite a lot in Southeast Asia on both large Crisses and the smaller dagger sized Crisses. But equally famously, we find them in Europe as well. We find them on so-called flamberge great swords or two handed swords. And, you know, why do we find them on those specific types of swords? Well, that's a good question. It could be because they're relatively slow moving weapons and easier to grab or command, or it could be because it's something to do with their function against pole weapons, or it could be some other feature related to their use. That's not really no one's got a good answer to that question as far as I know. But not only do you find it on these big two handed swords, you also find it on some one handed swords as well, and sometimes even rapiers. But another place you find it is on Indian weapons, Indo-Persian weapons, and you find wavy bladed swords and knives from India and the Middle East to some extent as well. So, and there's also kind of related to these, there's not necessarily where the entire blade is wavy, but if it's only a single edged blade, what you sometimes get is a wavy front cutting edge, which obviously functionally is the same thing, but you just don't have two edges, you've got one edge. You also find saw edges on some Indian swords, Indo-Persian swords, talwars and stuff like this. And sometimes you find it on Middle Eastern shamshirs as well. And that's slightly different, I would say. It might be a related function, but wavy blades don't quite perform in the same way as a saw blade. A saw blade is quite a specific thing, I'm not going to talk about that here. So really just to say that you do find wavy bladed weapons, or wavy bladed bladed weapons of dagger size, short sword size, and right the way up to massive two-hander size all over the world, in Europe, India, Southeast Asia, and you know, you can find sort of less frequent examples in places like China as well. So there we go. As for what they're for and what they do, I would not argue that they're necessarily all for the same thing. So I think a lot of people want me to say, why would you have a wavy blade over a straight blade? And I think there isn't one answer to that question, because I think that the reason you have a wavy blade in the Philippines, for example, in the 19th century, may not be the same reason you have a wavy blade in France or Italy in the 16th century, for example. They may be different, or they may be the same, or they may be overlapping reasons, reasoning for why you have a wavy blade. And is it sometimes just to show off and just because something looks good? Undoubtedly, yes, that's sometimes the reason that things are designed the way they are. They're not always for purely practical and beneficial in terms of their use reasons, but sometimes they are. Anyway, so I'm going to finish up there. I hope that my light bit of editing practice worked and you got some interesting images there, and I'll see you again soon. Cheers folks! Thank you for watching, please subscribe and feel free to follow us on Facebook.