Swords held in the reverse or icepick grip in medieval history

Hi folks, Matt Easton here. So in one of my recent videos I uploaded about daggers held in the ice pit grip, a number of people actually asked me is there any evidence for swords being held like this and the short answer is yes there is. There is evidence in the form of artwork, medieval and renaissance artwork, actually showing swords being held point down. So we all know how a long sword for example is conventionally held like that, obviously with your dominant hand at the top of the grip and your non-dominant hand at the bottom of the grip, a left-hander would therefore be that way around. But what is interesting is that we do see in artwork of the period occasionally swords held completely upside down like this, we see one-handed swords held like giant daggers, we see long swords held the other way around and we also see in some treatises and we don't really necessarily know whether this is intentional or not, we sometimes see hands reversed, most usually the back hand like this okay, but very occasionally you even see the front hand reversed. Now I should state straight up I haven't really studied this topic very much myself, I'm really aware of it thanks primarily to the researchers of Matt Gallus. Matt Gallus has been researching HEMA sources since the 1980s and potentially even before that in fact, so he is kind of one of the HEMA godfathers. So props to Matt Gallus, he's someone who anybody who's interested in HEMA or practicing HEMA should have heard of. He in fact did some of the earliest research work on the German longsword material for example in early translations and he's been pulling together a huge amount of body of material covering every aspect of historical European martial arts and one of the things that he's noted is the great number of European medieval sources that actually show swords held the wrong way around. Now what is worth mentioning is that in movies and TV shows usually featuring ninjas or people using Japanese type swords, sometimes Chinese swords, sometimes Filipino weapons, they're usually used backwards to slash and in fact it's even shown in certain versions of Star Wars, Clone Wars and stuff like that. People using the sword held backwards to slash with and in actual fact as far as we can tell in the European sources it's pretty much always exclusively used as a thrusting device. Now one instance where I definitely know that this grip is used on a sword is in Fury Delivery which is the main longsword source I teach from and it's actually used for throwing. So in that instance we definitely know it's the point being used because he throws it like a spear and in fact I have uploaded a little video I shot in my garden once of me throwing a sword at a target like this. It's not particularly difficult, you can't throw it as far as you can throw a spear in general but at short range it's very very powerful and if you want to throw a sword at someone for some reason then you certainly can do it. If you can throw a spear you can throw a long sword and it is slightly easier with a longsword because of the way it's balanced with a fairly long grip as well. However it is also shown as a stabbing thing done from horseback and I know Matt Gallus actually found a number of sources which show people on horseback holding the swords upside down stabbing people who are on the ground or on foot at least beneath them in this fashion. Equally the longsword sources particularly some of the German sources do show hands turned around in various strange positions. Some of these we sort of understand or some people have their interpretations of those but some of them are pretty much open to debate and we don't fully understand. Generally speaking this is a fairly unusual thing so I'm not going to witter on for ages because I don't know a huge amount about the topic but simply to say that one-handed and two-handed medieval swords are shown in medieval artwork both non-technical that is non-fencing treatise artwork and technical that is fencing treatise artwork are shown with one or other or both of the hands reversed and therefore the sword essentially held upside down at various points for various reasons. However we don't know an awful lot about the topic fundamentally because it's not something that's dealt with in great depth in the fencing treatises so hence I haven't really spoken much about it in the past because there's not a huge amount at the moment that we can say about it. There we go guys, cheers!