Some Thoughts on the Speculative Nature of Early Historical Combat

All right let's talk a bit about early historical combat. What I mean by early is before the time of the instructional manuscripts that describe specific techniques and often show them in drawn illustrations. So before that it is very speculative. Now we have some sources for example about viking combat, the old Icelandic sagas talk about fighting, they describe it in varying degrees of detail and you can draw some conclusions from that. It is tentative. Now some groups have come up with some pretty interesting martial art systems. They generally make clear that it is speculative. Hurst Week for example they do a lot of reconstruction but they clearly say it is speculative because the issue with these things is even if you come up with a martial art system around for example the Dane axe that works really well we don't know for sure if that's how they fought. Just because it works doesn't mean that's how they did it. There are always you know more options than one. There are some very plausible techniques in the sagas for example one of the things you have described is thrusting with the the horn of the axe blade into someone's throat which is yeah that's perfectly possible so that seems plausible. However there are also cases of what I would personally call Viking Hollywood where they clearly exaggerated just for the sake of storytelling. Especially also you have to keep in mind that people at the time didn't have this concept of objectivity that we have nowadays in the sciences and they weren't concerned about you know telling history you know as close to reality like as precisely you know exactly this is how it was. They always were you know quick to take liberties and you know make the story more interesting or leave out things that they didn't personally like there can be accurate accounts. It's not all you know make-believe and whatnot like for example the stories of you know the discovery of Vinland meaning North America by the Vikings that's we actually have archaeological evidence that shows that yes they were indeed there and a lot of the things they talk about in the sagas are indeed plausible. However there are also things like and this right here I'm going to read to you he kicked the bottom of the shield up into his mouth so hard that his face ripped open and his jaws fell down to his chest. Now that's just crazy there's no way I believe that this actually happened. If we have a shield like this we can generally assume that most of the time they didn't have a metal rim because there are few finds of metal rims which would be more likely to be preserved but there are many cases where you have the boss preserved but no metal rim so either they just covered in leather or rawhide or whatever or didn't cover it at all so to think that this would be driven into somebody's face hard enough to just split it in half that's just ludicrous and to generate that sort of force that would most likely break the shin of the person kicking the shield or the foot before that would actually happen so that seems very very unlikely to say the least. Now this one I definitely do not buy at all so there's one story where a fighter takes you know grabs the opponent by both shoulders and there's a rock behind him and he jumps backwards over the rock and then pulls the other guy down and splits him in half over the rock. No that's that's we're not made of paper mache I mean this is the kind of stuff that you would see on The Walking Dead you know just pulls him on the rock and then just his body just rips apart no no that's that's kind of absurd gore you would see in a horror movie and a cheap horror movie that is so I absolutely do not believe that. So aside from sagas and other written accounts what can we use if we want to come up with a speculative reconstruction of how they might have fought back then? Let me just point out that I'm absolutely not claiming to be an authority on this whatsoever. I've been practicing historical martial arts based on late medieval and renaissance manuals and we can speculate based on those for example sword and techniques are applicable to larger shields as well. Not all of them work the same way but you can assume that there might have been some carryover but it might also have been completely different because we're talking several hundred years in between here so a lot may have changed especially also considering that a buckler is quite a bit different than a shield. There has been the whole debate about whether a viking sword was used with a hammer grip or a handshake grip or if it were you know throwing it out like this and letting it slide down. If you were to use the hammer grip you would have to use more draw cuts so closer to the body which also makes sense you know both can be effective if you're doing it well but we don't really know and in fact also one thing I should point out as well there is really no reason to assume that everybody thought the same way you know even if you go by just vikings in particular there's no guarantee that they all had the same style. In fact I would say it's quite likely that there were different fighting styles might it might have been regional differences there may have been personal differences so you know different people may have preferred different things in fact it's possible that people back then even debated which grip is better even when trying to exclude impractical things again we don't know for sure for example a really bad thing to do is either in a thrust or a cut is this kind of broken wrist position where you overextend the wrist and that takes quite a toll on the tendons you can injure yourself very easily and it's not as efficient biomechanically so you can say that they definitely didn't do that they didn't want to mess up their wrists and everything but do you know for sure not really people did all kinds of counterproductive things back then there were very dubious quote-unquote medical practices that did more harm than good that you know people just weren't aware of now that's not to say that people were stupid not at all they just had limited knowledge and especially their anatomical knowledge was very often limited so things like this they might not necessarily have been aware of and this kind of thing is not that easy to figure out i mean if if you don't immediately get wrist pain as soon as you do a couple of those swings and most likely you won't if the problem is going to show up later and when it does then it's hard to figure out why you know what is this connected to so those are things to keep in mind to give you another example how to hold the shield you can either hold it flat in front of yourself or you can hold it angled or some variation thereof with sword and buckler both versions do exist for particular techniques and you can think about so what are the implications of that now if you're if you're thinking warriors in a shield wall obviously it's going to be flat in front of themselves because the shields all overlap one another there's one here one there so obviously you have to hold it in front of you like this then and then that means you have to strike over it in some way now this also has implications for how you hold the sword of course so it may very well make sense to use the hammer grip in this case and indeed do you know fairly short strokes like this because that way if you look here my hand actually stays behind the shield most of the time as opposed to if i wanted to get maximum reach and just you know throw it out like this now the entire arm is past the shield so that seems very exposed now again they might have done it i don't think it's particularly likely it seems more likely that they would try to you know stay behind the shield as much as possible and not expose the hand too much that also applies to holding the shield like this in a one-on-one duel so this way i can actually throw a cut like this while staying with my arm behind my shield so i don't get my arm cut off in the some things are equally plausible for instance when you hold the shield like this what's mainly exposed is the legs so the legs would be a prime target we also see that in archaeological evidence a lot of skeletons with cuts to the leg bones and so the question now is how do you defend against the cut to your legs you can either move the shield down you know just move your arm down which would be a really bad idea because then you're extremely exposed so they could feign to the leg and then cut to your upper body or you can move your entire body down thereby covering your your leg and not having to expose your upper body as much or you could just take a step back what we call a leg void so that way your legs out of the way no risk they could have done all three of these they could have preferred one of the three hard to say if we want to speculate about fighting with a dane axe we could look at the later medieval pole axe manuscripts but the problem is those are most likely different because that's fighting in full plate armor which is substantially different than fighting in just clothing or mail and we don't even know how they swung them i mean it may seem simple it's an axe you just swing and hit somebody but there's a lot of variables for example how do you hold it do you want more control so your hands are further apart so there's not as much power but more control do you want to hold it further down so you have one hell of a swing but are not as agile and even which hand generates the power and do you swing with with the main hand like this and kind of a chopping motion or do you swing with the offhand like this which can generate a lot more power but there's there's so many questions we have absolutely no idea and once again different people may have done it differently i suppose some weapons are easier to reconstruct than others the spear for example is one of the simplest weapons now don't get me wrong you can get extremely complex and advanced in spear techniques but it is a pointy stick so the simplest thing you can do is thrust you know feint feint high thrust low feint low thrust high etc and quarter staff techniques are perfectly applicable and in that case the basics remain the same so with the quarter staff in the manuals they do show a lot of thrusts and you can use that with a spear just fine and many of the techniques with a quarter staff absolutely apply for example you know pushing the opponent's spear aside or knocking it aside and then you know keeping the opponent's spear or quarter staff bound and thrusting this in fact even has some similarities to rapier fencing oddly enough so there's a lot of questions about it my personal point of view is it's very interesting to try to speculate about fighting methods and you can absolutely come up with techniques and systems that work that are effective and plausible and that are you know are likely to have been used in one way or another as long as you don't claim that yeah you know exactly how they did it and then this must be it and how do you know we just always have to keep in mind that it is just our modern interpretation the same applies to the later manuscripts as well we never 100 percent know if this is exactly how they did it it is always interpretation but you know the further back in time you go the more speculative it becomes when we get to you know celts for example this gets really murky but anyway just want to ramble a little bit about that so hope you enjoyed the video thanks for watching