The Weekly Warfare   Musings martial from across the SCA

At the Torchlight Pas at War of the Wings, Grettir challenged me to single sword, five counted blows at the barrier.  Grettir grabbed his hand-and-a-half, I picked up the basket-hilted broadsword I was borrowing, and we headed out to the field.  Lay on was called, and I’d landed five within two seconds.  Onside/offside/onside/offside/onside, faster than […]

On any given day ~100 spam messages get posted to this thing.  Wordpress does a great job of dumping them straight to the Spam or the Pending Approval folders.  For the Pending Approval messages, I end up going through and looking at each one before deleting it at some point.  Some of them make me […]

How do you interpret and incorporate the mental aspects of fighting?  How conscious are you of reading opponents’ body language, selling a bait or a feint, working through your decision tree before getting to measure, etc.?  How has that aspect of your fight developed over time?   (I’ve got an answer in the cooker, but […]

To the main point: would you be willing to start a discussion topic on the pitfalls of excessive competitiveness? I admire your self-awareness of your problems with pride and anger, as mentioned in prior postings. It sounds like you had a really bad reaction to the rules of the rapier battle. I admire your wisdom […]

David Packer, of Box Wrestle Fence, posted a brief overview of some additional leg strengthening/conditioning exercises that target particular needs of fencer legs.  Worth a read! Bounce A Little Higher: Moving Past The Squat  

Yeah, you should do the… crap… out of that.   (This will be the least annoying of my pokings and proddings on the matter)   -shiny new Atlantian Deputy Kingdom Minister of Arts and Sciences for HMA

From Dante So, a while back (on the Armour Archive) a duke from another kingdom, in regards to his knighthood standard, remarked that consistently winning 80% of your fights in all tournaments that you enter was a significant accomplishment because not many people can manage that. I started paying attention to how I do (and […]

Almost all the fencing instruction I have received (and certainly all I have given) has been either technical or tactical in nature. Technique addresses the physics of fencing—the footwork, the blade angles, the body mechanics, etc, while tactics concern the broader considerations of the fight—forming a counterguard, gaining the blade, setting up an attack, adapting […]

Ruairc Ua Aedh, or however it is his people choose to call themselves, has talked about “the one percent” left over after one accounted for the “why” and “how” of swordplay. He called it many things. The “headspace” or the “mental game.” As he put it, “ethereal” and a “nebulous arcane cluster of concepts.” The […]

WE HAZ DOMAIN NAME! Also, we need header art. And contributors.   THIS is why it hasn’t been “weekly” of late.