Aros said:
CJ_W said:
. . .It's obvious that you have never learned any type of sword fighting arts - I took up fencing for 3 years in college, which included the french foil (the small malleable sword you see when everyone tries to portray it in media)the Saber, and Spanish Rapier and Dagger(dual wielding style).
The guard its Pretty damn important(not important as footwork but still), ESPECIALLY in Spanish Rapier and dagger. Also, if you're really good you can use the guard to disarm your opponents.
I wish people on this site would stop talking out of their ass so much when they have no idea wtf they're talking about, seriously.
It would be worth mentioning that the viking shields is a major part of the fighting style. Let's be honest here for a sec, you don't know what I know and don't know, you assume, based on a post about a light saber. Here is why viking swords don't have guards:
dkhpqAGdZPc?t=20m24s
Can't access the video because at work, but I've been slowly looking through John Clements' self-published
Medieval Swordsmanship - he seems reasonably credible on the subject, look him up via ARMA.
His basic take on quillons (or guards if you will) seems to be that they weren't primarily meant to protect the hand from incoming sword strikes. If you got into genuine, intent-to-kill blade combat with the longsword, your hand for the most part
wasn't in any real danger of getting hit by virtue of its position throughout a swing - long swords were intended much more towards larger slicing or thrusting maneuvers, they weren't focused on trying to hit the hands as such. (This is not to say they weren't precision instruments or that Western medieval combat was not a real martial art - the historical research seems to suggest much otherwise.) In addition, sword-and-shield combinations were far more common than single-blade duels; the shield was the primary defensive device, not the sword itself.
What the long quillons
did do for the most part was protect your hand from getting hit by a shield, mainly because the quillon was long enough that if someone did swing a shield at your hand or try to foul your blade against it, the shield's face would impact on the quillon's end and on the pommel of the sword, thus making a right-angle triangle with your hand safely inside it and untouched by the shield. (This is a bit hard to describe, but take a look at the picture above, draw an imaginary line between the lightsaber's hilt and the end of one of the quillons, and you get the idea...)
Guards changed, as did swords in general, as the medieval period passed on and the fashion changed to light blades, the ancient-ancient-ancient precursors to the highly stylised (and not representative of medieval sword combat) sport of fencing.
All of that, though, might well be irrelevant, because stage or screen combat bears little to no resemblance to medieval combat (or really any other form of life-or-death combat). Stage or screen is the art of illusion - the art of making it
look like it's lethal combat when in fact the actors have usually been extensively drilled so it's actually pretty safe. I suspect the quillons are in there more for the "something that hasn't been seen before" value - far more than any real tactical or strategic significance.
...and I have to admit that shot of the Millennium Falcon upside down with John Williams' theme blasting away got the blood pumping again. It's not like they could get any
worse than The Phantom Movie, Attack Of The Killer Tomatoes, er, Clones, and Revenge Of The Pith.
opcorn3:
