Hey guys, when SDA visited us, they mentioned that a certain book of sword techniques was "garbage". Does anyone remember what its title was? I think we may of had a copy of whatever it was and I'd hate for us to spend much time looking at it..

Here I'll upload pictures of the two books cover that they brought with them that day.

Never mind, I'll just type the names of the books...

Codex Wallerstein (A medieval fighting book from the fifteenth century
on longsword, falchion, Dagger, and Wrestling)
-Grzegorz Zabinski with Bartlomiei Walczak

The Art of Combat (a German martial arts treatise of 1570)
by Joachim Meyer
translated by Jeffery l. Forgeng

Medieval Swordsmanship by John Clements.

I don't think that it's "garbage" so much as it's just really outdated theory. I think more study and interpretation has been done that has led to a better understanding of the techniques.

Ditto Sir Eric there. It was another book, that was just no good.

Keaton, it might be the one that I borrowed from the Ordo library. Rather than explain techniques, it shows a picture, then a description. (ex. Fighter on the right has turned aside his opponent's attack, an followed up with a stab.) Not much going for it as I once thought.

To clarify, it's what Sir Eric said, it's just really really really out-dated.

The Codex Wallerstein and the Meyer translation are both direct translations of real historical fechtbuchs with the original art etc. so those are very good, though they can be quite hard to interpret. Josachim Meyer is probably the easiest of all the German school Fechtbuchs to understand because he spells everything out so explicitly, but it still requires some thinking to get what he is saying. I think I sent one of you guys a list of other useful translations and books which have both translations and interpretations, the David Lindholm Ringeck book for example.

I also gave you guys a copy of Toblers book, this is an interpreted manual which are much easier to understand but the signal to noise ratio is realtively poor and gets worse every year compared to the general understanding in the HEMA 'scene'. The tradeoff is that intepretations are easy to understand but are mostly 'fluff', or to put it another way frankly B.S.. The translations are the real thing but vastly more cryptic.

That said I think the Tobler book is still fairly useful especially for beginners, he has the real lichtenauer guards, counters, and all the basic concepts in there. It's one of the very few ones I personaly think have any value.

The John Clements book was out-dated when it was written and is no longer of any value in my opinion, it has made up guards for example, totally invented systems for things like sword and shield fighting (which appear to be based on LARP or SCA combat) and generally very little directly related to any actual historical fencing manual I know of.

There is however still plenty of very useful stuff on the ARMA website including scans of many of the original (real) manuals.

DB

Yes, the translations are very tedious to read. I looked at that translation that one of you guys are working on on SDA's website about the krumphau and I almost laughed at the crazy way the author spoke/wrote. I have no disrespect for the old sword masters or their methods, I just wish they could say "step to the right with your lead foot while bringing the blade down at an angle" rather than "He who krumps, krumps with skill. This I will laud". (Okay I misquoted the guy completely)

I don't have any disrespect for the way they talk either. I'm just sayin that its hard for my weak mind to comprehend .

By the way, is this a good reference for learning the master cuts?
http://www.thearma.org/essays/mastercuts.html

I've been trying to learn them off that site and by looking at a few videos on youtube of people attempting them. I say attempting b/c idk if half the guys on youtube are actually doing them properly or not.

Yes, many of the manuals seem to be very cryptic or even arbitrary or deliberately vague. The first is true, they can be literally cryptic and you have to kind of have the key to the "cypher" to make them out, fortunately that is pretty easy now days compared to a few years ago - but the latter is not, nothing in those books is by accident and the words of these Masters are carefully chosen.

For example, an early translation of a Lichtenauer verse done around 2000 or 2001 may have given us this cryptic sentence

"When he over hews from the roof wrathfully step sideway hew and take forward"

which made absolutely no sense. But when we understand the way the words are used throughout the document we begin to see the meaning... or many of us together frankly pieced it together over a period of years, and now the same sentence might be translated as:

"When he cuts at you from Vom Tag [guard] cut with a zwerchau [Mastercut] and make a passing step, you will seize the Vor [initiative]"

Which makes a lot more sense to me, at least at the level of understanding I am currently at. In fact the better I understand the system the more the original German makes sense to me and the more useless the early interpretations and translations seem to be (since the actual German words we use and understand now are in the original manauls - Vom tag, Zwerchau etc.). I figured a lot of this out with help from other people online like I'm giving you guys, but if you did meticulously read the thing from beginning to end you will already know he is speaking of one of the guards (Vom Tag) and one of the Mastercuts (zwerchau) and the idea of timing (Vor).

When I'm in doubt about something basic I always consult the Wiki, it's acutally a useful overview

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_school_of_fencing

Now some Masters are much more cryptic than others of course. Ringeck is fairly straitforward Lichtenauer, though terse and in verse (sorry) form and he has no pictures. Lichtenauers "Versa" is written to rhyme for very good reasons I won't go into now though.

Talhoffer on the other hand has wonderful pictures but unless you already know the system is extremely cryptic, made even more so by the fact that the most popular (and cheap) reprinting of one of his several books has 15 or 20 pages out of order.

Joachim Meyer is available in a high quality translation, has very clear explanations and excellent illustrations, but he is a much later Master describing a more complex system.



Yours and mine both brother



yes that is a very good article, albeit a bit dated now in certain aspects, but it will give you a good basic overview of what the Mastercuts are and aren't.

It's written by Jake Norwood incidentally who is the guy forming one of the new national HEMA federations, the one they are discussing on the Pendant RMA forum. He was here visiting a couple of years ago and will probably be coming to visit again soon.

As for youtube videos, it's a good idea to collect the best ones somewhere on your site, maybe in the private area so nobody knows you are using their stuff, and organize them by topic etc. But there are many good ones out there, as well as a few pretty crappy ones. Most people are more careful than they used to be about posting half-assed stuff though, especially intepretations.

Here are a few Youtube users who usually post good HEMA videos showing specific techniques accurately:

http://www.youtube.com/user/TheRealGladiatores
http://www.youtube.com/user/MEMAG
http://www.youtube.com/user/DarkFury
http://www.youtube.com/user/vaingloria

Hope that helps.

DB

ah sweet I had already found vaingloria and marked him as one of my favorite people on youtube haha. I'll have to check the other guys out.

That is David Knight, Ex-ARMA, who is another one of the founders of that new North American HEMA association they are putting together on the Pendant RMA forum.

DB