A Miscellany of Projects - Gaming, SCA Combat, Arts & Sciences, and Travel

It feels appropriate to me to begin with the very first line of Munenori, as the first few paragraphs sum up much of his worldview. Hathaway: There is an old saying, "Weapons are in-auspicious tools.  They are shunned by Heaven's path.  Keep them ready without the intent to use them; that is Heaven's path." HPB (Ridgway): From antiquity it has been said, "Weapons are an inauspicious instrument, abhorred by the Way of Heaven, and to be used only when unavoidable.  That is the Way of Heaven." Satô: Here's what was said in the past: "Weapons are unfortunate instruments.  Heaven's Way hates them.  Using them when there is no other choice - that is Heaven's Way." Footnote 2: Allusion to Section 31 of Lao Tzu: Good weapons are unfortunate instruments.  People hate them.  So someone with Tao does not rely on them... Weapons are unfortunate instruments and not the wise man's instruments.  When he uses them because there is no other choice h...

I own four English-language editions of of Heihô Kadensho .  I actually own more than that, but the others are copies or extracts of these four.  Two of them, the Satô ( The Sword and the Mind ) and Wilson ( The Life-Giving Sword ) translations, are what could be called "mainstream" translations - that is, they are either at least partially informed by, or endorsed by, members of the school, and are relatively complete, with supplementary material that will help make sense of the original and provide it further context.  They are broadly similar; Yagyû Koichi, the head of the school today, prefers Satô, while Dave Lowry and a handful of other American budô practitioners encouraged Williams to make his translation.  In other words, in quality terms there is little to choose between them, other than personal preference, and one cannot really go wrong with either.  The third was a copy that I happened to pick up at Half-Price Books that did not match either of...

Having completed my review of the various editions of Fiore currently on the market (I suppose I should write up the Hatcher edition of the Getty, but it's been out a few years and is kind of a gold standard!), it's time for a project I've been delaying for months. That project is a comparison of the four editions I have found of Yagyû Munenori 's first volume, "The Killing Sword."  To understand why I'd be doing that, and why there have been delays, one must first understand who Munenori was, what the formative environment of Yagyû shinkage-ryû was, and why the school persists. First, the Yagyû themselves.  All Japanese noble families trace themselves, at least nominally, to one of three origins, the Taira, the Minamoto, or the Fujiwara.  The Taira and Minamoto (or, if one is feeling particularly fancy, the Heike and Genji, after their On'myo, or "Chinese-style," readings) were descendants of emperors who had been mediatized as nobles no l...

Before I start reviewing the Chidester reproduction of the Morgan manuscript , I'd like to talk about parrying and defense in longsword, based on a passage I read in Meyer.  To do so first requires me to express some frustrations. The frustration is this: Meyer knows what he's talking about, generally, and has some excellent  advice, but Meyer is also writing for gentleman duelists, not for killers, and Meyer has a very bad case of OCD in trying to document every potential combat situation he can think of.  This weakens his overall approach, especially considering that Meyer, writing in a different era from, say, Fiore, relied much more heavily on text than on images.  The number of woodcuts in Meyer, compared to the overall length of his book, is frustratingly small, and the Meyer woodcuts varied even more substantially than the Fiore drawings vary from edition to edition.  This means that to understand Meyer, you really  need either a guide, or a lot ...

At this point I can safely say I have studied, am studying, or am at least passing-familiar with no fewer than four historical or modern sword schools (in rough order, SCA sword and board, Fiore, shinkage, and montante courtesy of Figueyredo), and am currently working my way through Windsor's translation of Vadi.  This has introduced me to a serious problem - technical vocabulary.  In any profession, technical vocabulary or jargon accrues, but because there are few true modern practitioners of sword work, the technical vocabulary winds up being exceptionally obscure, and cause for argument. We know that this has been a problem for a while, too.  For instance, Fiore trained under a series of Germans and north Italians, which means he would have been familiar with the German technical vocabulary, probably learning the same technical vocabulary developed in Liechtenauer's   Zettel .  The problem, then, is that Fiore wasn't   working  in Germany.  Som...

Last time, I wrote about the   six blows of the sword , based on   di Grassi 's wrist-elbow-shoulder classification.  Other writers classify them based on origin (Fiore, Figuereydo), targeting (Yagyû) or technique (pick a German).  However, di Grassi's classification has a couple of advantages to me - it allows development of exercises to strengthen particular techniques without relying on repeating the technique itself, and the truth is that if you can hit someone in one spot with a technique, you can hit them in another with it.  Its weakness is that it is much easier to train a fighter, for instance, to throw a   mandritto fendente  than to know when in a fight to use the wrist and when to use the shoulder, and that training a fighter to target the head, or to know when to go around the sword rather than try to beat through, is easier to see directly than the blows of wrist, elbow, and shoulder. For all that, though, di Grassi's conception is probab...

In his  Discourse on the Art of Using Arms Safely  (or, in its first English publication,  His True Art of Defense ),  Giacomo di Grassi  describes the blows of the arm as follows: The Arm likewise is not in every part of equal force and swiftness, but differs in every bowing thereof, that is to say in the wrist, in the elbow and in the shoulder: for the blows of the wrist as they are more swift, so they are less strong: And the other two, as they are more strong, so they are more slow, because they perform a great compass. Therefore by my counsel, he that would deliver an edge-blow shall fetch no compass with his shoulder, because whilst he bears his sword far off, he gives time to the wary enemy to enter first: but he shall only use the compass of the elbow and the wrist: which as they be most swift, so are they strong in ought, if they be orderly handled. Thus, di Grassi identifies three blows, those of wrist, elbow, and shoulder - and thus the anatomical dra...

Since my Fiore class series wrapped up, I've been helping a friend write up her own follow-on montante class series using mine as a foundation.  That led me to a discussion point: Before one can understand, and therefore teach, a system, one has to understand the underlying assumptions of that system.  For instance, neither boxers nor wrestlers are inherently better combatants; a boxer is a better boxer, and a wrestler a better wrestler, than either on the other's field because the underlying assumptions - in this case the formal rules - are very different. Sometimes, identifying the underlying assumptions is easy.  Modern combat sports have written conventions; identifying them is pretty simple as a result.  Historical authors tend to get a little harder to figure out, and the more comprehensive the system, the harder it becomes.  Fiore writes in his first Italian foreword that he trained gentlemen for combat, specifically for deeds of arms from unarmed all the...

One of the senior students at shinkage said something a few weeks ago that stuck with me - that styles that focused on duels tended to have closer, tighter stances than shinkage, which almost elevates distance from the body to the point of principle.  That, combined with a  video  from Marky Berryman of the Exiles, and Fiore's remarks on what each position can do, got me expanding on my thoughts from the last  Post Office  post. Let's revisit what Fiore has to say about position equivalence, so we have some textual grounding.  Keep in mind that I strongly prefer the term "position" to "guard" - a position is a decision point, from whence you can do things; a "guard" is a position where you are proof against someone else doing something to you.  This may be semantic, but I feel it represents a substantial mindset difference.  In any case, Fiore is here describing two different applications of   posta di donna  that look radically differen...