Thoughts on zweihanders?

Zweihänders are SUPER fucking cool! If I had a spare $900 I would totally get one.

A lot of video games and other media actually get them wrong, though. Slamming a sword that big into the ground is gonna really damage the sword, but abruptly stopping something with that much momentum can severely damage your joints and muscles if you aren't careful. You want the sword to only come to a stop when it's either hitting something you want to hit or when stopping its movement won't injure you. The trick, then, is to let the momentum of the sword carry it into this very beautiful flowing cutting pattern where the sword and its wielder are working together.

So, in practice, zweihänder/doppelhänder/montante/spadone looked less like this:

And more like this:

Some fun zweihänder facts:

"Zweihänder" is specifically a German name for this kind of sword. "Montante" was the word for more or less the same kind of sword in Spain, and in Italy they were called "Spadone."

There are some particularly massive swords of this style called "Paradeschwert" that were purely ceremonial. I saw a few at the Chicago Art Institute last time I went that were absolutely enormous.

It wasn't too uncommon for these swords to have wavy "flamberge" blades.

The prongs on the blade are called "parrying hooks."

The Landsknecht mercenaries famously used zweihänders to push past enemy pikes and break front lines.

Aside from Landsknecht, they were also used by bodyguards.

Flamberge zweihänders are still used today by the Papal Swiss Guard for ceremonial purposes.

This sword continues to be both difficult to weild, and a thing of beauty! If you want to see more of my training progress, there's a new video on Patreon- check it out!

Hopefully, I'll eventually get good enough to start investigating fantasy sword tropes 🤔... In the meantime, more archery incoming this weekend!

'Fire' | Landsknecht aesthetic

no matter what your favorite sword is though you can find it in our zine!

I think there’s a pretty good argument to be made that Gideon Nav’s weapon of choice isn’t a longsword, but something bigger, more comparable to a zweihander or a montante.

Like yes, of course Gideon uses a longsword because we as a fandom have a special place in our hearts for longsword and there’s probably Word of God from Tamsyn about it, but if we look at the text *archaeologically* how is this weapon actually described? Getting this out of the way: it’s called a two-hander (literally English for zweihander)  as often as a longsword but I don’t think that says much on its own. Neither are technical terms (“longsword,” historically, has been used to describe many weapons including, ironically, rapiers) and “two-hander” is pretty descriptive of what we think of as a longsword. Another potential fallacy that won’t help us is how everyone seems to regard Gideon’s “longsword” as a brute’s weapon with little finesse behind it. This isn’t true of longsword, but it *does* ring true for a take from snotty rapier people, and this series has an astonishing number of those in it.

Rather, I think the best argument is found in how we’re told these weapons are used. We never get to see Cohort swordsmen in action but they sound more like zweihander-wielding doppelsoldners than fighters practicing blossfechten or harnischfecten. Front line shock troops widely regarded as insane (at least by normal, non-House people), the Cohort's swordfighters seem to trained to take on large numbers of enemies at once and—critically—they don’t seem to fight *other people with swords.* Blood of Eden doesn’t use swords and there are no references to other anti-House resistance movements using them. So what makes the most sense here? Longsword, a surprisingly technical weapon most often used to fight other people with longswords? Or the whirling battle dance of the montante, designed to shock and terrify and cleave through whole units at once? I know which of these fighting styles I’d want to use against a giant bone construct.

new sword dropped

sanctity jumpscare

Spent a bit of time doing this study. I think it's reflections that really sell armour as feeling more real, even if they're just scribbles. All reflections. everywhere. I've gotta incorporate that more into my non-study work. Anyway, what do you guys think?

I AM MAKING AN SCA LEGAL GREATSWORD AND WILL USE IT IN MELEES BWHAHAH

I am going to Landsknecht so hard

Blades of May #10: a late-16th century sword inscribed with the seal of the Brewer's Guild of Cologne, as long as I am tall (6'3) and weighing a shave under ten pounds, from the upper gallery of the Royal Armouries in Leeds.

Landsknecht aesthetic // Original character

She has a sword, it's big, she swings it good

starting a new campaign soon, so naturally, a new character for it. meet Rupert, the human fighter.

In case anybody is interested in swordfighting shenanigans go check out my YouTube channel