Guy Windsor

Consulting Swordsman. Writer.

Archives for October 2013

The Ill-Made Knight, well made indeed.

By Leave a Comment

I have a special place in my heart for novelists who actually practise the skills that their characters need. Of these perhaps the best example alive today is Christian Cameron. His US Navy aviation thrillers (co-written under the nom-de-plume Gordon Kent) are informed by his 12 years in the Navy; his ancient Greek novels (the series Tyrant  and The Long War and his stand-alone biographical novel on Alexander the Great Alexander: God of War) are informed by his years of ancient Greek re-enactment. And to write his current two series, one strictly medieval, the other medieval-fantasy (the Traitor Son cycle under the incredibly impenetrable nom-de-plume Miles Cameron), he came all the way from Toronto to Finland to train with me in Fiore’s Art of Arms. He has been training daily ever since, and has fought in armoured tournaments in Canada, the USA, and Italy.

That's him on the left belting someone in the head.
That's him on the left belting someone in the head.

It’s really no wonder then that his descriptions of armoured combat are the best in the business, bar none. I have written elsewhere about how I first came in contact with his work, and how from the first, I was impressed with the accuracy and depth of his fight scenes.

So you may imagine the degree of anticipation I felt on getting my copy of his latest, the first in the Ill Made Knight series. This is right in my home turf, set in the 100 years war, and, get this, a young Fiore dei Liberi appears as a character! I had very high hopes for this book. And Christian delivered. The book is a triumph of plot, character, and action. It works as fiction, and it works at all the sword-nerdy levels you could possibly want. It is accurate enough, I think, to be used on a history curriculum, with the main features of the campaigns (Poitiers in 1356 and Brignais in 1362) rendered in detail. We see Chaucer, Froissart, Jean le Maingre, Geoffrey Charny, and a host of other well-known 14th century people, alive on the page as they have never been before. The main protagonist, William Gold, was a real lieutenant of Sir John Hawkswood, perhaps the most famous condottiero of them all, and yes, another character in the book.

It is in the minutiae of camp life that this book really stands apart. Sewing. Cleaning equipment. Cooking. Dealing with cheap weaponry when you can’t afford good stuff. This book takes you on campaign like no other ever written, except perhaps God of War.

Buy it, read it, tell your friends. Historical fiction was never closer to fact, or more rewarding to read.

Did I mention that Fiore is in it?? 

Conan the Barbarian: role model?

By 1 Comment

ConanPalkkasoturi

I was asked recently to write a preface to the new Finnish-language Conan compilation, Conan Palkkasoturi (Conan the Mercenary). It was a pleasure to write, and the published book is nothing short of beautiful. The editor, Janne Suominen, translated my thoughts into Finnish, and with his permission I am sharing the original English version here:

When I was a child I faced a serious choice regarding my future. I was either going to grow up to be a ninja, or Conan. While neither quite panned out, I do find myself swinging swords every day at work, so it could have been a lot worse. My career choices stemmed from two sources: the ninja movies of the early 80s, and the great, the glorious, Conan books and movies. Incarcerated in boarding school, I was forced to play hockey. Field hockey. This had one major advantage over all other sports: they gave me a weapon. I used to try to play defence so I wouldn’t have to run around much after that stupid ball, and instead could get back to the serious business of training up to becoming CONAN!!

When the first movie came out in 1982 was only 8, so I didn’t get to see it right away. It took about 3 years and a pirate VHS copy before I saw it on the screen. But the novelisation of the film Conan the Barbarian was in the school library and I devoured it. There were other Conan books to be had, the one I remember best being Conan the Buccaneer, also by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter. These were heaven on the page: swords, sorcery and sex. Fantastically educational for an 8 year old. Graphic novels like the wonderful example you are holding had not yet become mainstream enough to be widely available, and were banned at my school unless obviously made for children. How the legendary Frank Frazetta book covers slipped through the net I don’t know. But I think my swordsmanship students should be glad they did.

I am often asked who draws the best swordfights, and it is a tricky question to answer. We have some great swordfighting graphic artists here in Finland: my favourite is Hannu Lukkarinen, not least as he came to me for training just to improve his artwork. The Art of Swordsmanship is to strike first. To do this your actions should be as small and quick as possible while still getting the job done. The sword is a labour-saving device, as it is so much easier to kill someone with one than without. But Swordfighting Art is a whole other story. It has to look good on the page, to an uninformed audience. It has to look like it would do the damage, and it doesn’t matter if the actions are way too big. On one of my consultancy jobs for a swordfighting computer game they had me put on a motion-capture suit and do various sword drills. A year later when I was back helping these game designers work out the underlying logic of what action counters what, I saw the game footage and said “that isn’t me! It’s all over the place!” and they told me that the actions I had made for them looked like nothing on the screen. Nobody would believe that they would work, as they seemed to take no effort. “That’s the fucking point” I said. But next time I’ll ham it up for them.

The great thing about fantasy series like Conan, of course, is that it is not trying to be historically accurate. The writers and artists can take whatever liberties they like, and must only be true to the characters, the story, and the fictional world of the Hyborian Age. Conan the Babysitter would not go down well. Nor Conan the medieval knight. But Conan the Cimmerian is one of the great characters of 20th century fiction, an archetype of the independent warrior spirit that can encompass being a thief and a pirate, a mercenary and a king, remaining true to himself alone.

Conan is a perfect hero, if you think about it. He is really, really good at killing people, but never takes advantage of a naked slave wench, never kills people who don’t deserve it, and is always there for his friends. Today in my School’s training hall there is a shelf of role models, gifts from friends and students: Yoda, Zorro, the Black Knight, and of course, inevitably, Conan. Thanks to some of the artwork, and a certain Austrian’s screen portrayal, the modern Conan is a muscle-bound archetype of brawn over brains, which is quite unsuited to swordsmanship. But this is not at all how Howard portrays him. Howard’s Conan is cat-like and clever, strong yes, but lithe, fast and cunning, with a very clear moral code. In every way, the ideal swordsman.

How to spot the bullshit in any martial arts drill, and what to do about it.

By 4 Comments

The first play of the dagger, from the Getty MS.
The first play of the dagger, from the Getty MS.

The real thing is the only bullshit-free scenario in martial arts. If you’re an MMA fighter, that’s the ring on fight night. If you’re a soldier, that’s being in the presence of the enemy. And if you are a swordsman, that is someone trying to take your head off with a blade. But the real thing must be prepared for, so we have drills, exercises and training. Problems only arise when we mistake one scenario (a training drill) for another (the real thing). To properly understand any drill, you must have a clear idea of exactly how it deviates from reality. I call this spotting the bullshit.

Let us take a simple example, a drill that is usually included in day one of our Fiore beginners’ course: the basic execution of Fiore’s first play of the dagger. This technique is a disarm, done against the common overhand blow.

In its basic set-up, the drill goes like this:

“Both players start left foot forwards, hands down, in a proper guard position. This is very artificial, and is intended only to create a consistent starting point for beginners.

Disarm and counter

  1. Attacker and defender both in porta di ferro, left foot forwards.
  2. Attacker passes to strike with a fendente. Aim it at the mask!
  3. Defender intercepts attacker’s wrist with his left hand and
  4. Turns it to the left, creating a leverage disarm with the dagger against the back of his wrist.
  5. Defender collects dagger and strikes”

(Quoted from Mastering the Art of Arms vol 1: the Medieval Dagger page 51)

There is nothing wrong with this, as a starting point. But it has at least the following dollops of bullshit in it:

  1. The attacker is not trying to kill you.
  2. The weapon is not sharp.
  3. The roles are pre-set, attacker and defender.
  4. You can’t run away or call the cops.
  5. You have to wait for the attack.
  6. You are wearing protective gear, that will allow the attacker to make contact, but would not work against a real dagger (we tried this with a mask on a dummy: the mask failed against all medieval weaponry).
  7. The line of the attack is pre-selected.
  8. Your defence is pre-selected.
  9. The attacker is not allowed to counter or continue.
  10. The attack is done with little force.
  11. The attack is done slowly.

I am sure that you can think of other dollops, but 11 is enough to be going on with. So, how do we deal with this? How can we eliminate the bullshit without killing students?

To start with, number one cannot be trained outside of the real scenario. Don’t even try. It is this one element that really makes the difference between those that have done it for real and those that haven’t. (I haven’t and don’t intend to.) Regarding combat sports, you haven’t done it till you’ve been in the ring or competed in a serious tournament. Fortunately, those are much more survivable environments, so anybody who trains seriously enough can get there and do that art “for real”. This is one of the big attractions of combat sports I think: the real environment is available. I will never forget my first fencing competition. It was an eye-opener, to say the least!

So, if my drill above is so full of bullshit, why do we do it?

It does:

  1. Teach core mechanical principles, such as grounding, finding lines of weakness, etc.
  2. Teach core tactical principles, such as control the weapon before you strike; timing, and control of distance.
  3. Given the source of our art, it gives beginners a chance to reconstruct a technique from the book.

It is a perfectly good starting point. Just as a child learning to read sounding out the individual letters and creating the words is not really reading yet, we don’t say that they should just recognise the words straight away. This level of practice is a necessary step on the way to expertise.

But be aware that this drill does NOT:

  1. Teach a survival skill.
  2. Teach situational awareness.
  3. Teach decision making or judgement.
  4. Teach the ability to execute the action under pressure.

But given our list of eleven dollops of bullshit, we can map a route through training to systematically eliminate each of them in turn (except for the first). By applying the “who moves first” multiplier, for instance, we can eliminate point 5, so the “defender” is not required to wait, but can enter or move away, gaining some control. By allowing degrees of freedom for one or other student, we can eliminate 7, 8 and/or 9. By applying the rule of c’s you can increase the intensity in a systematic way, so eliminating 10 and 11.*

It is very important not to eliminate all the bullshit all at once. Especially when eliminating no. 2 by practising with sharps, you should absolutely keep all sorts of other bullshit present to avoid serious injury.

So, by carefully considering all the ways in which a set drill is not a real fight, you can design variations to the basic version to systematically clean up some of the bullshit. You will need lots of different drills, each with a different bullshit profile, to make sure that you are training in all of the attributes of the “real” technique. (For more on customising drills, see Mindful Practice).

Just for fun, and to see if you are paying attention, I have inserted one deliberate dollop of bullshit in this post: a deliberately misleading statement made for pedagogical purposes. Can you spot it?

* The “Rule of Cs” (abridged from Mastering the Art of Arms vol 1: the Medieval Dagger p136) every drill is first worked through with the players:

  • Cooperating in creating correct choreography

This is means exactly what it says: the students are just co-operating in going through the motions of the technique.

Once that is easy, increase the difficulty by increasing intensity, or introducing a degree of freedom (e.g. is the attacker might vary the line of attack), with one player adjusting the difficulty for the other to learn at their most efficient rate- if it works all the time, ramp it up- if it fails more than twice in ten reps, ease off a bit. This is called:

  • Coaching correct actions

Finally, the players each try within reason to make the drill work for them. When coaching, the attacker would try to make sure the defender can usually counter him; when competing, you just try to make your action work. This can be dangerous if it gets out of hand, so be careful, and wear full protection just in case. In practice, the more experienced scholar should get most of the hits, without departing from the drill. This is fine, and gives a good indication of whether your training regime is working. So,

  • Compete.