What is HEMA to you?

Partly as a result of the discussion that ensued after I posted my last blog update, and partly as a result of a presentation I gave in-house to the fellow members of my club, I wanted to devote some space of this blog to a very difficult subject, namely that of deciding what kind of swordsman I want to be. I feel that, if I want to approach any activity with any seriousness, I need to have a clear picture of what it is I am doing, and what it is I hope to achieve. This may sound painfully obvious, but it is a very difficult thing to do, and it is very easy to slip into lazy assumptions and generalizations.

Notice I was, and am, careful to speak in the first person here. This is in fact part of the point I am trying to make. To me, thinking about HEMA, or almost anything really, in universalizing terms of 'this is how it is' or even 'this is how it should be' is a very dangerous path to walk down. I feel it is the main contributor to what has been dubbed HEMA drama. Indeed, I have noted some exceptionally strong, widely varying opinions being voiced about HEMA, about what it is and isn't, how it should or should not develop in the future, both on- and offline. Often, this leads to heated discussion, which all to easily leads to antagonization.

In a way, of course, this can be taken as a good sign; a lot of people clearly care very much about the current state of HEMA, and it's future, which I believe is a good thing. Divisiveness, however, is not, especially in a community as relatively small and young as ours. Moreover, I feel that much of this divisiveness is completely unnecessary, for it seems to be the result of a miscommunication about the basic premises of the discussion. What is happening, I believe, is the following; because some people see HEMA as a more or less cohesive community, they believe that the ideological foundations of this community should be more or less the same throughout as well. The same principles should be guiding all activities within the community, and if an individual, activity or group seemingly deviates from these principles, they are often branded as counterproductive or simply wrong.

I wish to illustrate this by doing something that seems to go directly against what I wrote at the start of this post, namely by making general observations. Let's say that the HEMA community can be roughly divided into three main groups, depending on how they feel HEMA is, or should be. These HEMA straw men may be described as follows:

1. The Academic. This person has a fetish for parchment and goosequills, practicing HEMA purely for the purpose of gaining an understanding of the martial culture of the past. Primary source study is his main, if not only focus, and his sole interest is in reviving the lost arts, attempting to interpret the techniques from the manuscripts as the masters intended them. The Academic feels that modern tournaments are diluting these arts, devolving it into the point-fighting and reckless suicidal anti-technical behavior he despises in modern olympic fencing.
2. The Athlete. This person fights to win, and is willing to employ all means, historical or otherwise, to achieve this goal. The Athlete may or may not study manuscripts, but that is beside the point. He doesn't really care about whether a certain technique is derived from Fiore, Ringeck, Meyer, Monkey Style, or that anime he watched as a kid; if it wins him tournaments, it must be good. Besides, the human body only works in a limited amount of ways, so really, how much difference between martial arts can there really be?
3. The Recreationalist. This person likes swords, and likes swinging them. There's not really much more to it than that. The Recreationalist might have taken up swordfighting because he loves Medieval stuff and Game of Thrones, and felt he needed the exercise. The recreationalist also loves the social aspect of HEMA, the drinking, the talking with people who also like Medieval stuff and Game of Thrones, the bashing people in the face with swords and hugging it out afterwards. He's not that competitive, and it's all in good fun.

By now, you might have felt a surge of indignation at this blatant stereotyping, which you might have guessed is kind of the point. Subtle, no? My point is that often people project one of these stereotypes on to the person they're having an argument with. "He combined elements of Meyer and Vadi in his sparring! Blasphemy! He must be an Athlete, who only cares for the touch and the medal!" "He thinks tournaments may be a bad influence on historical interpretation! He must be one of those stuffy Academics, forever in a book, forever getting his ass kicked in sparring!"

In fact, I think that in all practitioners of HEMA, elements of all three of the above stereotypes exist, in varying degrees of a spectrum. We each, however, have unique priorities and values which we bring to the table, and there should be room for this. For example, I think of myself as largely an Academic: I try to keep my longsword training grounded within a specific timeframe and geographical area, focusing on the big three manuscripts of Ringeck, von Danzig and Döbringer, and atttempt to gain a greater level of understanding what kind of swordplay was practiced by the authors of these manuscripts and their contemporaries at the time. I mostly see my practice as a kind of experimental history, testing hypotheses on the use of techniques through sparring, while trying to keep in mind the limitations of this method and my personal bias. I fight in tournaments, but I largely see these events as laboratories for testing new interpretations, Therefore, I try to limit my use of techniques to what I can conceivably trace back to the sources mentioned above. For instance, I try not to use the Hanging Guard or Hangetort, as I feel that is more of a Meyer-type technique, effective though it may be. This does not mean, however, that I don't try to win, and I very much enjoy it when I do win. Neither does it mean that I think technical proficiency is all that matters; I train my strength and conditioning, because all the technical expertise in the world means nothing if you can't control your own body and move it athletically, powerfully and efficiently. Neither am I a purist when it comes to reconstruction of old systems. I am a firm believer in the use of frog-DNA from other martial arts; If I didn't read up on modern Freestyle wrestling, Lignitzer probably would have remained a mystery to me. Nor does my academic focus mean that I didn't get into swordfighting because I'm a huge geek, because I am. Because come on, swords are just awesome, who am I kidding. Hell, it's the main reason I keep practicing HEMA year after year.

It's quite scary putting all that up for display. It of course doesn't cover the whole picture, partly because the picture changes. I spent quite a bit of time getting the priorities I just set out straight in my head, making them as concrete as possible, while occasionally adjusting them as my perspective changes, as it is wont to do. I feel this is crucial, because first of all, if you don't know as exactly as possible what you're doing, and why you're doing it, you're never going to figure out how to improve it. Second, these priorities are what keeps a discussion on HEMA clear and on-topic. If both participants of the discussion are more informed on the other's context and goals in which they are presenting a certain point, then misunderstandings can hopefully be kept to a minimum.

This is just a small piece of how I think about HEMA, and especially the role of academia within the development of the community. Future posts will expand on that latter point more thoroughly, but for now, I think this will do.

Tournament rulesets: an alternative proposal

I have a few HEMA tournaments coming up, and as such, the formats of these kinds of tournaments have been on my mind a lot. It ties into a lot of things I probably want to write about in the future: the growing 'sportification', for lack of a better word, of HEMA, how I see and use tournaments for my own specific purposes, and how any fighter needs to be very conscious of what they are trying to achieve by competing, and how it fits into what they are trying to achieve by practicing HEMA in general. For now, however, I want to focus on the rulesets being used.

A few days ago, Lee Smith of Blood and Iron posted a critique of the ruleset used at Longpoint 2014. His comments were mainly focused on what in his opinion was too great a value being placed on the afterblow, or the strike delivered within a tempo of being hit. In his opinion, it basically rewarded a fighting style that the early masters would describe as that of a 'buffalo'. Mindless flailing without regard for the opponent's weapon, because a hit is a hit, and if you get struck, might as well try to hit the other guy as hard and fast as possible to negate his advantage, right? I'm (over-)simplifying here, but it does point to an important problem in HEMA.

Generally, HEMA tournaments want to simulate combat as it would have been practiced back in the day as much as possible without actually dueling to the death with sharp swords. There are other basic premises, such as historical formats like the Franco-Belgian rules, but for the sake of clarity I'll omit these outliers for now. This rules out any fencing type stuff such as right of way or that thing where only the first tippy-tappy hit counts (I don't know anything about fencing). The basic guidelines for a duel to the death are usually employed to create a ruleset. These are as follows. First and foremost, do not die. This can be expanded to 'do not get hit'. Killing the other guy is very much a secondary concern. But, since statistically speaking, the longer the other guy remains alive, the greater the chance becomes that he'll eventually kill you. So usually, killing the other guy increases your chances of remaining alive, provided of course that you don't die in the process.

These premises have resulted in two extremely controversial concepts in HEMA, namely the double hit and the afterblow. The double hit occurs when both fighters focus entirely on killing the other guy, ignoring the 'remain alive at all costs' bit. As a result, they both hit each other at the same time, making them both losers in the most absolute sense of the word. This situation is often discouraged during tournaments. For instance,in the only tournament I have so far participated in, three double hits resulted in a disqualification.

The afterblow is a bit trickier. It takes into account that very few strikes are instantly fatal. Even a thrust straight through the heart does not necessarily cause the victim to immediately collapse; there have been plenty of recorded instances where people missing an arm or having their guts hanging out have continued fighting. This means that a fighter needs to be able to continue defending himself even after dealing a blow to his opponent. Usually, the fighter that has been struck has a short amount of time, roughly a single tempo, to deal the afterblow.

How this afterblow is dealt with varies quite a bit. The general theory is that they're bad, and should be avoided if at all possible to improve the quality of fighting. Some tournaments therefore penalize the fighter who 'let himself get hit' with an afterblow. Apparently Longpoint 2014 was an extreme example of this. If I recall correctly, the tournament I participated in sat on the other end of the spectrum, awarding no points to the afterblow but otherwise attaching no consequences to getting hit with one. Both types of rulesets seemed to encourage mindless flailing.

The problem, to me, seems to be translating what I believe is a general agreement on what constitutes good fighting into an objective ruleset which would properly reward fighters for this type of good fighting. Most fighters, organizers and judges know what good fighting looks like, but if it seems more likely that one can win by fighting sloppily, the sloppy fighting will prevail. I believe this problem seems to be inherent in a point-based system, which is what the vast majority of tournaments uses. trying to quantify what constitutes good fighting seems a hopeless task.

I therefore wish to propose an alternative. Instead of using a point-based system, like most martial arts competitions seem to be using, I suggest a panel of judges be used to determine the overall quality of a fighter's swordplay during a single fight. The referee determines when a hit has taken place, and separates the fighters. This I feel is still necessary to prevent endless mauling, which is not what a historical fight would have looked like by any means. Following this, however, instead of allotting points, the referee immediately restarts the fight, only to break up the fighters again after a hit has taken place. This goes on for a predetermined amount of time, after which the panel of judges determines which of the two fighters was the more proficient one. how exactly this is determined can vary. Like I implied earlier, I'm not a fan of trying to quantify an opinion, so holding up signs with a grade from one to ten on them á la gymnastics is not something I would prefer. The two options I see are either a short discussion to consensus or a simple vote. There is of course always the problem of objectivity here: one panel of judges could have entirely different criteria than others. A set of guidelines that the judges are to follow, with priorities of what would constitute better fighting, would hopefully minimize this, and making these guidlines public would also help with transparency.

An alternative method would eliminate the panel of judges entirely, leaving it up to the pool of fighters themselves. I once saw this method being used in what I believe was a Polish tournament; I can't recall which one right now. I don't remember the details, but the basic structure was like this. Fighters fought a predetermined group of opponents, and were then asked which of their opponents they thought was the best. The one which would ultimately receive the most votes would be deemed the winner. Now, there would probably be some issues with this system as well, but I am just in love with it's simplicity.

These are merely some very general suggestions, but the main point I wish to bring across is that there might be a need for something of a paradigm shift in the way HEMA tournaments are judged. I feel that a move away from trying to quantify performance, and embracing abstractions like 'good fighting' would help the level of technical skill being displayed during competition.

First post woo

Hi there.

I´ll just start off by saying that I´m starting this blog, not so much to be read, but to write. I felt I needed the practice; writing papers and such for school has never really been one of my fortes. Not that I'm dissatisfied with them, once I finish them. It's just that because there are so many restrictions and rules to follow, that it becomes a bit paralyzing. Because of that, I have a tendency to procrastinate.

So, to try to counteract that, I have started this blog to be able to write in a bit more of an easygoing environment. No real need for things such as footnotes and proper structuring of texts exceeding 5000 words on a topic I need to rigorously research for three weeks before I can even begin. In this blog, I write on the topics that occupy my everyday thinking. I always have these ideas rolling around in my head that I feel would benefit from being written down and analyzed, so now there is a place for that. Meanwhile, I have an oppurtunity to write, and practice getting better at that.

The topics, I think, will vary a bit, but I wanted to focus on a few main themes. First, one of my greatest passions, HEMA, or Historical European Martial arts. I am both a practitioner and an instructor in this, and am constantly thinking of ways to improve my interpretations and didactic skills. Second, academia. This might be too big and pretentious a word for what it actually will entail, but I might devote a few blog posts to ideas on the periphery of writing a paper, or the academic context of HEMA. Lastly, I have been getting into strength training over the last few months, specifically barbell training. I'm always trying to improve myself in this regard, and this occupies my thoughts quite a bit, so one might expect one or two posts on that as well.

This all of course assuming I actually keep this up, and this won't become one of those blogs where you see an opening post full of hopes and dreams, dated three years old, and the rest is a graveyard. There are literally thousands of those on the Internet, and mine might become one of them, who knows. No matter though, because, like I said, this is more of an online notebook than a real blog, so readers mustn't expect too much.

That said, I hope to be adding to this blog frequently, as I think it'll be beneficial to me and my scattered brain to have a central repository of my wandering thoughts. And who knows, maybe someone else will somehow benefit!