rohan apologist

petermorwood:

ivanasksyou:
forbosmargad:
lord-kitschener:
notabrobro:
swordmutual:
swordmutual:
debate: is a really long sword-length but still otherwise knife-like knife valid to be considered a knife, or is it now a sword because it’s long
@nagunkgunk
It’s a knword and it’s Valid
I don’t wanna like Kill The Joke but this brings up a really cool fact about swords in ~14th-16th century Germany! The only people who were allowed to own Real Swords were the royalty and nobility BUT! Everyone else was allowed to own knives. The definition of a knife, however, was based on not length but handle construction, and to some extent how it was sharpened. The handle had to be constructed Like So with 2 pieces of wood sandwiching the metal tang.
Only one edge was allowed to be sharpened, but oftentimes a small part (a couple inches) of the short edge (e.g. the edge that wasn’t sharp) would be sharpened, and weapon design often allowed for this
In this way, something that looked like This, a messer of just over a meter in length…
…would be legally considered a knife, and therefore allowable for non-nobility to possess. (you can also see the bit on the back of the tip that would be sharpened)
So @swordmutual, there’s a not definitive but certainly interesting historical perspective on your question
Lemme correct you there @forbosmargad
There is litterally no historical evidence of late medieval/rennaisance Germany having laws against commoners owning swords, plus the definition of a sword under medieval German weapon law was effectively length-based rather than on those features.
The real reason Messers showed up is because of Medieval German craft guilds. In order to make a sword, you would have to be a member of the local swordsmiths’ guild. What then happened was the local knifesmiths’ guild decided they wanted in on the buiseness and started making things that technically counted as knives in terms of production, undercutting the swordsmiths’ prices.
If you think modern “union rules” are restrictive as to who could and couldn’t do what, medieval guild rules were there before them - closed shop, trade embargo, import tariffs, you name it.
I don’t know what people in Gothic-armour-making Nuremberg would think of a local knight who wore Milanese-style plate armour from Italy (shades of how his mates would look at a Ford car-worker from Detroit or Dagenham who drove a Volkswagen or Toyota)…
… but he wouldn’t make many friends or be invited to the best parties. Or jousts, or whatever.
Re. the OP image - that’s a big knife, but not the first I’ve seen for advertising purposes…
Defining the difference between a “sword” and a “knife” when they’re both the same length is one of those herding-cats-at-a-crossroads things.
Is it because the sword has two edges and the knife has one? Then what about scimitars, sabres, katanas, backswords…?
Is it because a knife is a tool and a sword is a weapon? You could say that a sword is principally a weapon, while a knife is principally a general-purpose cutting implement that can be used as a weapon, but despite that the combat use of short blades is known as “knife-fighting” rather than “dagger-fighting”.
Is it because of the way they’re constructed? A sword has a full grip enclosing the blade tang, secured by peening (heating and hammering) the end of the tang down onto the pommel like a rivet…
…while the knife has a grip composed of two separate scales, often/usually leaving the tang visible between them, secured by adhesive or by rivets through the tang like a chef’s knife, and which usually has no pommel…
…except when it does. And a full grip, too.
There are, however, Indo-Persian swords which often have no pommels and whose grips are held in place with strong adhesive rather than a peened tang, and the Turkish yataghan short sword has a grip secured by, yes, rivets through the tang but also has a very big pommel indeed.
Is it because the sword is longer than the knife? That doesn’t work when an Afghan choora (Khyber knife) or a big kukri can be as long as a Roman gladius (short sword) and of course, further down, there’s the Renaissance Messer (which means “knife” no matter how big it got – and “big” could mean the size of a longsword). Here’s an example:
The sword is a qama or quaddara, the dagger is a kindjal - but if they were two images resized so both weapons were the same length, only the hand-space on the grip would show which was originally bigger. And by the way…
…quaddaras could be single-edged.
Confused yet? I am…but then that’s par for the course; our ancestors had the annoying habit of not giving things all the specific names we seem so fond of, and often called a sword just a sword and a knife just a knife. And as for the names and shapes of complex-headed polearms, let’s not go there right now…
“Messer”, as mentioned before, simply means “knife” - the aircraft designer Willy Messerschmitt may have had knifesmiths as ancestors - but as they got bigger and more swordlike the word had extra descriptors tacked onto it: “Grossmesser” (big knife), “Heibmesser” (hewing knife), and of course “Kriegsmesser” (war knife).
Here are two Landsknechts using longsword vs Kriegsmesser, with no suggestion that one weapon is in any way better than the other.
A couple of characters in Breughel’s “Peasant Dance” painting (the bagpiper and the first dancer) are wearing short Messers that are obviously weapons, not just everyday knives: the bagpiper’s Messer has a long, S-curved crossguard and a side-ring to protect his knuckles.
(For extra interest, the way the knife’s guard is constructed and the way he wears it on his right hip (perhaps even the way he plays his bagpipes) show he’s left-handed.)
The dancer’s Messer is even more clearly a weapon, since it has a knucklebow and side-plate (compare it to the ordinary knife - that little black thing with the brown top - worn by the man in red hose).
All the on-line images of this character are either dark or small, but here’s a much clearer reproduction of that very Messer.
Here’s another weapon-carrying bagpiper, and two more men (white hose left, orange doublet / tan coat centre back) with ordinary general-purpose or eating knives for comparison.
This selection of repros by Tod’s Stuff shows what the ordinary knives look like more clearly than the paintings (maybe they were so ordinary and familiar that Breughel didn’t take much trouble over painting them).
Messers weren’t just weapons for commoners: Emperor (and armour, jousting and weapons-in-general fan) Maximilian I owned this one.
If Messers were good enough for the Holy Roman Emperor, they were good enough for anybody.