This article deals with medieval swords of Western Europe; curiously folks in the western world often know less about the swords of our ancestors than we do about the swords of the far east. This is due in part to the surge of eastern-asian martial arts that started in the 1960's and 70's.

Let's not get all philosophical here. A sword is a tool for killing people. Currently it is an obsolete tool -that's pretty simple when you get right down to it. A tougher question is what makes a specific weapon a sword? It has a blade, a guard and a handle. Most have a blade more than sixteen inches long. But an eighteen-inch long pizza cutter has a long blade and a handle and a guard of sorts, yet it is definitely a knife. The term 'sword' has proven surprisingly difficult to pin down an exact meaning for- but we usually know one when we see it. Part of the problem is that swords come in a baffling variety of forms, sizes and shapes.

We can start with what a sword is not. A medieval sword is not a big knife. It is not crude. It is not heavy. It is not clumsy or poorly balanced. OK, there were isolated examples that were some or all of these, but why talk about bad swords? Early on when custom knife makers started trying to make medieval swords, there was some tendency to make them like big knives. This resulted in swords that were far too heavy that didn't work all that well. Some people didn't care- some still don't. Fortunately, most of us learned pretty quick that that wasn't the way to go... Because of their length and the energy with which they strike the target, swords encounter stresses that knifes do not- they need to be engineered differently.

The medieval sword was a sophisticated and well-developed weapon. It was the highly evolved product of at least two thousand years of experience and experiment. Guilds of bladesmiths passed trade secrets down from generation to generation, and the body of knowledge demonstrated by surviving swords is awesome. There are some examples that easily equal Japanese swords for esthetics and craftsmanship. There is purity to these designs, a wedding of form and function that is quite elegant.

Because of Hollywood and inexpert writers of fiction most of us start out with the impression that these swords were heavy and slow. Hollywood portrays fighting with medieval swords the way it does for two reasons- at first they had no clue, but more recently it's because realistic swordplay is too fast and subtle for the average

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