{"id":4646,"date":"2010-07-22T12:21:36","date_gmt":"2010-07-22T16:21:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=4646"},"modified":"2011-02-12T11:19:20","modified_gmt":"2011-02-12T15:19:20","slug":"swordplay-is-hard-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2010\/07\/22\/swordplay-is-hard-work\/","title":{"rendered":"Swordplay is hard work"},"content":{"rendered":"

Peter Saltsman<\/a> visits Toronto’s Academy of European Medieval Martial Arts (AEMMA) and finds that there’s not much “play” when you’re just starting to learn how to wield a sword:<\/p>\n

\n

I was hoping this courageous group of historians and hobbyists could teach me to fight like they do in movies such as Robin Hood<\/em>, Macbeth<\/em> or the new Pillars of the Earth<\/em> series. In the movies, it looks so easy. The sword fights I know are the perfect harmony of choreographed bravado, hyperbolic grunting and dramatic pauses for someone to say \u201cMy name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.\u201d<\/p>\n

To the disappointment of my eight-year-old self, real medieval combat is nothing like that.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019re not really trying to hit each other,\u201d says Cal Rekuta, a Senior Free Scholar at AEMMA, of cinematic battles. \u201cStage fighting is the art of looking dangerous. We\u2019re actually studying how it was dangerous.\u201d<\/p>\n

I was in over my head. When a man dressed in a full suit of chain-mail armour — armour he weaved himself — talks about danger, he probably means it.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I visited AEMMA once, several years ago. It was quite an enjoyable experience, but I’m more interested in later-period swordwork than most of their membership at that time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Peter Saltsman visits Toronto’s Academy of European Medieval Martial Arts (AEMMA) and finds that there’s not much “play” when you’re just starting to learn how to wield a sword: I was hoping this courageous group of historians and hobbyists could teach me to fight like they do in movies such as Robin Hood, Macbeth or […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,18],"tags":[569,678,207],"class_list":["post-4646","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-sports","tag-fencing","tag-swords","tag-toronto"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-1cW","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4646","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4646"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4646\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7743,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4646\/revisions\/7743"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4646"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4646"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4646"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}