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First look – Red Dragon Concepts Federschwert

Image: Red Dragon Concepts FederschwertThe Knight Shop, under its in-house equipment brand Red Dragon, has finally produced the first batch of it’s long-promised customisable federschwert for public sale.

After several years development, Red Dragon’s component-based HEMA training weapon has emerged from its Eastern European partner’s forge and is on sale through The Knight/HEMA/Sword Shop for a bargain opening offer price of £150. …

Fencing in the Ancient World

Egyptian stick fighting
Egyptian stick fighting

The word “Carma” coming from Sanskrit refers to fencing in ancient times. The modern word “Escrime” is used to signify the art of “touching without being touched,”

Mankind has a history of fighting and conflict. People have tried to compensate for their physical weakness by inventing weapons to defend against or conquer animals and other humans. Weapons developed from wood, stone and then metal, lead man to try to perfect methods of combat; to maximize their most effective strengths and skills for both offence and defence – the art of fencing. …

Romancing the Sword [re-post]

Image: Alita, Hellboy, Thor Ragnarok postersThe final release poster for Alita: Battle Angel is out and she’s holding some weirdly unidentifiable, but cool-looking sword. A 26th-century cyborg still needs a sword.

Cue Hellboy reboot and in the poster, the guy who carries an unfeasibly large calibre revolver is holding… a sword. As is… Transformer‘s own Optimus Primus Stove, a thirty-foot alien robot from another planet last seen wielding a dirty great sword, which presumably transforms into, I dunno, a roofer’s scaffold tower? …

Bartitsu and the ‘New Art of Self Defence’

Image: Bartitsu New Art headerMr Edward William Barton-Wright was an English railway engineer who travelled widely and formulated what today we call a mixed martial art. Barton-Wright combined elements of boxing, jujitsu, cane fighting (la cane), and French kick boxing (savat) in order to create a self defence system that could be used by gentlemen on the mean streets of Edwardian London or elsewhere in or beyond the British Empire. For a short time it was so popular that even Sherlock Holmes employed a form of it in his detective adventures; a down-and-dirty form was picked up in the Robert Downey Jnr / Guy Ritchie Holmes movies of a few years ago. …