The Illustrated Guide to Viking Martial Arts E-Book

Antony Cummins

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 143

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

Martial Arts expert Antony Cummins reveals the hitherto hidden world of Viking hand-to-hand combat, employing the sword, the spear, the axe and the shield. Based upon a careful analysis of the Norse Sagas, the techniques described are recreated precisely, from knocking down a spear in mid-flight to the shield cleave. Illustrated with over 250 images, The Illustrated Guide to Viking Martial Arts in effect represents the earliest combat manual in the world. This insight into the warriors who were the scourge of Dark Age Europe is a feat of textual interpretation – and imagination.

Leseprobe

Viking battle axes and spears found in the River Thames. (Courtesy Museum of London)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

A special thank you to Todd Palmer for his essay on the Viking quotations that has allowed me to produce this work. Viking Fighting Notes from 23 Sagas was the foundation and inspiration for this book. Also to Jayson Kane for his work on the graphics, his noir style bringing the images to life.

About the Author

Antony Cummins is an author and historical researcher. Having obtained his Masters degree at the University of Manchester in Archaeology, he has worked as a TV presenter, documentary fact checker and writer. He is also the head of the Historical Ninjutsu Research Team who translate and publish medieval ninja training manuals from various clans of antiquity. As a martial artist, Antony has spent most of his martial arts life studying human movement and the dynamics of combat, concentrating on the Japanese arts but with the aim of understanding the universal principles of movement that define historical combat. For more information on his work visit his website:

www.natori.co.uk

About the Graphic Designer

Jay Kane studied Art and Design in England and works as a freelance graphic designer. He has has worked alongside Antony Cummins for many years, realising his visions. Jayson lives in Stockport, England. For more information on his work, visit his website:

www.iamjaykane.co.uk

CONTENTS

Title

Acknowledgements

The Sagas

1 The Definition of a ‘Viking’

2 Martial Arts

The Weapons and the Images

3 The Sword

The Overhead Cut

The Strike to the Neck

The Downward Strike to the Shoulder

The Upper Shield Cleave

The Lower Shield Cleave

Severing the Arms

The Horizontal Cut

The Mid-level Strike to the Leg

The Low-level Strike to the Leg

Cutting Through Both Legs

The Thrust and Stab

The Leap and Thrust

The Downward Stab

The Two-Handed Cut

Throwing the Sword

Pummelling

Sundering a Weapon

The Parry and Cut

4 The Spear

The Spear Throw

Catching and Throwing it Back

The Thrust

The Upward Thrust

The Lower Thrust

The Impale and Lift

The Slash and Cut

The Strike to the Centre of the Back

5 The Axe

The Overhead Cut

The Strike to the Neck

Striking the Shoulder

The Shield Cleave

The Horizontal Cut

The Mid-level Strike to the Legs

Attacking the Feet

Attacking the Arms

Sundering a Weapon

The Parry and Cut

Ambidexterity

6 The Shield

The Shield Wall

Individual Protection

Hemming In

The Sword Disarm

The Shield as a Weapon

The Redirection

Knocking Down a Spear

7 Unarmed Combat

The Body Grapple

The Manipulative Grab

The Improvised Weapon

The Throw

The Disarm

Leaping the Spear

8 Horse Combat

The Pre-combat Dismount

The Spur Gash

9 Combination Moves

Combination 1

Combination 2

Combination 3

Combination 4

Combination 5

Combination 6

Combination 7

Combination 8

Combination 9

Combination 10

10 Group Combat

Group Combat 1

Group Combat 2

Group Combat 3

11 Miscellaneous Aspects of Combat

The Way of Death

The Way of Suicide

Claiming the Head

Armed and Ready?

The Spiked Shoes

12 Effectiveness of Weapons

13 Conclusion

Copyright

THE SAGAS

The sagas referred to in this book were sourced from the Online Medieval and Classical Library (OMACL) and are a collection of public domain texts that are available to all. For further information, please view the full manuscripts on the OMACL website or the published sagas themselves. Each saga has been given a Roman numeral for ease of reference.

I

The Life and Death of Cormac the Skald

II

The Story of the Heath-Slayings

III

The Story of the Volsungs

IV

The Story of the Ere-Dwellers

V

The Laxdaela Saga

VI

The Saga of Grettir the Strong

VII

The Story of Burnt Njal

Heimskringla, the Chronicle of the Kings of Norway, includes the following sagas:

VIII

Ynglinga

IX

Halfdan the Black Saga

X

Harald Hafager’s Saga

XI

Hakon the Good’s Saga

XII

Saga of King Harald Grafeld and of the Earl Hakon Son of Sigurd

XIII

King Olaf Trygvason’s Saga

XIV

Saga of Olaf Haraldson

XV

Saga of Magnus the Good

XVI

Saga of Harald Hardrade

XVII

Magnus Barefoot’s Saga

XVIII

Saga of Magnus the Blind and of Harald Gille

XIX

Saga of Sigurd, Inge and Eystein, the Sons of Harald

XX

Saga of Hakon Herdbreid

XXI

Magnus Erlingson’s Saga

1

THE DEFINITION OF A ‘VIKING’

The pounding of the surf, the call of a horn and the sight of a square sail on the horizon; you may be thinking that the next sound would be the troubled cry of a beachcomber screaming the word – Vikings! This may not have been the case. While the Anglo-Saxon word Wicing existed, we do not know when this word became the common name for all Scandinavian raiders, they may also have be called the Danes, North-men or other names. ‘Viking’ may be derived from the Old Norse word vik, meaning a bay, implying a Viking was one who kept his ship in a bay, or the Old English wic, meaning a camp or a trading place. However, the word Viking is used today to describe Scandinavian ‘warrior-farmers’ and/or Scandinavian privateers and raiders. It is not the intention of this book to list and identify the social differences in the Viking world, or to differentiate between those who were warrior-farmers and those who were professional sea raiders and privateers. The purpose is to attempt to reconstruct the fighting arts of all the people within the medieval Scandinavian world. No matter what they were called or how they were portrayed, we know that what we are dealing with is a group of men who are ‘warrior-farmers’ and that for the purposes of this book it does not matter if they were fighting in Scandinavia over land disputes, raiding monasteries or protecting the Dane-law in England. For this investigation into the martial arts of the Vikings, we have only to know that a ‘Viking’, as we have come to know them, was a Scandinavian who was part of a warrior culture with its own methods of fighting. Therefore, this book will refer to all Scandinavian warriors as ‘Vikings’, as that is the name by which they are now most commonly known.

ANALYSING THE TEXTS

The first thing an academic would do is list the pitfalls in attempting to reconstruct the Viking martial arts by using the post-Viking era writings. These include:

1 The time delay between the events of the saga era and the recording of the sagas can average around 200 years.

2 The authors were writing for a specific audience.

3 The clothes, weapons and items of the world in the sagas actually reflect the Christian medieval period at the time of writing.

4 The subtleties of translation could lead to mistakes.

5 The writers embellished the feats of those in the stories beyond the reality.

These problems are all good reasons not to trust the word of the sagas. Most academics would say it is too problematic to get a correct martial understanding from them. However, the aim of this book is simply to take the basic elements of the combat as described and start to reconstruct them as a martial art, not to analyse the historical record in full. So this book becomes a starting point for all Viking enthusiasts to work from, as a guideline for reference. While some feel that the reality is too far away to grasp, the author feels that the truths that will be unearthed through this approach are worth the effort of tackling the problems that the saga writers have left for us.

Now that these problems are established we can identify the solutions. It is the job of the reader to consider these problems at all times and to take them into account when striving for the truth. With this in mind we now turn to the counter-arguments.

1 This issue is a great factor in reliability and we can imagine that many changes have been made, especially with the Christianisation of the country. However, if a man is decapitated in a story it is unlikely that this will change into a leg amputation or a spear thrust, such evolution would not be natural. We can trust that if in the written saga a man was defeated by having his leg removed, then we can expect that the original story held the same information. Remember that the audience was still a warrior culture, even if that of Christian knights, they were still descendants of the people in these sagas and 200 years is not a long time for an aristocracy to transform itself, nor is it such a long time that the stories could have radically changed, so that the combat descriptions became distorted wholesale, even if they had become somewhat embellished.

2 The sagas certainly were aimed at a certain audience. We have to consider the difference in the warrior aristocracy of the Viking era and the warrior aristocracy of the early Christian medieval period. Underneath the religious change you still have a selection of aristocratic families who fight with similar weapons for similar reasons of greed, land and pride. They simply want to hear stories of the brave and the heroic, which has no bearing on the martial arts issue.

3 The look of a Viking and the look of a Christian knight may seem radically different from an external point of view. However, if we take into account the only factors that would affect the martial arts, then we can see that the differences are slight: a sword in the twelfth and thirteenth century is very like its Viking equivalent. It is still well constructed, of similar length and weight. The spear is still a principal weapon, as is the axe, the warrior wears mail and a helm, as did the Vikings. The only changes to this fundamental equipment are in the shape of the shield, from what was probably a circular version to a kite shape, and the addition of small sections of plate mail being worn. The issue of the shield is germane and is discussed in the text. And there appears to be no mention of plate mail in the sagas.

4 This is the biggest issue and the most problematic. All the sagas here are late nineteenth-century or early twentieth-century academic translations. We know from the introduction to the new translations of The Sagas of the Icelanders that these older translations are more ‘word for word’ than later works. These older texts are therefore better for our purposes as they stay as close to the original as possible. It does not matter in general how the translator has come up with sentences such as ‘his head was cleave in twain’ or ‘his leg was cut off below the knee’, any translation is unlikely to be factually incorrect. Here we are not concerned with the subtle meanings or literary skill of the work, we have used a small number of quotations that have direct meaning and are unlikely to be in error. This being said, it is still possible that translation may be the cause of some inaccuracies. On the whole, we have ignored ambiguous text references and poetic flourishes. We can use the most unambiguous quotations to begin to establish if groups of attack and defence methods can be categorised, and from these categorisations we can start to build the martial arts of the Vikings.

5 We have to remember that the audience for the sagas was a section of fighting men or people who have witnessed violence of a similar kind. So while there was embellishment, it was not in the realms of fantasy. Unrealistic embellishment about the Viking fighting arts at the time of writing would be like telling a story today in which a soldier of World War II shot and killed 500 men in an hour. The audience would simply refuse to believe it. The inclusion of demons, monsters and spirits has to be taken as a part of the world that they lived in, and heroic deeds were meant to be just outside of the reach of a warrior and relatively close to the reality of combat. Most of the descriptions are brutal and simple.

2

MARTIAL ARTS

As a martial artist and having spent a significant amount of time in Japan trying to find the ‘secrets’ behind the way of the warrior, I have learned a few lessons. Firstly, when martial artists from any style reaches a certain level, they tend to gravitate towards the same form of movement from whatever school they come, that is – balanced, economical and potentially deadly. Secondly, most people concentrate on the differences between styles, whereas the similarities outweigh dissimilarities. As a historian, I find that the modern martial arts audience do not think in the way in which ancient warriors thought. It is not often that you find the likes of Julius Caesar writing that the Gauls are soft and weak, nor do Irish monks say that the fighting style of the Vikings is rudimentary and lacking in organisation or finesse. The Mongols and the Japanese did not consider each other as poor fighters. It is rare in history to find a chronicler opining that the warriors over the next mountain are weaklings and that their martial prowess is questionable. In general, all martial arts styles across the globe share a great deal in common – and any man trained in those arts from a young age is a man to be feared. We should not fall in to the trap of underestimating how far a fighter can push himself and the skill level that can be achieved in any art, especially one that results in death.

A deep understanding of the martial arts is a lifelong pursuit. However, for those who have had no formal training, here are some precepts that I feel to be universal:

• Movement should always start at the hips

• The body should move as one

• Power does not come from the arm or muscles alone

• Balance should be retained and small steps should be taken at all times

• You should never overreach but instead move in and strike

• Martial arts are not static and a fighter should move like a ‘castle on wheels’, opening his portcullis only to attack

• Movements must be dynamic, three dimensional and fluid

I have spent my life looking for the connections between all martial arts and the universal truths I have come to are that a well trained man moves with absolute efficiency and strikes with formidable power, be it kung-fu, jujutsu or fencing; and to be on the receiving end of a determined attack by a master normally results in death.

THE WEAPONS AND THE IMAGES

Martial instruction books have consistently been plagued with drab pictures, grainy black and white photographs against a school hall gym background. The aim of this book is to merge three elements: historical research, martial arts instruction and noir style art, in a collaboration which should bring historical accuracy, art and entertainment together. That being said, it must be remembered that these images are graphical representations and therefore have limitations. Take note that at times, shields shown flat against the ‘wall’ of the image in reality would be covering any openings. The reader must take these images as two-dimensional representations of three-dimensional movement. The weapons in the images are artistic representations of the time period and may not match the saga descriptions completely. Taking both of the above points into consideration, Jayson Kane has done a wonderful job of creating a dynamic and inspirational martial arts guide.

Now that the stage is set and the problems identified, you have grasped the idea of martial arts and understand the approach taken to the weapons and to the style of the imagery, the opportunity to take an entirely new look at the world of the Viking warrior can be taken.

3

THE SWORD

‘The sword ye have, Bersi, is longer than lawful’

The sword, from no matter what era or in any form, is the emblem of the highest forms of the martial arts. To hold a sword brings out the warrior in most men and to watch it swing in silver arcs through the air rouses the blood. The Viking sword is no different. This chapter on swordsmanship reveals the dynamics of Viking sword combat and the bloody truth found at the end of a blade. The sword was an expensive piece of equipment, often handed down from generation to generation. Early blades were made of strips of wrought iron twisted with mild steel that were then forged and a hardened edge (usually edges) added.