About halfswording

[Corey Roberts]

Many of the masters (such as Fiore De Liberi) recommend halfswording is done primarily when armoured. However obviously in later manuals there is a large amount of halfswording with no armour at all and no hand protection whatsoever. My question is to what extent can you actually grip real weapons in order to halfsword and what prevents the hand from being injured against your blade when you halfsword?

[Richard Strey]

I can grab my sharpened sword ("chisel sharp") in the middle of the blade and thrust at a suspended car tire or switch to halfsword from a "florysh" and do a mortschlag at the same tire with serious power. No gloves needed. What keeps my fingers from coming off is a) Excerting pressure on the flats of the blade, not the edges and b) not sliding along, but keeping a firm grip.

[Jaron Bernstein]

I can similarly halfsword bare handed with my albion sempach with intact bare hands. That same blade goes through pork shoulder and bones pretty easily in test cutting.

[Matthew_Anderson]

Yep,

If you do a search, you should find several previous threads on this, it has been discussed several times here. Several things always come up, such actual sharpness of period blades, the use of gloves, a tight grip on the blade, etc. But I think many folks have shown through experimentation with modern replicas that is is possible to grip reasonably sharp blades, at least sharp enough to cut the usual targets, without injury. Even in armour, the palms of the hands are generally only protected by leather, and that is certainly adequate.