Two bladed swords

[Joseph argento]

Wow, there's certainly a lot to address here

I think two bladed sword idea, which springs from either Dungeons and Dragons or Star Wars, is idiotic, with all due respect.

Such a weapon was featured in one of the Star Wars movies. My personal favorite example is in John Marco's "Tyrants and Kings" series, where the weapon can be separated into two sabers. This goes back to the original problem, being that two swords would be more useful than two joined together.

Well, if it's polearms you're thinking about, there is sort of a historical parallel. Many polearms were made with spiked buttcaps, which had all sorts of useful poking applications. I don't know of any two-bladed glaives, though. It seems to me that one would be vulnerable in the middle with something like that. Also, remember there's nothing you can do with two blades on a sword that you can't do with one.

True. But wouldn’t poking applications be even more fun if you could slash at your opponent with the backhand? As to there being no advantages, the only thing I could foresee would be the use of leverage in close quarters, at which point you're weapon would probably be useless anyway.

Alas M Argento, the catalog wherein I saw the double bladed thing was found on a sidewalk...
And the relative entertainment value being somewhat low, it soon enough was cast into oblivion.
Might consider having your character use a billhook. Could get firewood and murder people all in one tool.

No problem. The billhook thing would be a bit harder though, since I outfitted nearly half of one of my created race's army with them. <img src="/forum/images/icons/grin.gif" alt="" />

For one blade of your sword to be effective, you must have it pointed at the opponent (the tenet of "point always online" here). Well, if that is the case, by default you always have a sword tip pointed online at you! - Your own other blade. Likewise, for a sword to cut, you must describe a nice arc according to the cut attempted. The parallel inverse arc would thus be cutting back on you! (I.e., an oberhau to him becomes a simultaneous unterhau to you). I have enough worry keeping the opponent's blade from within my danger zone without having to worry about two blades in it (his and my own!) I think that a double-edged sword is a fine thing, but double bladed becomes (excuse the pun) more of a "double-edged sword" to you as the linear nature of it forces a blade at you every time you force one to the opponent

Hmmm... I suppose I could see that. One blade is always in the opposite line, but I chose to see this as an opportunity to instantly reverse the direction of your attack instead of to hurt yourself. If the weapon were held diagonally across the body, with one point towards the opponent and one pointing behind you perhaps? Then again, its hard to imagine what the contacts of a staff to your body would do were the weapon edged.

An afterthought: Perhaps such an implement, though not as practical in combat, would serve as a more efficient harvester of wheat? If used in a scything motion from one side of the body to the other, then number of cuts to the wheat would effectively double in efficiency.

Again, I only intended to discover what made such a weapon impractical, so that it had never been used historically.

[Travis Beamon]

True. But wouldn’t poking applications be even more fun if you could slash at your opponent with the backhand? As to there being no advantages, the only thing I could foresee would be the use of leverage in close quarters, at which point you're weapon would probably be useless anyway.

The reason a spike is better than the blade is because you can still grip the spike giving you the extra reach that polearms are so wonderful for.

[Stacy Clifford]

Remember that a spear is basically a knife on the end of a staff, so you can poke, slash or smash with it as desired. Some polearms were closer to a sword on a staff for that matter (partizans, etc.). The idea of having a blade on only one end is effective because it keeps your opponent as far away from you as possible by allowing you to grip the pole from one end, and many of us can tell you from experience here that it's much harder to fight an opponent who can keep you out of reach. The spiked butt cap doesn't get in the way of your grip or inhibit long thrusts, but it's there just in case you do need to swap ends and shorten up.

[JeanryChandler]

As for cutting a staff, I have to disagree with you a bit, Jeanry. It may not be that difficult to cut through an immobile staff, but to cut through one that is feinting, probing, thrusting, and generally moving around a lot is another story. Unless you cut into it head on going in opposite directions, the staff is probably going to give a bit on impact and absorb some of the cutting force, so that you'll be chipping at it more than cutting sections off.

We tried some kind of dangerous experiments a while back on some of my trusty pine maul handles, and found it was fairly easy to hack most of the way through them with one strike when a person held it at arms length, and very easy to knock good sized chips away from the wood. The swords we were using weren't even really sharps, one was a blunt and the other was a 'factory edge'. I'll grant you it isn't going to happen every time, but often enough to make using the staff quite dangerous, especially in hard edge to haft contact of any kind.

Also, even when catastrophic damage didn't occur, incremental damage in the form of chips and nicks was virtiually inevitable, weakening the wood. We ended up destroying three maul handles in about five minutes of this experiment.

Also remember that an unrimmed shield was valued for the fact that a sword could get stuck in it, and I imagine the same could happen in a stout hardwood staff. A staff with a nifty new sword attachment could make a really nasty club (or fling the sword really far away), and watch out for the backup dagger.

I think this is maybe a bit far-fetched. You would have to have a stout hafted staff indeed to hold a blade. The shields used by Vikings were usually made of very soft wood (ideally linden, which is like basswood) and also quite thin. You can hack into something like this easily with a machete... Linden wood as been used for shields going back to Roman times because it is also very fibrous, unlike say oak or pine, so it doesn't split but tends to grip penetrating objects like arrows or spear heads. (This is how a 1/4" shield can actually provide some functional protection on the battlefield). Plus of course the shield is around a meter in diamter so even if the sword penetrates 4 or 5 inches, it's still going to be stuck in the shield rather than cutting through it.

So I think the shield is vastly more likely to stop a cut, while a staff would chip, splinter or break.

The one possible fault in my argument is that I'm not sure what kind of wood was typical of staffs in the day, and what properties it may have had. Yew is pretty flexible I know... .

I'm sure you can tell me...

Jr

[Stacy Clifford]

I admit the sword sticking in the staff is pretty unlikely, but I think it could happen at least with certain types of wood and a shallow angled cut (and just plain bad luck). As far as I know the only wood I've seen referenced for staves is oak, but I doubt that's all that was used. I have a nice hickory staff which I think would survive a few sword blows considerably better than anything made of pine. Polearms also often had some metal strapping (langets?) down the haft to help protect it. However, I think any staff man who lets his weapon take more than a couple of sword hits probably isn't a very good one and is likely to be dead shortly for playing too defensively. The best defense for staff against sword is a good offense precisely because the staff is destructible.