The mighty Axe

[Steven Blakely]

I know very well that what i will come up with will not be historicly acurate. But to just ignore a weapon weapon because of the difficulty in learning it. It seems to me like you would really be missing out on some unique experiences. There are some other ren martail arts groups that claim to teach the pole hammer. (notice i used the words claim )
And if i do use the le jue de la hache then i will be in fact learning a historic form for the axe.

[Jon Pellett]

Steven:

The 'axe' taught in Le Jeu de la Hache is, in fact, a "pole hammer." Pollaxes can have small axe blades or war-hammer heads. So if you are looking specifically for plain unadorned axe, that's not the place to look.

If you want to learn the two-handed, long-handled axe, you can basically just use pollaxe or halberd techniques and you'll be pretty damn historically accurate. As Marozzo says "...note that all these three sorts of weapons [bill, halberd, and axe] are one and the same in play...."

There are tons of other sources for halberd and pollaxe besides Le Jeu - Fiore, Talhoffer, Anonimo, Marozzo, Manciolino, DiGrassi are all available online, and there's also Kal, Mair, Meyer, and heavens knows who else.

Cheers

Cheers

[david welch]

There is another way, too, but I would consider it to be near the last resort...

Supposing most weapon techniques are grouped like I was talking about earlier with half-sword and poll axe.

You wanted to learn how to use the WMA weapon X (wX), but there is no material on it.

You could look at several forms of other martial arts, to see if they had X. Then see what X techniques were grouped with.

So, say for instance you looked at several Eastern MA, and found that they had X (eX) and it's techniques were similar to another weapon (eY).

If you could say:

1eX is similar to 1eY
2eX is similar to 2eY
and
3eX is similar to 3eY

Then you could guess (and that would still be all it is) that
wX is similar to wY

and base your techniques for wX off of wY, provided we had source materials for Y.

As long as you only used 1eX, 2eX and 3eX for the survey and kept all their techniques out of wX, you should not be corrupting WMA with EMA influence.

But again, this is just IMO.
You would still want to look for other evidence, such as artwork, and also to see if there was any hints to X in the Y material. Meyer does this quite a bit, once you know to look for it.

[Nathan Dexter]

I think that the value of learning something like the tomahawk is good, but there are considerable diferences between axes even in europe. the vikings had at least tree different basic kinds that all could have differences in the individual weapon. I think the best way to go about learning with it is the same way ancient people learned things, by the trial and error approach. Do what you can and find out what works, and what doesn't. And back to tomahawks, they are different, because most of them have a punching point, rather than a shearing blade, and where does the host of this video get hid information? Be sure to check out your sources! I'm glad the first thing I stumbled across was John's Medeival Swordsmanship. I was lucky. This is probably common sense, and I know I've said it before, but axes as weapons are a lot different than axes as tools.

[Steven Blakely]

Steven:

The 'axe' taught in Le Jeu de la Hache is, in fact, a "pole hammer." Pollaxes can have small axe blades or war-hammer heads. So if you are looking specifically for plain unadorned axe, that's not the place to look.

If you want to learn the two-handed, long-handled axe, you can basically just use pollaxe or halberd techniques and you'll be pretty damn historically accurate. As Marozzo says "...note that all these three sorts of weapons [bill, halberd, and axe] are one and the same in play...."

There are tons of other sources for halberd and pollaxe besides Le Jeu - Fiore, Talhoffer, Anonimo, Marozzo, Manciolino, DiGrassi are all available online, and there's also Kal, Mair, Meyer, and heavens knows who else.

Cheers

Cheers

You are correct in that allot of the Polaxes had hammer head. But even historicly i have found that many actually had Axe heads. I have seen pictures in the book Le Jue that are actually axe headed. Althoigh i do apriciate the info on the halberds.