Conversations with ARMA Director John Clements

PART  I, PART II, PART III, PART IV,
PART V, PART VI, PART VII, PART VIII

VI - ON MODERN REPRODUCTION SWORDS

You must get asked a lot about what’s a good sword to get or who makes the best replicas swords?

Constantly. But ARMA does not officially endorse any brand nor do we make nor sell any.  Like many other enthusiasts, ARMA wants one thing: more accurate and more reliable information on Medieval and Renaissance martial arts.  We have been for too long buried under mountains of myths and misconceptions and sheer nonsense about historical fencing and our own martial culture. This view extends to wanting more accurate swords at reasonable prices for the value. 

Then what does ARMA do in this regard?

We try to stay out of making any recommendations of specific replica swords so not to offend any makers who might feel slighted, so I believe in educating the sword community, whether they are manufactures or consumers. An educated consumer is going to want a better quality product and a more “historically accurate” weapon.  Today, most people buy swords off the rack to play with or decorate. Whereas historically, swords were very personally items and were working tools –valued and prized yes, but perishable tools nonetheless.  So, what ARMA tries to do, sort of as a consumer advocate for sword enthusiasts, is try to get sword makers to follow actual historical models for their pieces and reproduce their correct dimensions, measurements, weight and cross-sectional changes.  In this way we are assured of more realistic performance when interpreting and practicing historical techniques.  When the manufacturers don’t do this we only ask they say so up front.  But getting manufacturers to listen is not easy. 

Can you recommend a manufacturer or maker of off-the-shelf (non-custom) swords?

Sigh… since taste is subjective and these are very personal items, I really can’t fully recommend any one off-the-shelf brand of swords in particular.  There’s several pieces we’re really impressed with and several were terribly unimpressed by.  I have seen all sorts of modern swords, good and bad from the same maker, and because of differences in batches of swords they change in quality so often that I don’t know what to suggest.  It's so hit and miss it's depressing.  I can tell you though, there are some pieces that I’ve liked in the recent past, but whether or not they are still made as well now (or even better) I really can’t say, so I prefer to avoid doing so.  I certainly don't get to examine every sword out there, and as I already indicated, there can be differences among various models from the same maker and differences with their identical pieces.  There are plenty of models by makers we just haven’t seen or can’t afford to test realistically or have not done more than just hold and look at.  I can only comment in private on those I own that I’ve played with at length or those that come into my possession for a time.  Bottom line, to train and practice according to the historical methods you’ll want the most accurate, light, and sturdy a blade as possible. 

Ok, what advice then can you offer a novice interested in purchasing a practice sword?

There are a lot of issues involved here.  It goes without saying that no one buys a sword today with the intent of fulfilling its original purpose: slaying opponents.  We have to ask then, what do you want a sword for? Training, theatrical fighting, test-cutting, or just costume wear and display?   How much can you spend on it?  Less than $150, $200-300, over $500, over $2000?   But the main question is just how exactly do you tell whether an “XYZ” brand replica is truly better than an “ABC” brand replica? Based on what characteristics or qualities? Who has the knowledge to offer a trustworthy opinion?  Is there an objective criterion by which a serous martial arts student can judge as they wade through marketing hype and technical jargon? Some may ask, what is historically accurate anyway and who defines it?  Does it even matter? Some will even say as long as a sword is a sharp piece of tempered steel, who cares if it’s a close copy of a real one or not?   After all, how do we know they (i.e., historical swordsmiths) didn't make them this way?  You’ll also hear people say, for that matter, how do we know they wouldn’t like modern swords now if they could have tried them?  So, it’s not a simple question.

Then what information is there for a consumer to rely on when selecting a sword to purchase?

I recommend readers take a close look at the article on our site, “A Vocabulary for Modern Replica and Reproduction Swords” under the Spotlight section, for one thing.   I once got asked a good question when someone said to me, “How do I, with no experience with swords tell the difference between a good quality piece and a cheap neo-wallhanger?”  I answered, “That’s just it, you can’t”.  Without experience how can you tell the difference?  What do have to go on?   

So, what then can you really tell of a replica sword?

You can ask about the tang for one thing. If it’s not a full tang I would not bother with it.  And by ‘full tang’, I mean of one solid rectangular piece, not short and not with a rat-tail piece of rod welded on.  You can also test the balance or the feel, and you could perform a flex test to see if it’s not too stiff or too wobbly and returns true.  I think equally important is the edge. If the blade is made as a stage combat tool for re-enactment / living-history combat, in my experience it is often too thick and the weapon is overly heavy and poorly balanced.  (Though, there are a few blades with thicker edges I have seen that were made as practice weapons that were quite good).  When it comes to the guard, there is a lot of casting and spot welding of guards in the industry today and they tend to easily snap under casual contact with another blade.  This is particularly so with ring or close-hilts.  Some are also made of nickel-plated brass, which is too soft and invariably too heavy and typically distorts the weapon’s balance. 

            You could ask about the blade’s hardness and hear some answer about Rockwell scales, but without a context for Rockwell hardness it’s meaningless, and besides, it says nothing about the swords overall composition. An edge has one hardness and the outside of a blade may have another and the core still another.  You could ask if the blade is made of a high-carbon steel, but then again, with modern metallurgical science most all modern industrial steel now is high carbon.  So it doesn’t tell you much.  You might be told a blade is hand made, but again, that does tell you much since it could just mean that modern hand tools were used on it or that it was made in a third world country where they didn't have electricity.  If you’re told a blade was “custom” made, well that might mean only that a customer ordered it a certain way as opposed to a common design bought off the shelf.  Plus, you might ask if a sword is historically accurate and be told ‘yes’, but on close examination and questioning you’ll learn that it only means it was copied from a photo of a historical piece not that it was made from the same exact dimensions and measurements (meaning in terms of cross-sectional geometry as well as length).  Then, when it comes to the hilt, a hilt might not be attached in the historical manner or use hard wood in the handle or have a properly forged steel guard.  Most guards are mass produced rather than custom fit to a specific blade shape.   So, if it’s not attached well you can always modify it, but it would be better if you didn’t have to.  So, bottom line is there are many issues to consider, the least of which is price.  

What about a reputation of a sword maker?

Well, again, you have to ask who is giving the reputation, where is it coming from?  Sometimes people raving on the Net or at a Renn faire about a sword they bought might be the ones who don’t know any different. Plus you have to consider that different people have different reasons or intentions for why they buy swords and what they do with them.  They may just be hanging it on the wall, or standing around in costume, or just posing with it rather than giving it a good work out or test-cutting against firm materials.  Then again, people praising a brand of sword may have a personal or economic relationship with the maker that renders doubt to their objectivity –and they won’t mention to you that they are a distributor for the brand or personal friend of the maker.  As the saying goes, caveat emptor, buyer beware.

Do you test many different makes of swords?

Now and then. I'll cut with  anything I can get my hands on.   As many already know, I have an open offer to test and evaluate swords for anyone and give them honest feedback privately –unless I really like the sword, and then I will happily tell everyone publicly.  I do this consulting work occasionally for some manufacturers. But sometimes…a maker has “requested” my endorsement for “complimentary” swords and I won't and don’t give it.  At other times, after they hear what I intend to do with their sword in my testing and they back off sending me one. At some times, when they cannot answer my basic questions about their blade’s accuracy or hilt construction or some other aspect, they withdrawal the offer for me to test them.  No big deal. They usually just go find others with less knowledge and experience to get the preferred review they want.  But…one or two makers will instead feel it necessary to personally insult me and to try to discredit myself and my associates. Add to this our ARMA policy of consumer advocacy and education and it spells problems for those sword makers falsely hyping their product’s qualities –and yes, it’s also a problem for those sword fans who spent good money on a sword that they do not then want to find out is not as special as they were lead to believe. 

So business rears its often ugly head?

Well, they certainly have a right to earn a living and offer their wares. It would be great if this community was all one big happy family, but it’s about economics. There are a lot of small mom & pop garage-shop sword makers out there, some do very good work, others less so, but they feel very threatened when they don’t get the praise they want and they will retaliate.  It’s a shame and a waste of energy.  To quiet their critics they should put their effort into making better products rather than attacking consumer advocates. 

You’ve been a gadfly as well as consultant among the industry?

I dunno, have I?  I know I’ve given my opinion at times, for better or worse, and I’ve tried to look out for the average student’s interest.  I love swordmakers, where would I be without them?  I need them!   Yet, creating a sword no more makes someone a swordsman than building a piano makes you a pianist.  I’ve compared in the past swordmakers to aerospace engineers building fighter jets, they don’t fly them in combat, trained officer pilots do, and it is they who give the feedback on performance and handling. Like the relationship between racecar drivers and auto-mechanics, you have to have both.  It’s a symbiosis. And when we have folk today not making real swords in the true historical manner, and folks not using swords in the true historical manner, how much do we really know then about either? 

But you have criticized some makes and models, yes?

Sure, who hasn’t?  As I’ve often advised, any time a sword seller or sword maker offers pieces not based on copies of actual originals, but then claims their blades have “special qualities” that others don’t, a little warning buzzer should be going off in the back of your head. 

I think what bothers me, is that you can have a sword manufacturer –who is trying to sell a product – say things on the Net which may or may not be true, he might even exaggerate or out right lie. His customers may be completely clueless neophytes when it comes to knowing decent replicas, let alone real swords, yet they will praise him to high heaven and influence people in the process.  At other times, when a guy has spent $500 or $900 for a sword, he ain’t about to bang it around with force on another blade or try to cut strong materials in order to evaluate and test it.   That’s just not what people do. So, often, an expensive sword may get praised but never really evaluated or properly tested as a similar $200 sword would.

Another thing that bugs me, is when people confuse a sword fabricator –who only operates a machine (not even by hand sometimes) to grind a piece of steel in a stock removal process –with an actual real swordsmith –a man, often an accredited or certified bladesmith, who forges and tempers his own weapons by hammer and fire. 

Are there problems you’ve noticed among some makers?

From my point of view, if they aren’t accurate or truthful in what they are selling it’s a terrible shame.  Remember, professional sword makers are businessmen first and foremost.  I’ll just say this: when it comes to what attributes and qualities you want in a real sword, you can have a novice manufacturer who will say, ‘don’t listen to that martial artist swordsman with 22+ years of experience in handling weapons’, and instead say ‘listen to me who’s trying to sell you a product’.  They try to discredit the practitioner who has actually handled and trained with antique blades!  It’s absurd.  They know I know more about the subject and will be able to tell others that their product may be lacking. That kind of truth is devastating to a substandard manufacturer.  

What do you think of some of the tests or evaluations of swords on the Net?

I think it’s great that people are doing more of it.  But much of what I’ve seen can be misleading.  For instance, when handling a sword, some people will swing it around and cut at a few pieces of cardboard or milk cartons and feel they have “tested” it and now know something about its use.  The reality is simple test-cuts on light materials is only the very beginning. It’s a good start, but it doesn't equate to long-time test-cutting experience with all manner of makes and models of swords on all types of targets combined with training in how to strike with power, speed, focus, and intent, etc.  I don’t want to be negative, but I like to encourage good test-cutting and serious study, not reward mild halfhearted efforts. 

I sincerely believe a good many Internet posters merely hang their swords on the wall or wear them to the Renn fair. But online they will eagerly write about them as if they train hard.  I suspect most are not about to honestly evaluate their qualities.  We’ve also noted that if your own subjective evaluation of a particular maker’s sword disagrees with someone else’s, who may have far less credentials, the other person tends to get really snotty about it. 

On top of this, when you stop and think about it, how much is it really worth when complete neophytes on the Net are raving about how ‘accurate’ a sword is or how ‘good’ a sword is when none of them are even using those swords for anything close to their original purpose: fighting?

What do you advise students do in test-cutting?

Well, that is a complex thing to answer. I actually have a long chapter on it in my upcoming Training Guide which I’ve been.  I don’t believe a modern replica sword can be said to have been “tested” by using it to make a few cuts on water jugs, cardboard boxes or thin plywood. A sword has to be struck hard on substantial a target materials as well as contact another blade with force before it can said to have been tested realistically. And to optimize the effect tests should be done with correct physical mechanics, i.e., by someone who knows how to wield a blade with proper motion and energy (…it takes a skilled marksman, for instance, to evaluate whether a particular gun is firing accurately or not). 

Can you elaborate?

Sure: gauging either a good blade or effective cutting both require a high degree of familiarity with what swords were designed to do and a person who trains physically to achieve it.   Test-cutting and sword fighting skill go hand in hand.  A tester who already has the skill of striking strong, clean blows with proper mechanics, first begins cutting on soft materials to acquire understanding of the correct angle and follow through.  Then, once technique is consistent, harder materials are then struck with force.  In this way the tester can determine that the technique was good but the blade or edge was at fault.  There are some necessities in serious test-cutting like knowing the 4 or 5 different historical gripping methods to use, the 8 cutting lines using the 5 or 6 fundamental cuts, and the 14 to 17 total true and false-edge strikes, plus correct footwork, stepping and balance, as well as focus and follow-through. All these are needed to ensure fluidity and maximum force.  This doesn’t even address the importance of realistic “emotional content” for proper energy in the throwing blows.  So, yeah, it takes a swordsman to properly test a sword. It was true back then, it’s still true today.    Otherwise, a person can reasonably only say something as far as, “I like this sword, it felt good to me and was easy to wield.”

Let me also add this, it may very possibly be that our modern perspective for evaluating replica swords is flawed. We may need to think about a sword’s quality only in terms of how well it inflicts damage, and not to how it feels when we play around with it. These weapons after all were designed for the very singular purpose that, besides occasional test-cutting, we today do not investigate: hitting raw meat and bone. They were not designed merely for swinging about or banging together. This would surely have been the view of historical warriors –not whether the sword could receive parries or beat on another blade, but how it cleaved and sheared when striking home. Their standard for judging a blade was focused only on what, in a skilled hand, it could do to human flesh.

Are there problems you’ve noticed among some makers?

Oh yes, occasionally we run afoul of sword makers and comments on replica swords have created friction for ARMA. There is one sword fabricator in particular who made truly asinine comments on Sword Forum about how no one needs an expert swordsman (a direct reference to me) to tell you how a good replica sword should properly handle, and then claimed that one very bright 19 year-old girl (a former student of mine who has never seen an real antique blade) knew more about swords than either Hank Reinhardt or I, and then was claiming that his own blades possessed special “harmonic” qualities that made them better than others (at the very time we actually found them lacking!).  That the Sword Forum website was acting as a distributor for this guy’s blades naturally made them partial to his ramblings, and we’ve been unwelcome over there since then.  

This may be obvious, but what is so important about a replica being an accurate copy of an original design?

Because we know the originals worked.  For today’s practitioner, study of this subject must begin with the use of weapons that are as accurate as possible.  The more realistic your weapon, the more realistic your technique and your understanding of fundamental principles and concepts.  Each digression from this causes a degree of misinterpretation of the methods developed by and for real weapons in real combat. Unrealistic weapons function incorrectly, distort techniques and encourage improper mechanics. This dynamic leads to misconceptions about personal combat and misinterpretation of the historical source material. Practice based on this misunderstanding causes still further misinterpretation and a distorted sense of timing and distance –all because of training with inaccurate weapons. Serious practitioners must avoid this cycle.

            I will add this: We can never be sure what the true teachings of the historical masters were.  But we can try to emulate them as near as possible using the same equipment.  This means using swords that closely resemble the dimensions, weight, and balance of the originals.  The more changes we make, the further we get from an accurate understanding of the dynamic of real historical fighting. 

You don’t seem to have many firm, hard answers for us here?

I think what needs to be stressed is not what swords I personally like or dislike, but the bottom line idea I am trying to present that in order to recognize a good replica sword you need considerable training and practice with different swords.  But this is a catch-22.  You need experience with good swords…yet to do that you need to find a good one.   But, you can’t reliably do that until you have a good idea of what make one a good sword in the first place.  One of the ways we in ARMA try to help students get around this problem is to stress in our method training with different tools (wasters, padded, blunts, sharps) so that we continually refine our understanding. As one of my students pointed out, if a novice practitioner knows almost nothing about swordplay, a simple wooden dowel rod will be as effective a training tool as a highly accurate replica sword. Unless they have first learned proper aspects of swordplay, the better tool or better replica will not make much difference for some time.  But as the practitioner improves, his technique will benefit from the subtleties and nuances of using a more accurate replica.  With proper study, they will learn to discern the quality of a replica blade. But, without access to better tools they will miss crucial elements as well as pick up bad habits.  So, this explains why I am more critical of replica blades than most others are. As a student gains more experience, they will inevitably discover that what once seemed like a really good blade before may not seem so good now. As my student here said, when your training begins to surpass the quality of your training tools, then you know you are learning.

Anything else you’d like to add?

Yes, I think the basic problem and issue here (which gets lost in the netspeak) can be summed up as threefold:

1.    Anytime ANY replica sword maker or seller hypes his product to the point of misinformation or lies we will speak out to educate and protect the consumer enthusiast in this community.  Some of them will take it personally and strike back personally. 

2.    Unless a consumer/enthusiast-student of the sword has had ample opportunity to handle real historical blades (and how few have?) they are simply ill-equipped to expertly evaluate how good (accurate) or how bad a replica is.  That is where authorities such as a few others and myself try to come in.  

3.    If a consumer/enthusiast-student of the sword has spent a large sum of money on a potentially inaccurate replica without knowing any better, it is reasonable to assume they will not find the previous two statements very appetizing and may even feel a certain amount of resentment or discomfort toward those who bring it to public attention.  

Thus, I hope readers can perhaps understand that for someone in my position –with access to experts such as respected museum curators & researchers, private collectors like Hank Reinhardt and Lee Jones, as well as skilled smiths like Paul Champaign, and contact with makers like Dan Maragni, Arms & Armor, and Simon Fearnhamm of Raven, as well as having actually practiced with authentic antiques swords (not just handled them) –I lament when makers reduce the accuracy of the product to reflect the fickle changing tastes of the lowest common denominator consumer, and I have little patience for hype and deceit promoted by some commercial vendors.  

Finally, what advice can you offer a new student trying to decide on buying their first sword for training?