It's an entirely predictable irony that in the morning, when I have the energy to write, I haven't thought of a subject to write, and in the evening, when I've had a chance to think of things I'd like to record, I've lost too much energy to feel much like being creative. That was the case this morning, at least. Will to write, nothing to write about. I guess I could scan Ace of Spades until I find something to be outraged about, but it feels a little like cheating. Later on, my wife suggested I write about something I had been ranting on the day before, about cultural imperialism of imposing the ephemeral values of modern culture on figures in the past. This had been occasioned by something I noted reading a passage of Robert E. Howard's "Beyond the Black River", that did not match my memory of the story when I was a teenager. It appeared that a line had been changed to make it less racially objectionable. I would never change someone else's words for them, but I can understand the urge to. What I can't abide is it being done in a book that claims to be the original, unaltered work of the author. It destroys-it murders-the past. How can we know where we came from, when the very words that preceded us have been destroyed?
Now I can't know that it happened. My memory may be faulty. Or perhaps the edition I had was the inaccurate one. It's my opinion that Robert E. Howard, while believing much of the foolish pseudoscience surrounding race in the early 20th Century, wasn't personally racist in the truest sense. If anything, he evinced an admiration for ethnicities he perceived as "closer to nature". Compared to Lovecraft, for instance, he was positively progressive.
But that's not what I came to talk about. Turns out, I need to get started on a swordplay related syllabus to prepare to begin teaching saber on Saturday morning. Thus the title. Who was Alfred Hutton? He, with his good friend Egerton Castle, and Sir Richard Burton (the explorer, not the actor), was one of the premier scholars of the sword of the 19th Century. These three men were largely responsible for carrying the knowledge of classical swordsmanship through to the modern day. Like most fencers of the 19th Century, they believed heartily in the "evolution" of swordplay; that it progressed, in a logical trail, from barbarians whacking each other crudely made ten pound "broadswords" lacking any finesse or ability to cunning foilists they were accustomed to. This is of course, hilariously wrong, but consider what they had to work with. The fechtbuchs and manuals they translated were barely closer to their day and time than they are to ours, and they did not have the benefit of on-line translation software, bulletin boards, instantaneous communication, or digital printing. They tried, using all the skill the resources a classical education gave them to keep the ancient knowledge alive, and for that we owe them a debt.
Say what one will about their knowledge of medieval and Renaissance swordplay (which was better and more accurate than I give the impression above), Alfred Hutton developed a system of saber that was more technical than the crude efforts taught the English military of his day. Remember even into the Nineteenth Century, the saber was still an important weapon, especially for cavalry, and the English had fallen behind Europe in skill, especially the Eastern Europeans (who still excel with the saber). His method was based largely on earlier manuals for backsword and cut-and-thrust, and he took those plates and developed a system that conformed to modern fencing terminology.
So that is what I will begin teaching on Saturday-Alfred Hutton's system of saber fencing, as laid out in the book Cold Steel. My students for the most part have more of a HEMA background, so it will be interesting to teach someone whose background is longsword, rather than foil. Should be interesting.
Since this meandered much more than I thought it would, that means I've got my subject for tomorrow-to write the beginning of the syllabus. See ya then.
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