Art of the Sword

"The volunteers of HEMA, those of us who execute and not just ideate, have had two primary goals in mind: 1. Foster HEMA as a culture and a community across the globe, based on passion for the arts and compassion for each other. 2. Build HEMA as a collection of arts that will endure through time, just as the Asian Martial Arts have." This is mostly some thoughts sparked by this  article . Are the bulk of HEMA participants really that internationalist in outlook? Firstly a minor quibble, I'm pretty sure that the bulk of the "volunteers of HEMA" that do things and don't just "ideate" are probably not that internationalist in outlook. The people, in my experiece, who worry the most about the big picture and the "HEMA Community" tend to be those who ideate. For those doers you could probably, more accurately, replace these goals with: 1. Foster a culture and community in your club, your city and possibly your country based on a passio...

The Zufechten is the phase for setting up attacks, seeing openings and generally preparing our win, but if you want to fence from the Nach it’s also the time to show the opponent the openings you want them to attack into, to prepare your counter ahead of time, and to make them uncomfortable enough that they’ll throw a poorly executed attack that will be easier to defend. http://longswordsinlondon.tumblr.com/post/165400841911/pro-activity-in-combat-sports 

So, my Club has just completed their 2017 open tournament. This post is a summary of my thoughts around this experience and follows from this post from 2016 tournament. A bit of background, the tournament is open to all other Clubs or individuals in New Zealand and sometimes further afield. It usually attracts around 30-40 people. Many of those are from my own Club but there's usually about a third comes from other Clubs. Last year I organised the tournament and spent most of the time marshaling and judging. This year I managed to duck out of organising altogether and spent most of the time training in the run-up. I also did a small amount of judging at the event. The rules for the tournament are based on the Fechtschule New Year ruleset, or a round-robin style with each engagement limited to the first blow. You have three lives and different weapons have slightly different scoring and restrictions. Given the need to cater for a wide variety of practice in terms of safety ...