There Is No One Right Answer

So this is an idea that might seem obvious on it’s face, that one size fits all solutions don’t work when it comes to swords. However, I’ve found that it’s an idea that’s pretty deeply ingrained in so much of how we approach things and I think it’s time we delved into a bit of deconstruction work. With that in mind, let’s take a look at a few different spots where I see this popping up.

1. 70’s Kung Fu Movies

In my younger days I ran with a crew that looking back, used a lot of the same rhetoric you see in 70’s kung fu movie villains. There was a lot of talk about how their style was the ultimate evolution of rapier fencing, that if the period maestri had lived for just another ten years they would have moved past their original teachings and ascended to where we had gotten. While the group did have a lot of high level performers, I saw just as many if not more people pass through and then move on to something else when this one approach didn’t click for them.

In The Dawn of Everything, by David Graeber and David Wengrow, they present a wildly different idea. The beautiful thing about humanity isn’t that we’re so smart we can find the one way to do something, it’s that we have such a diversity of answers to life’s problems. We see this in the fencing world as well. Yes, period duels were a giant unethical Darwinian experiment to see what worked and what didn’t with piles of corpses to show which ideas didn’t make it to the top. Even without that, we still find multiple approaches. We didn’t just have everyone doing Giganti with minor variations, such as Capoferro and Fabris, but we also see entirely different approaches with the same exact tools being used over in Spain. The difference between the two is so stark that it was easier for me to go from Giganti’s rapier (1606) to Fiore’s longsword (~1400), all within the Italian tradition, than it was for me to go from Giganti’s rapier to Pacheco’s rapier (1605). Neither of these were short lived fads either. Giganti’s work got republished repeatedly over the years and is referenced by Marcelli is 1686. Destreza has a similar longevity with the tradition carrying well over a hundred years into the work of Francisco Lórenz de Rada. This isn’t a “What if knights fought samurai” kind of question either. These people traveled around and fought each other constantly and neither school truly supplanted the other.

2. One Singular Tactic

A few years back I was training at a martial arts school where we had an assistant instructor who was incredibly determined that the only proper footwork was pushing forward and would object whenever I tried teaching people how to retreat. He gave a bunch of reasons, none of which I can remember at this point, about how pushing through was always the safest thing to do in a fight and that our style doesn’t work if you back up. I’ve since changed schools and funnily enough, no one at my new school says this, despite it being the same style.

Look, it’s fine to have a default tactic. Fabris fencers tend to like being the aggressor and doing so without blade contact. That doesn’t mean, though, that no one can legitimately do Fabris while being a counterpuncher. If he only wanted you to do one thing, he would have written a much shorter book.

I’ve seen a similar thing in longsword with people idealizing the notion that what you need to do is to start from a shouldered guard, aim at a deep target, and then throw a fully committed attack. The Anonimo Bolognese, however, tells us to just step back and hit people in the hands. Both plans have their merit and neither one ought to be treated as the Platonic ideal. Yes, obviously there’s bad plans you can have, but there’s also good plans you can execute poorly. The traditions we study have no shortage of options for you to try out. Next time you’re at practice, flip to a random page in the book and see if you can pull it off.

3. Stance

Something I’ve heard in oh too many intro courses is the idea that “this is the only way to stand” when doing a particular tradition. Now yes, there are certain invariants we need to be mindful of. If you do a hard and fast lunge with your foot turned sideways, your knee will do its best to attempt to exit your body (yes I know people who this has happened to). There are, however, still multiple correct ways to stand even with just one master.

The big thing I’ve heard people be insistent on is on how to position the back foot. I’ve seen folks teach it as only having your feet at 90 degrees or only setting up with your back foot turned out. If you look at the engravings, though, you see both options popping up time and time again. Same goes for the lunge. Some folks say that you must, no matter what, keep your back heel attached to the ground in order to maintain structure. I’ve had other instructors say to instead pivot on the balls of the back foot in order to lengthen your offensive measure.

Whenever I teach my day long workshops I just tell people to do whatever feels comfortable for their back foot to do. Peoples knees and hips are built differently and it’s important to recognize that. Yes, I require everyone point their front toe forwards to keep their knee in line, but there’s no way for me to know what position will work best for their back foot from the outside.

4. How You Grip The Sword

Out of everything I see people insist there only being one correct answer to, this is by and far the biggest one. I had an instructor once insist on having one finger fully over the quillion as the only answer, regardless of how much it hurt my hand to do. Outside of the brain, the human hand is the single most complex mechanism in your entire body. Most of your bones are in your hands and your feet. Each hand has 34 muscles and over 100 tendons and ligaments. Out of anything that’s going to be shaped differently between two people, it going to be the hand. Now add to that an entire encyclopedia of different hilts and you’ve got all sorts of variations possible.

While grip isn’t something the renaissance authors really go in to, you can just flip through the plates and see different ones pop up.

The invariant with how you grip a sword is that you want the pommel to be in line with your ulna when in third instead of having the pommel be on the inside of your forearm. That way your bones and your sword make one line, instead of two intersecting lines. Within that, though, do whatever feels best. Do you want your thumb pointing up? Go for it. Are you a crazy Dutchman who thinks he’s doing Destreza? Have fun being your freaky self.

Here’s a video a couple of my friends made looking at all the different rapier grips people like.

In summary, yes there are of course wrong ways to do things. But even if you are doing your best to only recreate plays from one singular text, it’s important to realize that there’s multiple correct ways to do so. The beautiful thing about what we do isn’t having students who move exactly like us, it’s helping folks come up with their own solutions and witnessing the diversity of effective approaches.

Thank you so much for reading my latest piece. If you want to see even more of my writing, please feel free to pick up a copy of my latest book at my website FoolOfSwords.com.

I will also be teaching workshops at two different events coming up. First I’ll be teaching a class on Bolognese longsword at my favorite event in the entire SCA, the Constellation Academy of Defense (CAD) in central Indiana. https://mynyddseren.midrealm.org/constellation-academy-of-defense-2025/?utm_source=fool-of-swords.beehiiv.com&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=the-four-sons&_bhlid=2c73a6724a403bb63996e2e417946e8c33ba4b53

I’ll also be teaching another workshop for my east coast friends at an event called Skewered, just outside of DC.

See you all there!