Posts: 61 Location: Drammen, Norway
Fri 24 Feb, 2012 3:34 pm
You can find more information on the Norwegian bucklers in my post in this thread
http://www.myArmoury.com/talk/viewtopic.php?t=2830&highlight=
and in this gallery:
http://www.vikverir.no/ressurser/hist_mus_osl...amp;page=3
As Elling says, these bucklers have nothing to do with Viking
shields. If you look at viking age art, you can sometime see fairly small shields, but this is probably to do with the art style (wanting to show the person behind it...), rather than a good representation of their size.
I had promised my self not to get involved with this thread, but here I go...:
Using a Viking sword (or saxes) in two hands has few, if any, advantages.. By having one hand on the weapon and the other free gives you the opportunity to do grappling, controlling the opponents weapon, gripping the blade (yes you can do that...) or controlling the opponent. In other words, this gives you the capabilities of being both offensive and defensive... Taking into account the length of the viking swords and the quality and hardness of the steal used in them (which was poor), using it as a classical medieval longsword has loads of problems. If you do testcutting properly you will see that against unarmed opponents you do not need much force (or a really sharp sword) in order to do a lot of damage. Using it in one hand gives you more than enough force.
Also, as Johan Gemvik says in his post, you actually affects the cutting abilities of the weapon in a way that you don't want it to.
If you, as a unarmed opponent, uses any single handed or longsword sized weapon against a large shield (80cm +) and a one handed sword you have huge problems. The opponent can easily block your attack with the shield and hit you in the head with the sword...
Do any form of practical fighting you will probably find this as well.
If you blindly look for clues of weapons that can be used in two hands you will find them... many of them. This is because you convince yourself that what you seek is what you see. A good example is the picture of saxes on the first page in this tread. If you look at the pictures without looking at the measurements, it might seem like you can use them with two hands, but if you look at the measurements, they are fairly small and clearly made for use in one hand.
If you do research by having high and clear expectations on what to find will will only "enforce" your knowledge (which is for us living today fairly limited) and expectations onto your findings. This is a very bad and will greatly affect your findings and conclusions. You have to look at the objects for what they actually are and let them speak to you.
The people who designed and made them where most probably not stupid, but had a much better idea of what it was going to be used for than we will ever have. Since they are long gone, the only thing we have is their object which will give us clues on why they where made... but this can only be done if we let them speak, and not enforcing our ideas onto them by shouting.
So, if you for example look at viking swords there are found a lot of them... not 3, not 100 but almost 3000... only in Norway. This is a substantial amount by any archaeological standard and gives us a extremely good basis for research. By looking at a many of them you will see that they are have a very consistent design (proportions, weight etc.). They where made this way, not because they did not know any better, but because that was the most efficient design at that particular place in time taking into account how they where going to be used and what they where going to be used against.
The same goes for shields... there are many well documented finds.
If you get good replicas (of any type of object) and try to use them in the most comfortable and practical way as possible, which often is not the most obvious one, it will take you onto an adventure which will teach you a lot...
A good example is this video that shows dueling with large shields:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkhpqAGdZPc
Using the shields in this way makes completely sense, especially when you look at the quality of the steel in the swords. Most of them where simply not in an condition where you want to use them against another sword... so you used the shield instead.
If you use a buckler you have to use the swords in binds against other swords to compensate for the lack of defence.