Hello,

My friend Hal Siegel of Therion Arms has been kind enough to post a paper I've written on a select subset of medieval German grappling techniques and their ancillary techniques on the Articles section of the Therion Arms web page.

The intent of the paper is to show Ott's drei Ringen or Three Wrestlings as a complete self-referential grappling subsystem as an exposition of the system as a whole. While no arms or armor are involved in the practice, I mention it here because of the close relationship between armed and unarmored combat in the middle ages.

I hope the paper will be of interest. It can be found here:

http://www.therionarms.com/articles/index.shtml

That was a great read. As a student of Fiore at the Academy of Medieval Martial Arts in Toronto, it was really neat to see how similar the two systems are. I can easily recognize most of the photos in the article as wrestling plays we practice frequently.

Hi Hugh,

The Three Wrestling aren't attributable to Ott - they're anonymous, a part of the hodge-podge of wrestling that appears in the Ringeck manuscript.

All the best,

CHT

Hi Hugh,

Most definitely not. The section of the wrestling in Ringeck that begins with "A counter to the bar" corresponds to the 2nd half of Ott as his treatise appears elsewhere, but the Drei Ringen are well before that.

Interestingly, for all their usefulness, Ringeck is the only manuscript where these three techniques appear. One can find analogues to the 1st and 3rd readily in the glosses for the armoured combat. And, really, the 2nd technique is just a hand switch off of the 1st anyway.

All the best,

CHT