Penney, Sean writes:
>Sorry for any vagueness - I am an SCA rapier fighter with only
>vicarious Olympic experience.
I don't have any, though I have played SCA. (and have studied
historical and classsical fencing from a master at both).
>I have and use two types of blades - a 32 inch Schlager blade (guess
>that's a smallsword)
Close enough, in dimensions.
>and a 43 inch Deltin (rapier - but we call them all rapiers
>regardless of length),
Sure...but the Del Tins tend to match (to some extent; they don't
taper enough) the historical weapons much closer than the little short
things [not to meanion the single-wide epees and foils used by [SCA]
Easterners [1]].
In any case, SCA fencing is a lot of fun...but it's not really very
historical, and doesn't have the reality of "kill or be killed" in the
way that techniques developed when weapons were used for real, and
only the masters whose techniques worked survived to teach them did.
Thus, invented techniques are rather suspect and I have significant
doubt that fencing, in the East[2] or Dragaera, is closer to any invented
artificial style than it is to any of the ones that actually existed
in history.
[1] People from the SCA "Kingdom of the East", which covers the US
north of Maryland and east of Pennsylvania, not from Fenario or whatever.
[2] The one in the books.
--
Joshua Kronengold (mneme at io.com) "I've been teaching |\ _,,,--,,_ ,)
--^--him...to live, to breathe, to walk, to sample the /,`.-'`' -, ;-;;'
/\\joy on each road, and the sorrow at each turning. |,4- ) )-,_ ) /\
/-\\\I'm sorry if I kept him out too late"--Vlad Taltos '---''(_/--' (_/-'