#swordfighting

Back in the 90s, we discovered this scene on The Criterion Collection's Princess Bride laserdisc. Then, as now, Criterion provided a bounty of extras; and amongst all the Princess Bride commentary and background was a curious addition: a scene from an episode of Rob Reiner's very short-lived 1991 TV series, Morton & Hayes.

I'm not certain why it's on the laserdisc; the only connection with The Princess Bride appears to be that it was another swordfight scene that Reiner was involved in. As usual with Criterion, the director has a lot of say in their presentation of the movie, and he may have suggested it be added to the extras.

(BTW, Reiner didn't direct this Morton & Hayes episode ("Daffy Dicks") -- it was Christopher Guest, who also starred in it.)

Morton & Hayes was a true oddball -- an attempt to recreate (as best as I can determine) old 1940's black-and-white movie comedy for a modern (well, 1990s) audience. It seems to have been built on the bones of the Abbott and Costello movies (Morton and Hayes resemble the 2 significantly -- particularly the straight man/clown dynamic), though the humor was closer to Bob Hope's 40s stuff (e.g., the 1939 The Cat and the Canary).

Some context for the scene: Catherine O'Hara's character is, basically, a homicidal Veronica Lake spoof, who is revealed at the end of the episode (a murder mystery comedy) as the evil twin of her saintly (and wealthy) sister, who she has murdered, along with about everyone else in the mansion, to inherit her sister's vast fortune.

The only other characters remaining in the mansion are our two hapless detectives, Morton & Hayes; and the scene opens as she prepares to snuff them out.

(Also, you have to admire a script that contains that fine old phrase, "the shank of the evening".)

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Some preliminaries: I have been practicing HEMA (Historical European Martial Arts, also known sometimes as historical fencing, it’s a sport that encompasses many kinds of weapons but focuses mainly on swords, drawing its techniques and martial philosophy from surviving manuals from the late Middle Ages-Early Renaissance era) for about eight years now, specifically Italian longsword, and I’ve taught the beginner’s course at my club several times. I’ve also been training stick fighting (a colloquial way of referring to the combination of different cane fighting systems) for five years, as well as knife and other various weapons (and other objects, we recently did some work on using bottles as self-defense weapons, it was fun). Basically, I kinda know my shit. That being said, I am by no means an expert, and this is for fun, so feel free to take anything I say with a grain of salt :). Also, regarding the technical terms for this analysis, I learned all of that terminology in Spanish, so I’ll do my best to translate and look for the proper terms in English, but there might be some incorrect language in there, for those of you who might know HEMA too.

The analysis will be divided into three broad categories: technical analysis, narrative analysis, and individual fighting styles, but there’s a lot of overlap between all three, so we might be going a little back and forth between the sections. I’ll also be focusing specifically on sword vs sword fights, so I won’t be including fight scenes where a single sword is involved, and battles will be mostly skimmed over because that’s a different type of analysis.

Part 1: technical analysis

Finally, I will be analyzing only the first two movies because I refuse to subject myself to Voyage of the Dawn Treader, not even for swords (also what I remember of the swordfighting in it is enough to make me want to bang my head against a desk (fuck youuuuu reverse grip), so, you know).

Onward!

I will preface this section by saying that the Chronicles of Narnia movies do fall into many of the same pitfalls as other movies (too big swings, impractical movements, an appalling lack of thrusts, etc.), but Hollywood is gonna Hollywood. That being said, one of the things I was pleasantly surprised by when I rewatched them after many years without watching them was how good the swordfighting is, especially in comparison with other movies or shows coughThe Witchercough. In this section I’ll be talking a little bit about the types of swords used, then the techniques I could see.

There are a few different types of swords used throughout the movies, but the main ones I was able to identify are longswords, arming swords, and sideswords (I’m pretty sure the swords the fauns and other characters use are khopeshes, but they’re not as prominent as the other types of swords, and also I know a hell of a lot less about them); the mice also use rapiers, but there’s not enough focus on their fights to be able to truly analyze their technique (a shame, really, but what can you do).

Longswords are two handed swords, used mainly by the centaurs in the movie; they’re also fairly bigger than standard longswords to accommodate the centaurs’ size, so much so that they might in fact be closer to the zweihänder or the montante in terms of overall size, but their proportions are those of a longsword. Arming swords can vary between one and a half hands and one hand, but most of the ones we see in the movies (of which Rhindon is the main example) are one and a half hands, a size that is designed to be able to switch between one hand and two hands on the handle, so they can be used by themselves or with other implements such as offhand weapons or shields. Finally, sideswords or spada da lato, used by the Telmarines in the second movie, are one handed swords, though the fact that they’re good for both cutting and thrusting means that they’re rarely used with offhand weapons; historically, they were a Renaissance sword quite popular in Italy, and were concurrent with the rapier, which would eventually become its successor.

Longswords and arming swords are fairly standard swords for fantasy settings, but the choice to use sideswords for the Telmarines is an interesting and very clever one, as it reinforces the Spanish/Italian inspiration for the Telmarines, even if no one would really notice unless they’re sword nerds (like yours truly). As mentioned above, they’re a one handed sword, but we do see Caspian using both hands during the first fight against Peter in the forest.

Now, this is most likely an error to mark in the “Hollywood is gonna Hollywood” column, but we could argue a Watsonian explanation of him needing both hands to counter Peter’s stronger blows. Personally, I’m not particularly fond of such an explanation, primarily because brute strength is not as important in a swordfight as fiction would have you believe (more on this later). We also see Caspian using an offhand dagger, something not common with sideswords, but this makes a bit more tactical sense, as one handed sword + offhand dagger is a tried and true combination.

We don’t see much use of longswords outside the battles, where it’s fairly difficult to identify specific techniques, but there’s plenty to see in regards to arming swords, as they’re the most commonly used swords in both movies. Now, I will say that as my experience is in Italian longsword, the techniques I will be discussing will inevitably be from that school. It’s more than likely that there are recognizable German techniques (the other main school of longsword) given that there’s only so much you can do with a sword, but I don’t know enough about that school to recognize and analyze its techniques.

One of the things I was pleasantly surprised by is that you can see at least four rather clear and fairly clean techniques being applied during different combats (you can see a gifset I made of these techniques here), so we’re gonna break them down from least to most complex.

The first one we see is this

It’s not so much a technique-technique as it is a guard, specifically posta di fenestra or window guard. This is a rather basic guard, it’s actually one of the six guards we teach in the beginners’ course at my club, but that doesn’t make it any less effective. In Italian longsword it’s what’s called an unstable guard, that is to say, it does not have a direct anchor point in the body; the appeal of unstable guards is that you can perform pretty much any type of cut from them, though one their drawbacks is that you do need to prepare the cuts (breaking the guard in the process) and thus you’re announcing what you’re going to do. Now, fenestra specifically is a rather interesting guard, as it is quite deceptive. By keeping the tip of your sword in a menacing position and in the direction of your opponent’s eyes, the perspective will blur your opponent’s perception of your sword’s length, thus sometimes tricking them into thinking you are closer than you actually are and launching an attack from a distance that is more favorable to you. I really like its use here, because a lot of Edmund’s fighting style relies on speed and drawing his opponents in as opposed to seeking them out actively, so fenestra is a really suited guard for such an approach.

Next up we’ve got this technique.

This is what we call a play, and this one specifically is called colpo di villano or the Peasant’s Blow. This play is executed in what is called long or wide distance, that is, the distance from which you can hit your opponent with your sword by advancing one step forward. Short aside (it’s relevant, I swear), one of the main manuals studied in Italian longsword is Il Fior di Battaglia, by Fiore dei Liberi, and it presents two main distances: long or wide (giocco largo) and narrow or tight (giocco stretto; this is the distance from which you can intervene on your opponent’s body/center of gravity without having to take a step forward); however, the way we teach in my club (based on my teacher’s own interpretation of the manuals) distinguishes two extra distances, broken distance, when you can’t hit your opponent with your sword even if you take a step forward, and medium distance, when you can grab your opponent’s sword or hands/arms without needing to take a step forward.

But back to the play, the Peasant’s Blow is one of the first plays taught, as it is rather simple but quite effective. The way that it works is that you catch your opponent’s blow with the middle of your sword and let it pass by dropping the tip of your sword, then immediately return and counterstrike with a downward cut to the hands or head. Now, as you can see in the gif, this move is rather cleanly executed in the movie, though unfortunately it does seem that the finishing cut is unaligned and would have hit with the flat instead of with the edge. Once again, a Watsonian argument could be made that Edmund wasn’t actually trying to kill Trumpkin and thus purposefully chose to misalign his edge, but it would have been fun and in my opinion more impressive to see a clean finish for the play, as the best swordsmen do know how to stop the blow if need be.

The next play we see in action is this disarm during the final duel between Peter and Miraz.

This play as we see it in the movie is executed from middle distance, and as you can see in the gif the way it works is by grabbing the part of the blade closest to the hilt (at least in my club we call it the “strong” of the sword) and using your own sword as leverage to break your opponent’s grip on their sword. Now, here we do see some muddling of the play as it is explained in the manual, as the “proper” way to do it would be to grab the handle or the pommel of your opponent’s sword, as opposed to the actual blade, but the thing is that in actual combat the techniques you learn during training will never come out as clean. The reality of combat means that the circumstances of the fight will be constantly changing, and so the techniques will have to be adapted on the fly, so if you’re fighting outside of a sports context the golden rule will be “whatever works”. And, well, in this case, it works.

Finally, the fourth technique we see at work is another disarm play.

The way it is depicted in the manual is once again a little different from how we see it executed here, but the principle is the same: you grab your opponent’s blade with both hands, disarm them by using the leverage of the spin, and then use their sword to injure or kill them. This play is executed from narrow distance, and it starts when you arrive at the bind (the moment when the two swords collide in that classic x shape); per the manual, the play would be executed by dropping your own sword in order to grab your opponent’s, but the same principle applies in a situation such as we see it in the movie, where you’ve already been disarmed yourself. Now, in a real fight the finishing move of the play would have been directed at Miraz’s neck or head, as they’re the least protected parts of his body at that point in the duel, and jamming a sword between the plates of an armor is a hell of a lot more complicated than movies would have you believe, but this is a situation where I personally believe the narrative had to take precedence over realism, since Peter killing Miraz directly would have led to a rather different narrative outcome.

In general, the Narnia movies have a lot going for them in terms of realism in swordfighting: the movements are visibly more controlled and less unnecessarily dramatic, there are little to no spins in the middle of a battle that would leave a character’s back completely exposed, most fights are short and direct, and from a fencer’s viewpoint (my own at least, though others might have other perspectives) it’s clear that a lot of work went into making them both believable and visually appealing (this is still a visual medium, after all), which is more than I can say for a lot of media. The other thing I really enjoy is that each character we see swordfighting has their own clear style that is visually distinct from other characters; for example, the disarms we see Peter doing are a lot more technically complex than the Peasant’s Blow we see Edmund doing or Caspian’s general fighting style, but each of their movements in battle fits their individual characters. I’ll do a short breakdown of individual fighting styles in part 3, but for now let’s take a look at the narrative aspect of swordfighting.

Part 2: narrative analysis

Now, if you’ve recently watched Prince Caspian, or just know the movie really well, you might notice that there’s a disarm that I didn’t break down in the technical analysis section.

This is because, from a technical standpoint, this isn’t an actual technique or play (or at the very least, I have never seen it depicted in any manual). Even if you’re wielding a one handed sword, it is highly unlikely that an opponent would be able to disarm you by simply “wrapping” their sword around yours unless you have a really weak grip, not to mention that in this case the swords are meeting middle to middle, so they would be pretty matched in effective strength, and Caspian has both hands on the handle, so not a weak grip at all (the same can be said for the disarm we see during the Edmund-Trumpkin spar, though that one would be slightly more realistic, since Trumpkin only has one hand on the handle; still not realistic, though).

However! Narratively, it is quite interesting, because it’s part of a larger pattern of how we see Peter fight. In both the fight with Caspian and the duel with Miraz, we see him go for the disarm first, every time, before he goes for the kill. In fact, in both of those fights there is a clear moment in which Peter essentially switches tracks and goes from fighting in a more sports-like manner to fighting in a life-or-death manner. And as someone who has trained both for sports and for self-defense, let me tell you, those are two very different mindsets: when you’re fighting for sport (or tournament style duels, in a fantasy/medieval setting), your focus is going to be on technique, on scoring points and/or maintaining the fight for as long as it takes to assert your skill (or fulfill whatever objective was set as the goal of the fight); in a self-defense situation, your focus is going to be on dropping your opponent as fast as possible and as definitively as possible in order to exit the combat situation and avoid as much damage to yourself as you can. As much as we make fun of the RockTM, that is absolutely how you know Peter’s been in life or death situations before, but it also shows that full on deadly violence is his last resort, once it has been established that his opponent is definitely trying to kill him.

In the duel, you can see after the respite that he begins to match Miraz’s blows a lot more, discarding finesse for stronger blows and attacks that go straight for his neck or face (in rewatching this scene I did notice several thrusts, which I applaud because thrusts are one of the most effective attacks with a sword and they’re greatly underutilized in fiction, mostly because they’re a lot less showy than the big cuts). Furthermore, back in LWW, there is also a turning point to how he fights during the final battle, which is when Edmund is injured. Before that, we can see him being a lot more controlled in his movements, possibly due to his awareness of his own inexperience with a sword, but after that point you can see he begins to fight in a much more intense way, eventually matching the Witch’s more violent swings.

The battles are obviously narrative high points, as they tend to be in fantasy movies, but it’s interesting how each one-on-one swordfight has its own weight. In the first movie, the fight between Peter and the White Witch is the climax of the battle, but it’s also in some ways the culmination of Peter’s arc in the movie, of him learning to lead and take on the mantle of responsibility, and using all of that in the service of others. The spar between Edmund and Trumpkin is the starting point for the Pevensies to regain their place in Narnia, making themselves known to the Narnians and reaffirming their skills, both to themselves and to the people for whom they’re only legends; personally, I feel that scene also does a really good job of highlighting the Pevensies’ dynamics and how they’ve been shaped by their time as monarchs, how they don’t hesitate to defer to one another and allow someone else to take point if the situation calls for it, whether because they’d be best suited for it or as part of a strategy. The fight between Peter and Caspian in the woods is not only the beginning of their antagonism, but it also shows quite clearly how evenly matched they are, how even when they are at odds, they’re still not so different from one another (it’s also interesting how much symbolism around swords is involved in Peter and Caspian’s relationship, especially the repeated instances of handing each other a sword: practically every single significant point in their relationship is marked either by one of them handing a sword to the other or has a sword involved in some capacity). The final duel, of course, is a pivotal moment in the narrative, but the pacing of the fighting and the technical aspect of it are perfectly matched to its narrative importance, from Miraz’s overreliance on brute strength over technique (something that is eventually his downfall, as brute strength is actually more detrimental than helpful in a swordfight: some of the main elements of good swordfighting technique are speed, precision and control, and all of those are hindered by excessive force, not to mention that a sword’s mechanics are designed to optimize the strength you use by working as a lever, so there is literally no advantage to fighting by relying on pure strength) to Peter’s ongoing adapting of his movements to match, all the way to Peter’s decision not to kill Miraz directly.

I might come back to this particular section, as there is a lot to analyze, but in general I want to emphasize how well swordfighting is used in these movies. It’s not there just as set dressing, or to make for a cool looking but ultimately irrelevant scene; each of the swordfights have narrative weight, they allow us to learn things about the characters’ mindsets and intentions, they’re culminations of story and character arcs, and yeah, they’re still visually quite impressive! As I mentioned before, there are still elements that are downright incorrect or even complete nonsense, but they are markedly less than in other movies or TV shows, and it’s not only a relief for a fencer like myself, but it makes it so much more enjoyable to watch, even if you might not know all the minutiae of swordfighting.

Part 3: individual styles breakdown

This is a rather short breakdown of the fighting styles of the main characters we see swordfighting, basically the most important aspects of their individual techniques, to complement what I’ve already talked about in the previous sections.

The Witch: dual wielding, clearly accustomed to using the wand as a main weapon, as she primarily uses the sword to defend the wand. Once she switches to two swords she mainly uses the swords in tandem, instead of using one to attack and the other to defend, which is more common as it is more effective (we do see Oreius and later Edmund dual wield, and they both do the latter). So, even though she is skilled in using two weapons, it’s clear that her main weapon is the wand, as opposed to a sword, and thus does not adapt effectively when she’s wielding two swords.

Peter: one the main characteristics of Peter’s fighting style is adaptability. In both movies (but mainly in Prince Caspian) we see how he adapts to his opponents, matching the energy and the movements of the person he’s facing. He favors control and finesse, repeatedly goes for the disarm first but will not hesitate to strike to kill, especially if it’s clear that his opponent is trying to kill him back. One interesting detail is that you can see how his style evolves from one movie to the other, reflecting how he’s spent years swordfighting: for example, you can see that in Prince Caspian his movements are a lot more controlled and precise and he uses his shield noticeably more effectively (one of the smaller details that I love is the difference in how he sheathes his sword: if you pay attention, you’ll notice that in LWW he always has to look at his sword to sheathe it, vs in Prince Caspian where he never looks while sheathing).

Edmund: fast and precise movements, waits for opponent to strike first and then goes for the counterstrike, draws his opponent in (through taunts if necessary) as opposed to seeking them out and adapts in turn. When dual wielding, he uses both swords separately, attacking and defending at the same time. As with Peter, you can also notice how his style evolves to reflect his years of experience, mostly in how his movements become much more purposeful, as opposed to just swinging the sword and hoping to catch something.

Caspian: wide swings (possibly to compensate for inexperience), takes the initiative but errs on the side of too much force behind the blows, which leaves him vulnerable to counterstrikes. Clearly has no qualms about fighting “dirty” (in most instances of duels or spars in a nobility environment, things like kicking would be frowned upon, but when it comes to a life or death situation, you know, whatever works is good). When using the offhand dagger, he clearly uses it mostly for defense, blocking and deflecting, as is the most common usage for offhand daggers.

Miraz: big swings with lots of windup (something that is rather ineffective, windup will add nothing but time to the attack, time that can be used by your opponent to counterstrike), doesn’t use the shield as protection but rather as more of an offhand weapon, leaves himself exposed after his swings; overall, his style favors offense and overwhelming the opponent through brute strength. In fact, I’d say he’s not that good of a swordsman, and a mace or war hammer would be much more suited weapons for him.

So! That’s about it for now, but like I said, I might eventually return to certain sections to dive into it a little more; that being said, I really hope you enjoyed me yapping about swords for over 4k words, and if you have any more questions my inbox is always open, I loooove talking about swords and swordfighting :)