How to Grip Bronze Age Swords (Response to Dimicator and Matt Easton)

Over on his website and social media, Roland Warzecha has been talking about how to hold European swords of the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age, the so-called Naue type II. These swords have a broad flat blade, a broad tang with scales riveted to the sides, and usually a mushroom-shaped pommel. If you are at all interested in swords, these are worth studying, because they are the earliest swords that we can understand really well. Iron tends to shrink or expand in the ground or water, and especially after it is excavated, so the remains of iron or steel swords tend to be ugly misshapen things. Bronze swords can emerge from the ground looking like they just left a cutler’s shop, and sometimes they have bronze grips and pommels so all parts of the sword are preserved. In the worst case the handle and the area where the handle joins the blade are usually preserved. In most of Bronze Age Europe it was not customary to make detailed images of human beings. Nor was it customary to write things down. But the swords, spears, and shields in museums speak to us and tell us how they want to be used if we can learn to hear them. They were carefully designed by sophisticated people for sophisticated people.

Roland got to handle a sword with a bronze hilt from the Tollense battlefield. Around 1200 BCE something very bad happened at a crossing point of the Tollense river south of the Baltic Sea. At least 140 people and some horses were killed with flint arrows, bronze swords, and wooden clubs and thrown into the river. Trace elements in the victims’ bones show that they had come from distant parts of Europe, whether as traders or as warriors. In places without strong government the two roles are hard to separate, travelers need to be able to defend themselves and often take whatever they can. Slave traders in particular tended to seize and sell their business partners.¹ Phoenicians and Greeks and Vikings and Castilians and English were both predatory raiders and eager traders. In most societies with gardening and farming, every ablebodied man is expected to be a warrior. Its not clear whether the sword was deposited as a result of the battle, or for other reasons around the same time. Depositing swords in lakes and rivers was very important to Bronze Age Europeans, and the site of the massacre was an important crossing point for hundred of years. The locals maintained a raised causeway through the valley between about 1900 and 1200 BCE, and in the days of oxcarts and baskets of gravel that was no easy task.

Roland found that this sword worked very well for his favorite way of using a sword. On one hand he likes holding the sword at maximum extension with the blade parallel to his forearm like a seventeenth-century rapier fencer, on the other hand he likes unusual ways of gripping the sword with the wrist bent from medieval German martial arts. These ways of holding a sword give less reach and power, but can be useful for working around the opponent’s weapons. This grip works for him because this sword has a very small ‘sun-hat’ pommel (a disc shape mounted at right angles to the long axis of the sword, like the weight on a spindle or a wheel on its axle). The disc is even an oval twisted slightly relative to the width of the blade so it does not bite into the meat of his thumb, just like the hilts of many Viking swords are slightly asymmetric so that one edge of the sword is the natural ‘true edge’ (the edge in line with your knuckles which you naturally cut with).

Most European Bronze Age swords had wooden, bone, or ivory hilts which have rotted away. People in most parts of Bronze Age Europe did not leave pictures or carvings of people which show something as small as a sword pommel, but it seems that many of the wooden pommels were ‘mushroom-shaped’ (similar to but bulkier than the hollow bronze ‘sun-hat’ pommels). The bronze pommels definitely vary in size. Its possible that some of those swords had wooden pommels which were less ’round’ and more twisted to provide less restriction than our replicas, but I can’t hold my Naue type II in the ways that Roland can hold this sword. Instead I find that its natural to strike with the blade at about a 45 degree angle from my forearm and my pointer finger over the guard. People sometimes call this the ‘handshake grip’ or the Italian grip.

Over on YouTube Matt Easton has brought up his theory that these swords were used perpendicular to the forearm like an Indian talwar. Talwars also have sun-hat pommels, and both writers from the 19th century and Sikh fencing masters today tell us that talwars should be used with the wrist unbent to deliver terrible slices at close range. The sun-hat pommel discourages the wielder from bending his wrist. Its helpful bringing in Indian martial arts, because most recent projects to reconstruct Bronze Age combat work with people trained in German martial arts form the 14th-16th century (check out a recent project on Bronze Age spears and shields in the Netherlands). Those martial arts are popular in places like the UK, Ireland, the Netherlands, and Germany but they are 3000 years later than the Late Bronze Age and just one of four families of historical martial arts from Europe. Every martial art teaches people to see some ways of moving and holding a weapon, and no single martial art will have all the secrets. Those German martial arts emphasize ways of striking which none of the other European traditions recommended practicing a lot. So the more people with the more kinds of training, the more possibilities we will see, and the more disagreements will help us decide what is really important and what is just a detail.

As historical martial arts grew from a few hundred curious nerds to a global sport with thousands of participants just in Germany and Austria, practitioners tended to learn less about other historical martial arts except through the rumour mill. Its very hard to find people with a broad familiarity with Italian, Central European, Iberian, and British martial arts let alone things like Sikh gatka. Most archaeologists certainly aren’t scholars of world martial arts. And its very hard to get martial artists to speak frankly about how their martial art compares to other martial arts because for reasons I will never understand martial arts become tied with identity. So not many people know of the variety of approaches in traditional or historical martial arts, or which parts of their martial art are unusual and which are commonplace.

Using a sword this way costs a lot of reach which was probably important in the Bronze Age where there was likely a lot of small-scale violence. Reach is really valuable in a duel, whereas soldiers who fight in packed formations and draw their sword after they are too close to use a bow or a lance find that a shorter sword can be more useful. A talwar is also strongly curved, and that makes sure that it impacts at an angle and slices through the target like the blade of a guillotine. People who use straight swords usually prefer to strike downwards with the point higher than the hand, and cut upwards with the point lower than the hand, so that the blade moves through the body of the opponent at an angle slicing. And many bronze swords have a blunt or gently sawtoothed area at the base of the blade, and on later European swords those areas were for resting the pointer finger against when it was crooked over the guard (the modern European name for this section of a blade is ricasso).

Matt objects that if the pommel is not for limiting your wrist movement and encouraging you to cut from the elbow and the upper body, what is it for? The pommel on this sword restricts my wrist movement, but not as much as the pommel on his talwar. Like a smaller pommel it gives me confidence that the sword would not be torn out of my hand if I was cutting the leg off some nasty Achaean or galloping past someone on foot as I cut his head off. It also makes it really easy to control the sword as I wear it at my side. I can rest my forearm or hand on the pommel to keep the sword out of the way as I walk around. And even if I move my pointer finger closer to my other fingers, the pommel on my sword does not restrict the movement of my wrist in the way that the pommel of his tulwar restricts his wrist.

I agree with Matt that its a good idea to look at Sikh gatka as a model for using Bronze Age swords, but the difference between a straight sword and a curved sabre is significant. And I really like using my Naue II the way I show above.

So we have given swords in a family to three fencers, and they come up with three ways of holding them, three ways which are related to their earlier training (I am trained in early Italian fencing which loves simple cuts and a finger crooked over the guard, Roland is trained in early German fencing which loves ingenious wrist positions, and Matt loves 19th century fencing and has a friend who teaches gatka). Roland likes to hold his sword for maximum reach, Matt wants to use the sword closer in, and I like a position in between with my pointer finger over the guard. I don’t think any of us are going to change our views after this online exchange, and next time we met sword-in-hand I doubt any of us will change our minds either. So is this all pointless?

But three swords in the same family are not the same sword. The Tollense sword has a small pommel which lets Roland hold it in ways that I can’t hold my sword. That sword was probably meant to be used in different ways. This debate makes me wonder how many related swords, like the “iron Naue II” swords from Greece in the eighth and seventh centuries BCE, had pommels which were wide front to back but narrower from side to side. The pommel of my sword was turned on a lathe but other shapes are possible especially if you carve them by hand!

I really like Matt’s idea that big mushroom-shaped pommels can be for restricting your wrist movement, and Roland’s idea of putting his thumb on the flat of the blade. That works well for me although I have not trained to make use of that grip in combat. I also like Roland’s idea that sword hilts are often slightly asymmetrical because a hand gripping a sword is not symmetrical and slight deviations can make for a more comfortable and versatile sword. I bet that someone who was good at Italian or Iberian sword-and-rotella fencing would see even more ways of using these swords. Trying out different things and seeing what works well and what works poorly is valuable even if we will never know much about how swords were meant to be used in Bronze Age Europe. Getting out of your chair and making something or using something is always valuable, and so is talking to people who have learned the same trade from someone different.

Its hard to have those conversations even face to face but I do my best.

Creating thoughtful posts with lots of attributed, marked-up images takes hours, and I am working more than full-time this week. I hurried up writing and illustrating this post to keep the conversation going. If you can, please support this site on Patreon, or Paypal, or ko-fi?. (Roland and Matt could use some help too).

Further Reading

Matt Easton @scholagladiatoria@youtube.com, “A VITAL CLUE to how BRONZE AGE SWORDS were used? With ‪@BronzeAgeSwords‬,” 23 September 2024 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uK4W3E1qKU0

Roland Warzecha, “Ergonomics of a Bronze Age Sword Hilt,” patreon.com/dimicator 2 October 2024 https://www.patreon.com/posts/113167023

Matt Easton, “How NOT to GRIP European BRONZE AGE SWORDS?” scholagladiatoria Channel 9 October 2024 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5nTDLKQvHI

Detlef Jantzen and Gundula Lidke, “Bloody warriors? The Tollense valley conflict and its relation to the Baltic Sea region,” in Daniela Hofmann, Frank Nikulka, and Robert Schumann, eds., The Baltic in the Bronze Age: Regional patterns, interactions and boundaries (Sidestone Press: Leiden, 2022) pp. 345-354 https://sidestone.com/openaccess/9789464270181.pdf

Barry P.C. Molloy, “What’s the Bloody Point?: Bronze Age swordsmanship in Ireland and Britain,” in Barry Molloy ed., The Cutting Edge, Tempus: Stroud, 2007, pp. 90-111

Marc Gener, “Integrating Form, Function and Technology in Ancient Swords. The Concept of Quality.” In Marion Uckelmann and Marianne Mödlinger, eds., Warfare in Bronze Age Europe: Manufacture and Use of Weaponry (Archaeopress: Oxford, 2011) pp. 117-123

Raphael Hermann, Andrea Dolfini, Rachel J. Crellin, Quanyu Wang, and Marion Uckelmann (2020) “Bronze Age Swordsmanship: New Insights from Experiments and Wear Analysis,” Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-020-09451-0 (bronze swords and Lignitzer’s sword-and-buckler plays!)

(scheduled 14 October 2024, edited in a hurry on 18 October)

Edit 2024-10-24: hi Hacker News! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41929122

1. The practice of kidnapping and enslaving people who were visiting to do business was common from the Atlantic slave trade to ‘blackbirding’ in the 19th century Pacific, but it happened in the ancient world too: Christopher Stedman Parmenter, “Journeys into Slavery along the Black Sea Coast, c. 550-450 BCE,” Classical Antiquity, Vol. 39, Issue 1, pp. 57–94 ↩︎