Lethality in Liechtenauer's Longsword

An addendum to "Death and the Longsword"

In my previous piece “Death and the Longsword”, I went looking for the clearest and most unambiguous textual references to death or lethal outcomes in longsword fencing I could find in longsword-related HEMA texts.

Today, I have a short addendum to that previous article, looking at some aspects of Kunst des Fechtens’s texts specifically on this topic of lethality in longsword sources.

Bear in mind: I am very much an extreme amateur when it comes to Early New High German, the language used in the Kunst des Fechtens texts. I used the Google translate function quite a lot in writing this piece. Take everything I say with appropriately sized grains of salt.

“Schaden”, “Enden”, “Erschlagen”: Extremely amateur linguistic musings

While writing “Death and the Longsword”, I noted the curious fact that the Kunst des Fechtens texts (Ms3227a plus the Ringeck, Danzig, Lew, and Nicolaus [RDLN] glosses) uses more ambiguous language to talk about the outcomes of sword-fighting than others like Fiore, Vadi, or Silver do.

Fiore just plainly states “for him that plays at sharp swords, on a single cover that fails, that blow gives him death.”

The original Italian word used here is la morte. There’s very little translation convention or ambiguity here. La morte in Italian is a straightforward term for “death”. It ultimately derives from the Latin mors, which also means “death”.

In contrast, the Liechtenauer texts use more ambiguous terms or phrases. For instance, 3227a tells us to use the Twerhaw when we must “fight for our neck”.

As I noted in the last article, “fight for your neck” appears to be a period idiom for fighting in danger or with some severe stakes, which may mean our lives, on the line.

I looked further into this phrase. The German word in 3227a given for “neck” is hals. Punching hals into the Deutsches Wörterbuch online¹, the source notes some interesting uses for it.

“but the enemy also goes for your neck , wants to get to your neck, how else does it go for the throat, for the gullet; the image is often based on the hunt , where the dogs grab the game by the neck”

“various phrases emphasise injuries to the neck as fatal , in particular the breaking, falling off, or crashing of the neck”

“the neck plays a major role in the criminal court proceedings , as life sentences are usually carried out on the neck, by beheading or hanging . the highest jurisdiction, which has power over the life of a subject , is designated by the alliterative formula court over neck and head”

Most interesting to me was this phrase, given as an example of the neck as a symbol of life: “Are we not fighting for our necks and freedom?” from Schiller’s 1781 play Die Räuber. As far as I have discovered so far, this is the closest match to 3227a’s “fight for your neck” in other German literature.

Now a line in an 18th century play does not necessarily mean that a 15th century text meant this phrase in one specific way or another. However the connotations around hals as given in DWB does make me more confident in my initial interpretation of this phrase. I think this is referring to using the Twerhaw in combats with life or significant injury potentially on the line.

Then there’s the proverb attributed to Liechtenauer on Fol 32r: “Whoever lies still, they are dead; whoever moves, they yet live”.

The German of this phrase is “wer do leit der ist tot / wer sich rüret der lebt noch”

I have not yet been able to find any versions or usages of this phrase outside of Ms3227a as of the writing of this article. It’s even unique to 3227a within the KdF corpus of texts. But, the German tot or todt does indeed translate to “dead”.²

Admittedly it could just be a poetic flourish. The context of this line is telling us not to remain too long in any one guard and not to rely on guards, but instead take action. My read here is that staying still will, well, get us killed in longsword fighting, and we have to remain moving and active to stay alive.

That being said, these references in 3227a are unique to the Codex. The KdF texts will more often use words like schaden instead. Schaden means harm or injury³.

Schaden is used only a few times in the RDLN texts. For instance, in the Danzig gloss it states “when you parry, parry with your cut or with your thrust and 'Indes' seek the nearest opening with the point so no master can strike you without their own [schaden]”.

Whereas in RDLN, schaden is only used once or twice, in Ms3227a by my count it occurs fifteen times: Eleven instances in the Liechtenauer longsword, one in the messer, one in the dagger, and two in the “Other Masters” longsword.

What is also interesting about this is the contexts that 3227a uses schaden in. This is often in the context of warning you about the consequences of not doing something properly.

“Know that as soon as you turn away their cut or thrust by turning, immediately step in and drive quickly toward them. If you wait and delay, you will suffer [schaden].”

Other times however, it tells us about how our fencing technique ensures our opponent cannot avoid schaden when facing us.

“Once you're engaged with each other on the sword and have extended your points toward each other's exposures, if they pull themselves back, then before they can recover from your strike, immediately follow through with a good thrust toward their chest with your point (or otherwise forward toward the closest and surest place you can land) in such a way that they cannot escape from your sword without [schaden]”

As with Fiore and Vadi’s comments about death, the KdF texts mention schaden as sometimes a risk for ourselves to consider or avoid and sometimes an outcome to be imposed on the opponent.

This does not necessarily have to mean a lethal outcome, but it also doesn’t exclude it either. A relatively straightforward read would be that it refers to any kind of injury or hurt in sword-fighting at all, which may include lethal injuries but can also include the much wider scope of non-lethal injuries. Schaden, referring to injury, could easily occur across the whole span of longsword fighting contexts, friendly and in anger.

Another ambiguous term relevant to this topic is enden, which in Lew and Nicolaus’s glosses is used to describe the technique Ansetzen. Ansetzen is said to be an ernst technique and that it gives as swift end with the sword. Enden, as the similarity to English “end” might suggest, translates to “ending, finish, or conclusion”.

So what does that mean? Does that mean we are concluding our opponent’s life? Concluding the combat or duel? Concluding a fencing match? It’s not clear from the texts themselves, and it could conceivably be all of the above.

“Enden” in Late Middle English (i.e: English of the 14th-15th centuries) is apparently occasionally used to mean to slay or kill or to inflict a fatal wound⁴. But that doesn’t help us much when we’re discussing German.

According to DWB⁵, “enden” can mean: “to kill someone , to destroy someone, to end someone’s life”

But it can also refer to any old ending at all, such as the ending of a sermon or the conclusion of a book.

So are we enden the opponent or just enden a combat or bout? It could be either, purely based on the language.

It is also worth noting also that there is some variance in the description of Ansetzen between the glosses:

Pseudo Danzig: “Note there are four lodgings that are called for in earnest combat. You shall conduct them when you wish to immediately slay or injure your opponent” (Trosclair translation)

Lew: “Know that lodging is an earnest play because it moves into the area of the four openings, and it is appropriate to conduct when you wish to give an immediate conclusion using the sword.” (Trosclair translation)

Nicolaus: “Pinning is an serious play because out of everything, it goes into the four openings the most narrowly and it is appropriate to execute where you wish to deliver an immediate end with your sword.” (Trosclair translation)

The word that Christian Trosclair translates as “slay” in the Danzig gloss appears to be slachen, which Corey Winslow translated as “strike” instead. I don’t have enough knowledge of Early New High German linguistics to comment about which translation is more accurate or appropriate, I can only say that whether it is “slay” or “strike” appears a matter of translator’s interpretation.

But as with the 3227a Liechtenauer proverb, I think remembering the context in the text of what this technique is describing helps us here: Ansetzen describes a technique in which we shoot the point in and see if we can thrust the opponent in the nearest opening in the moment that they prepare a cut or thrust. In modern fencing terminology, we may call this an attack on preparation.

This is indeed a quick way to strike and potentially injure an opponent. Practical experience has also taught me that when you thrust the opponent in the moment they prepare to attack, they often will step forward while trying to complete the attack and end up stepping into your point.

Knowing what we know about the mechanical efficiency of a longsword point at penetrating targets with a thrust, then (assuming a sharp point) this could quite easily cause a very grievous injury, even a lethal one.

Although it also ought to be admitted that trying to predict the effects of wounds is an inherently unreliable piece of guesswork. At least one near-contemporary longsword fencing source, Fiore dei Liberi, thought that thrusts kill people more often than any other strike.

For all these reasons, I lean towards interpreting the enden implied here as another reference to potential lethality. However, that is admittedly my interpretation and it relies on inference and conjecture rather than the explicit statements of the text.

Finally, there’s erschlagen. This is a particular word used in the Nicolaus gloss, in the text around the Nachreissen technique, in which it states:

“Execute the first play of racing behind like this: When you come to the opponent with the initiation of fencing, then advance your left foot and setup in the roof guard, quite precisely observing what your opponent fences against you. Then if they cut in long from above from their right shoulder, do not parry them and see to it that they do not reach you with their cut. Then mark the moment during the cut that their sword goes down towards the ground, then dart into them with your right foot and cut in from above into the opening of their right side. When they come back up with their sword, they are [erschlagen].”
(Trosclair translation)

This has previously been translated as “struck”. However, speaking to Christian Trosclair online, he pointed out that erschlagen can also mean “to slay” or “to strike dead”. DWDS backs up this translation as well⁶.

So, one potential way to translate Nicolaus’s Nachreissen gloss might be “When they come back up with their sword, they are struck dead”.

That being said, it should also be admitted that Ringeck, Danzig, and Lew’s glosses don’t use this term. They all say geschlagen instead, which seems to more simply mean to be beaten, struck, or hit, without any specific implication that this means struck dead.

To reiterate a few points from “Death and the Longsword”: Talking about lethality or indeed talking about any specific outcome of longsword fighting is rather rare within these texts. Whether talking about death or even simply stating that there will be a certain injury is rare.

The most common way these texts talk about the outcomes of longsword fencing is to simply state a strike towards a certain target, sometimes with a specific part of the sword. e.g. Strike them in the head with the long edge, strike them with your point on their hands, shoot the point towards their chest, and so forth. What happens after that is left to the reader’s imagination.

Overall, I found that the KdF texts are more ambiguous in their language about the potential lethal or injurious outcomes of longsword fencing in comparison to their Italian contemporaries Fiore and Vadi.

That being admitted, I also think that the KdF texts don’t completely lack mentions of death or injuries either. Some of it is only implied or ambiguous rather than explicit, but I think it is still in there. Or, at least, there are some things within these texts that I don’t know how to explain if talking about death or serious injury wasn’t an intended aspect.

The very fact that Fiore and Vadi saw fit to explicitly use language about life and death in discussing their fencing and the KdF authors apparently felt less need to do so is, in itself, an interesting topic worth further exploration and research. It is also worth wondering why 3227a seems to have more language around death and injury than the RDLN glosses do.

I learned from digging into this stuff that how we understand what is meant to happen in the blossfechten longsword writings of KdF relies quite a lot on conjecture, inference, and interpretation. The evidence is incomplete or insufficient, and the words in the sources often read as “obscure and disguised”. So we must judge from what is present and make the best educated guesses we can, much like palaeontologists reconstructing an extinct species from scant fossil remains.

Our interpretations thus as always to some extent a work in progress, always subject to revision and new information. But that, to me, is part of what is so exciting about HEMA.

1. www.woerterbuchnetz.de/DWB/hals

2. www.woerterbuchnetz.de/DWB/todt

3. www.woerterbuchnetz.de/DWB/schade

4. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/enden

5. www.woerterbuchnetz.de/DWB2/ENDEN

6. https://www.dwds.de/wb/erschlagen