Sword Fighting

Swordfighting was (obviously) the art of fighting with a sword. It is, essentially, the art of putting a sharp piece of metal into the body of an unwilling recipient.

Virtually every metal using culture produced an elite caste of sword fighters. Most of these fighters were selected from the males of a particular class and trained from young childhood. Various schools taught different methods of putting a sharp piece of metal into another human's body. These schools raised the training of sword fighting to a high art. Those arts continue today in many sports and martial arts, such as Olympic fencing, Kendo, and Escrima.

It should also be noted that these schools almost invariably taught a strict moral code along with the art of swordfighting. While this code was not always adhered to, the attempt was made to combine the art of destruction with responsibility.

Swordfighting ceased to be an essential military skill when it became cheap to produce soldiers trained in the use of gunpowder weapons. A man or woman can be trained to be an effective soldier in a few weeks using gunpowder weaponry, while learning to use a sword requires years.

Swords and large knives (such as machetes) are frequently used to hurt other humans today. The massacre of Tutsis and Hutus in Rwanda involved a large number of people being killed with Machetes. Guerilla fighters in the northern Philippine Island of Luzon frequently pose with Machetes and antique samurai swords in press photos. The issue of sword usage is large enough that England and Australia both have stringent laws controlling the possession and ownership of swords.

Sword fighting has experienced something of a rebirth as aficionados from many cultures have taken up the sword as a hobby in the past few decades.