Understanding G. Silver

[Lorraine Munoa]

In his Paradoxes of Defence, Silver says, "To know the perfect length of your sword, you shall stand with your sword and dagger drawn, as you see this picture, keeping out straight your dagger arm, drawing back your sword as far as conveniently you can, not opening the elbow joint of your sword arm, and *look what you can draw within your dagger, that is the just length of your sword, to be made according to your own stature."

At about where I have placed an asterisk I suddenly lose any idea of what he means. In that position are we to measure from our sword hand to the point of the off-hand dagger?

[LafayetteCCurtis]

Well, I'd just go by the illustration placed immediately next to that passage. It shows the man holding his dagger vertically or at an upwards angle, so I guess we're supposed to measure from our sword hand to any point on the off-hand dagger's blade as long as the dagger is held in a roughly vertical position.

http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/pics/paradox_stance.gif

[Randall Pleasant]

Lorraine

My understanding of the perfect length is that your sword must be short enough so that when you can grab an adversary you can still easily thrust him. If your sword is too long then it will be harder for you to get your point on him. It is that lenght that Silver measures with his dagger.

[Allen Johnson]

Yep! I think that pretty much one aspect of Silver that just about everyone in the WMA community agrees on. Btw... I'm about halfway through Wagner's book on Silver. I'll be posting reviews on both that one and Hands book soon after.

[Benjamin Smith]

The idea is to be able to get you dagger in front of your sword when your off side is forward, if you can't your sword is too long. Also I should note that a lot of swords both medieval and renaissance are quite a bit shorter than this, and were perfectly serviceable to their time and place. However, very few specimens exceed the length that Silver advocates "a yard and an inch" or "a yard and 3 or 4 inches for a very large man."

[LafayetteCCurtis]

My understanding of the perfect length is that your sword must be short enough so that when you can grab an adversary you can still easily thrust him. If your sword is too long then it will be harder for you to get your point on him. It is that lenght that Silver measures with his dagger.

Well, I agree that this is the implicit meaning of the measure. And that's why its' measured with the sword's point touching or crossing a vertical dagger--because in this position the dagger wouldn't artificially increase the length of the off-weapon arm, with the result that it wouldn't give a deceptive measure of your reach.

Most of the time I just take the dagger out of the equation and measure to the crook between the thumb and index finger--with a good thick glove protecting the hand, of course.