Oh yeah? Has that guy ever heared about those weird people in Europe? I think they were called Celts. Women not deemed able to wield weapons is a Graeco-Roman cultural heritage - maybe partial Middle Eastern too but it clearly already was there in Rome before Christianity induced the ideas of a former desert religion.
Harems were usually places of sanctuary for high-status women and their non-adult children - as contrasted to Europe where they were often forced into convents and their children were split off to occasionally indifferent relatives when the family unit had broken. Also with the king controlling the harem, they would not fall victim to petty squables between various factions, and was expected to be responsible for them or he'd lose his power base pretty damned fast. It is the exceptions we tend to focus on.
That’s SO not what the SCA types tell me. It turns out that being short and nimble is good in a sword fight.
OMG that's insane. And the fight broke out "shortly after 8 am"?! lol
Right after the party ended.
I would not consider the SCA an authority on historical matters though. If I take their take on dancing is a good indicator they emphasize way to much on the C in SCA. For a more realistic take on historical warfare ask ARMA (who appear to have some funny ideas as well, but apparently less of those).
So I just weighed one of the swords in my closet (a cutlass that's part of my pirate outfit). It's 2.5 pounds. Anyone in reasonable shape can handle it. Note that this isn't a toy or a prop, but a functional replica from my historical reenactment hobby.
The History of Medieval Swords (And the Women Who Wielded Them) - Nerds on Earth
Women and swords aren't imagined to go together. But history and physics tell a different story.nerdsonearth.com
Having been a long-time member, the SCA as an organization has no opinion on such things. Some people have done tons of research on their subjects of interest, and others had just wandered over from cosplaying at Comicon. We welcomed the newbies, and encouraged them to learn at their own pace, by example and a multitude of classes. But we also had fun, because if you made it as tedious as taking a history course, they wouldn't stick around.
It presumably varied from army to army and time to time, but weren't most infantry tactics based on moving as a group, with your shields locked together, stabbing with your short-swords between them? And, of course, as soon as they discovered the pike in medieval warfare, that was the infantry weapon of choice for centuries.
Some say re-discovered and claim the Age of Chivalry should be renamed "age when Europe forgot about the pike".
Odd but will "look better on on the screen".
There's this movie called Braveheart. Yeah, the Mel Gibson one. I actually like it, it's kind of a guilty pleasure if I want to be honest. Anyway, so people have always loved to point out the historical inaccuracies in the movie. Honestly, things like who married whom, who killed who's lover, whether Edward really died in the middle of Wallace's execution, what happens militarily in the movie's first battle is actually what happened in the last battle - I don't really care about those things. But the one thing that always made me shake my head and giggle about the movie is the part where the Scots, I guess as an act of unrivaled genius, spontaneously decided to invent polearms to counter cavalry. I'm not saying I know enough to know that this was positively untrue, it just always sounded really silly to me.
As I recall, someone memorably suggested it could hardly have been less historically accurate had they given Mel Gibson a large claymation dog as a companion and retitled the movie "William Wallace and Gromit."
You made me curious. Mine (a Landsnecht sword) is two pounds even.
