Quick question that came to me while reading another of your excellent posts, but are the terms 'polearm' and 'staff weapon' interchangable, or do they mean slightly different things? My quick google implied a short staff weapon is the same, but didn't really want to answer my question
Glad you enjoy my posts!
Now to answer that quick question...
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TL:DR - the terms are interchangeable IMO, but it’s best to pick one and stick to it.
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Simple definition: a “polearm” is a weapon that’s a metal head on a long heavy stick. A “staff weapon” can be the same thing, but can also be a long heavy stick without any metal extras.
The operative word must be “long”, e.g. a Lucerne hammer is a polearm but a cavalry war-hammer isn’t; a quarterstaff is a staff weapon but a police baton isn’t.
I’m sure My Opinion on this is different to lots of Other People’s Opinions; of course that’s what makes categorising polearms such fun, for a given value of fun, i.e. when you stop.
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Hotlinks are mostly to Wikipedia pages and website images; I’ve also got plenty of tagged pics and info throughout my blog, so no need for them here.
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Like anything to do with polearms / staff weapons, everything is open to (cough) “varied interpretation” and you keep tripping over weird terminology, often laden with combination-hyphens, generated as historians, archivists and antiquarians of past times tried to give individual names to everything that was even slightly different to the one next to it.
RPG equipment lists are - or used to be - full of stuff like this, apparently pillaged wholesale from Stone’s “Glossary”, with slightly different stats for each one, even though often it’s like the difference between identical sports cars painted white or red.
(This mystical difference was finally canonised, at least in “Warhammer 40,000″, by the Ork belief that “da red wunz go fasta”.)
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Here’s an example of how tangled things can be:
A halberd is a kind of battleaxe on an extra-long pole, so a polearm, or a staff, so a staff weapon, though depending on its points and spikes it might actually be a voulge, but often enough is just called a halberd...
Even when it’s a naginata, which is sometimes described as a “Japanese halberd” even though it’s closer in shape to a European fauchard or glaive, all of which are more like a pole-sword than a poleaxe, which is a separate weapon entirely and might be called a pollaxe instead.
Though they’re stabby as well as cutty they’re not much like a spear, which is also a staff weapon and / or polearm but is usually just called a “spear” - except if the spear is a very long one, when it’s a pike or sarissa, or a cavalry one when it’s a lance, or a thrown one when it’s a javelin or pilum.
A jarid is also a javelin, but it’s often so small that it’s more like a dart, which makes it closer to a plumbata or uchi-ne than a spear / staff weapon / polearm.
On the other hand an assegai is also a javelin, except when it’s the wrong name for an iKlwa, which is a stabbing-spear whose shaft can be so short it’s more like a long-handled sword.
This makes it more like a nagamaki or daarb, swords with handles as long as their blades, and now we’re back to pole-swords again, feeling more confused than informed...
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There’s a TV Trope for that feeling. Fortunately, on New Year’s Day it’s easily dealt with.
(“Skal!” Click heels, wince as it goes wrong, refill glass, repeat. Same procedure as last every year...)
:-D
