I’ve been thinking about this one for a bit. Though it isn’t mind blowing. Just really haven’t felt like sharing. But I haven’t written anything for fun in sometime so I figure why not.
I think most people, and I mean my favorite type of people the swordy types, would agree with me that adding length to the hilt allows the sword to be used with more speed, force and power. With a longer hilt than the one hander with the same blade length and you get to add another force manipulator to your weapon, pfff plenty of people will sign up for that. And now you can extend your range too?!?! Even more people will take it. Seems like if we had a third arm we might make the hilts even longer, and then the blades too.
We did see longer hilted swords in use for several hundred years, and against a variety of weapons used in a variety of different systems. The tactics are pretty basically, if you have the “bigger” weapon you use your reach and power to keep the “smaller” weapons uneasy and smush them when they goof on their cover or range, or if you have the “smaller” weapon you move around provoking the “bigger” weapon to unbalancing themself and providing you with an opening.
This is where I’m going to lose people though because I’m going to postulate that these basic tactics apply to weapons other than the european longsword. So the longsword can of course use them, but I feel as though the real benefit of adding the sinister hand is to add dexterity. As ironic as that reads.
So here is where those evil thoughts begin to dribble their slime around. It is possible to manipulate a sword with just a single hand to cut a twerhau, a krumphau, a scheilhau and a schietlehau, but it’s much harder. I do it by holding my thumb up, in a saber type grip, that allows me to rotate the hilt in my hand in combination with adjusting my finger grips. It is much more likely that your sword will get knocked out of your grip or that you’ll miss your target due to opposition. It’s hard to keep your point going in the proper place with just one hand. But you add that second hand and you’ve halved the amount of blade manipulation that the lead hand has to do in order to make all those fancy strikes. And you’ve made it that much more likely that your sword will go where it needs to go because that lead hand has help resisting forces, levers being a fact of physics.
And now those slimy thoughts are gonna get dirty. Today the majority of thoughts on using the longer hilted swords is to gain strength and speed, as evidenced by the prevalence of the zwerkopters. Or watch someone with a montante, zweihander/ bidenhander, or spada a dui mani swing those big ol blades around. How much time is the sword actually aligned to cut with it’s direction of motion? Bet it isn’t very much. But they sure do move it fast.
So maybe a few people out there might want to think about being both righteous and malicious with sword at the same time.