And my Axe! …or, my Sword
I got into medieval sword fighting a couple of months ago.
Ok, let’s back up a bit.
Did you know that there’s a sports league for sword fighting? Not foam swords, not larping (though those are both fun too) but full on armored, sword-on-sword, get-your-instructions-from-a-15th-century-manuscript style sword fighting.
Because that’s part of Historic European Martial Arts (HEMA), and there’s a whole league with established clubs and tournaments out there, and I learned that for the first time after falling down a youtube rabbit-hole. Or, I was scrolling through Imgur, which lead me to robinswords youtube channel, and binge watching that down to the tournament content sent me to google, and long story short it turns out there’s a couple HEMA clubs maybe 20min from my house.
Which left me in a curious place: Sword fighting was a thing that was actually really easy to get into but, and this was a big but for me, a lot of the pro-mo material looked very… Ok, there’s no way of putting this delicately: sword fighting is cool, it brings forward thoughts of knights and ancient warriors. But any time you get old, cool, martial, and ‘specif to Europe’ in one place, the odds that you attract a bunch of white supremacists goes through the roof. So that set me down another series of rabbit holes about the clubs near me.
They all seemed on the up-and-up. One very clearly called out that it was queer inclusive. All the coaches at the one that my boyfriend and I ended up joining had pronouns in their bio’s, which I consider a check mark on the “I’m not a bigot” checklist - not definitive, but a positive.
Of course I was still cautious; I did some poking around Instagram and really reading into the coach bios. Every hint of diversity or gender non-conformity being a good sign. Of course, the saga of internet stalking a hobby group to figure out if it was going to be safe was a whole session worth of stress for my therapist. Though ultimately I pulled the trigger, after looping in a couple of friends to take an intro course with me, we all bought a fencing helmet and went for it.
And I’m glad to report back that all is good. Great in fact! I find its a rare moment when anyone plainly acknowledges that bigotry is a legitimate issue around them, and its extra rare for people to then very explicitly condemn it and then actively look for and remove hateful people from their groups.
I bring that up because on the first day of the into classes, one of the coaches introduced themselves, and to paraphrase their spiel, they told the class:
“In this club when we introduce ourselves, all the coaches say their pronouns and we encourage you all to do the same. The sport is called Historic European Martial Arts, but we prefer to say Historic Fencing because what counts as Europe is up for debate and modern. And -I have to say this- some people show up with unhealthy ideas about how great Europe is. If you’re here and you think white people are somehow better, you need to leave. This club is for everyone, and if you have a problem with that you are not welcome here and need to leave.”
A+. No notes. 10/10 introduction. No hemming an hawing. No “well, as long as you keep your garbage opinions to yourself you can stay” hedging.
That was a couple months ago, and it’s been smooth sailing the whole time.
