Blades and armor
Jan. 28th, 2012 07:46 pmThat was fun! Currently, there's an exhibit of weapons and armor at one of my local museums, "Armed & Dangerous, Art of the Arsenal." It's not an extensive exhibit, but there are some choice pieces. I was purring, and making notes, and muttering about story ideas. (I was also wincing about 'use one spelling or the other, not two spellings in two rooms'; don't even ask ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
draconis about the mistakes in the Japanese sections).
The exhibit was mostly intended to show the decorative aspects of armor and weapons, some ceremonial, some intended for use. Some of them I would never want to come up against. A gun barrel looks big enough from the wrong side; a blunderbuss is just terrifying. And they had a dagger type I'd never seen before, designed to play can-open with chain mail links. A long, graduated point with sharp blades on either side of it. Imagine a long snake tongue to open the link with a blade on either side following up (and in) when the link is open. There was one Indian blade, a katar or katara, which I was calling a punch blade. It would work beautifully as a dagger, but the exhibit said they used that kind of grip/hilt for blades up to five feet long. Five feet of blade with a grip that keeps the wrist in one locked position is going to rip up an elbow fast between weight, impact, and the inability to soak up shocks to the metal.
But several of them were beautiful, a lot of them were clearly lethal (decorative or not), and at least one, to me, showed signs of use. Oh, and there was a tanto with a bone hilt and scabbard set with the most gorgeous carved work on it -- the hilt was a carp's head, there was a dragon and a demon on the hilt... just gorgeous.
Anyway. Off to go research neat subjects and pull up Word.
draconis about the mistakes in the Japanese sections). The exhibit was mostly intended to show the decorative aspects of armor and weapons, some ceremonial, some intended for use. Some of them I would never want to come up against. A gun barrel looks big enough from the wrong side; a blunderbuss is just terrifying. And they had a dagger type I'd never seen before, designed to play can-open with chain mail links. A long, graduated point with sharp blades on either side of it. Imagine a long snake tongue to open the link with a blade on either side following up (and in) when the link is open. There was one Indian blade, a katar or katara, which I was calling a punch blade. It would work beautifully as a dagger, but the exhibit said they used that kind of grip/hilt for blades up to five feet long. Five feet of blade with a grip that keeps the wrist in one locked position is going to rip up an elbow fast between weight, impact, and the inability to soak up shocks to the metal.
But several of them were beautiful, a lot of them were clearly lethal (decorative or not), and at least one, to me, showed signs of use. Oh, and there was a tanto with a bone hilt and scabbard set with the most gorgeous carved work on it -- the hilt was a carp's head, there was a dragon and a demon on the hilt... just gorgeous.
Anyway. Off to go research neat subjects and pull up Word.
