Even though I admire your work on the upcoming hope of all TROS worshippers, I wholeheartedly disagree with you about linking "angry and unnecessarily spiteful" with "German" (and I must assume that this is pointed at "German" as a national group of people living roughly in today's borders of the Bundesrepublik and maybe the former parts of the Heilige Römische Reich in today's Bohemia and Poland for example, rather than "German" as a vague collection of any "Germania" based people from the time of the migration period encompassing most people living in today's western nations including Germany, most of Scandinavia, France, Great Britain, America and so forth; which I would disagree with either).Agamemnon wrote:I think messer fighting is perhaps the purest expression of german swordsmanship - literally every move seems angry and unnecessarily spiteful. "I have this relatively short cutting weapon. I know, I'm going to get right up on top of you and beat you with the pommel instead!"
I've travelled a lot around the world, and I've never heard anyone who would have said that Germans would be particularly "angry and unnecessarily spiteful". Instead, I got told that we would be rude by Vietnamese, too honest by Romanians, too straightforward by Indians, too complicated by Americans, too jovial by Russians and Fins, much too uptight by Albanians, arrogant by Poles and just right by Swedes.
If the messer fighting looks "angry and unnecessarily spiteful" it most certainly wouldn't be because it's "German". Especially if you truly refer "German" to a national identity.
It would be because messers were weapons of the lower classes. And the lower classes do not care about honour or fancy looking fencing. They care about winning. And that is not a trait that is limited to the Germans, but which can be seen at scapegoats in Britain, America, India, Araby and elsewhere in the world. The weapon just originated in Germany because of the law, prohibiting the lower classes to wear double-edged weapons. I'm sure that similar styles have been used in every lower class of any nation just with other, more common weapons.
This just hurt my most un-angry and completely un-spiteful feelings as a true German (even though both my grandparents on my mother's side came from Poland, so I'm not exactly a 100% German).
I have no idea of other european styles. My brother has fought with longswords for some time (and has met Jake Norwood in Germany as well), but I have nothing to do with actual fighting...
