The Sword Guy Podcast

Listen in as Guy interviews a wide variety of interesting swordspeople and historians from around the world. Learn more about the practical, the tactical, the theoretical and the just plain awesome from a diverse group of voices.

Podcast Tag: german swordsmanship

Medieval wrestling and Liechtenauer expert Jessica Finley will be familiar to many of you from her two previous appearances on The Sword Guy. (Episode 1 and episode 56). We’re catching up today after my recent trip to Jessica’s training space in Kansas where we filmed the new Abrazare online course. You can find the course at guywindsor.net/abrazare23. In our conversation, we talk about medieval wrestling, and compare and contrast the approaches of Fiore and […]
Gretchen Settle models, swordfights and makes stuff. She is getting back into training after giving birth to an incredibly adorable young sword person who looks very good with her little sword. We talk about Gretchen’s background with horses and how she came to get into longsword and ringen with Maryland Kunst des Fechtens. Her love of historical martial arts has spilled over into her modelling work, and here is a link to the ‘Blossfechten’ […]
Veronica Young is an industrial designer, historical martial artist and founder of Cryptid Combat Wear, and she is also currently running a campaign for making a chest protector for women, which will actually fit and allow for movement. Veronica explains how she developed the prototypes, and how she has worked on the sizing to fit the widest range of people. The Indigogo campaign is running until 6th January, and you can support it here: […]
Michael Sprenger and Alexander Fürgut are the creators of Schwertgeflüster, a (usually) German-speaking podcast about all things HMA. In this episode Michael and Alexander interview Guy, while Guy also interviews Michael and Alexander a bit too. It’s not as confusing as it sounds. We talk about how Alexander can’t get into the correct position for Fabris’s rapier fencing, which Guy diagnoses as possible tight hamstrings. If you also want to work on lengthening your […]
Adam Franti is a member of the Meyer Freifechter Guild and an organiser of the Midwest Historical Fencing League. He also started the Lansing Longsword Guild in the summer of 2017, which focuses on Meyer’s longsword. And he is a fellow podcaster, host of a show called Murderhobos, which covers chivalry, duelling and warfare. We talk about 19th century American military history, and then hop back in time to 16th century Germany. Adam is […]
Dr. Reinier van Noort is a martial arts instructor and translator of over a dozen historical fencing treatises. He now lives in Norway but is originally from the Netherlands, so we talk about his impressive skills in translating from one foreign language into another. You can find Reinier’s work at www.bruchius.com, and his list of publications here: Publications – Ense et Mente (bruchius.com). We covered a lot in our conversation as you can see […]
Christian Tobler is a chivalric combat instructor and author of many books, including Secrets of German Medieval Swordsmanship, which launched the study of Liechtenauer in the Anglosphere. He also wrote Fighting with German Longsword, In St. George’s Name: an Anthology of Medieval German Fighting Arts, In Service of the Duke, and many more. Not to mention his latest, which is Lance, Spear, Sword and Messer, a German Medieval Martial Arts Miscellany. In 1979 Christian […]
Dr Ariella Elema is a finder of the forgotten, the hidden and the obscure. She’s an academic and archivist and an armizare practitioner in Toronto. Her Ph.D. thesis, Trial by Battle in France and England, should give you some clue as to why I invited her on the show. But it also won the Canadian Society of Medievalists’ Leonard Boyle dissertation prize, which is very impressive. In our conversation we talk about trial by […]
This episode is with Dierk Hagedorn, who is something of a legend in our community. He is a translator and author of very many books. Last summer he had seven new books on the go at once. Dierk has translated and produced scholarly editions of Gladiatoria and Lecküchner’s Messer fencing treatise, Peter von Danzig’s manuscript, Albrecht Dürer, and many more. Last year, when Dierk was working on a translation and transcription with Christian Tobler, […]
Claire Wemyss lives in Vancouver and is a coach, educator, and co-founder of Kunst des Funkelns, which focusses on the martial arts of medieval Germany and runs from Valkyrie Western Martial Arts Assembly. In this episode, Claire describes how she and her training partner Jon Mills came up with the name of Kunst des Funkelns, her love for the Messer, and why play-based learning is so important. Claire is also an ADHD coach, and […]