Posts: 163 Location: Germany
Wed 15 Oct, 2014 11:32 am
Your first sword...
...you remember owning.
Well I got thinking today about how I got into swords and all that shiny - and not so shiny - medieval stuff.
And honestly, I can't remember.
It has always been a thing for me, sometimes more acute than others and with varying points that focused my attention over time but never far from me.
Not remembering in general isn't really a great place to start a trip down memory lane, but I did remember something else.
The first sword (-ish thing) I remember owning. Now it is most certainly not the first thing of that category there was for me, far from it. It is merely the one I seem to remember most right now and in most detail.
Feel free to join in, I'd love to hear other what other people have as their first remembered contact to swordy stuff (Or general Arms&Armour for that matter, I just like to stick to swords due to my particular example).
As far as I'm concerned this first sword can be anything. A stick you imagined to be your sword, a piece of cardboard cut into vaguely cross-shape with a point on one end, a toy of any shape or size - might even be a particular piece of Lego you got really attached to. Or it might have been a "real" sword either wooden or maybe even steel?
I would specify though that it should be something you particularly identified as "your sword" (or other piece of Arms&armour) not just something sword-like you happened to own. I'm assuming people here know what I mean by that because I can't think of a better way of describing this.
Now without further ado, the sword I did remember wasn't a sword at all. It most certainly wasn't the first contact, I've seen pictures of me that put that particular milestone way further back.
I actually was a pendant I got - after a lot of fuss I'm sure, though I choose not to remember that ;) - on a renaissance faire when my family and I were visiting my uncle. I remembering it being outrageously expensive for what it was - but then again, when are things on a ren-faire ever reasonably priced, right?
What it was, was a sword made from pewter, the grip covered with red enamel which to me back then looked very much like ruby. Very simple shape, what Looking back I'd call an
Oakeshott Family H type. I remember distinctly, that it fit the hand of a Lego-Figurine perfectly though it was massively too long for it's size - if I'm not mistaken it might have towered 1.5 times as tall as the figurine in question, so about 3" on the sword I'd guess.
As one can imagine, quite thin items made from pewter and playing with it like Lego don't go well together. I think it survived about a week, possibly less, before the blade snapped off.
Come to think of it, this might just be my only broken sword so far, I don't remember breaking my wooden ones as a kid (though those owned by other people did suffer a bit) and the steel have all survived well through quite harsh HEMA training over the last couple of years.
Let's see what kind of anecdotes you come up with, meanwhile I'm going to jump on Google-Image search and try to dig up something similar to what I remember.