By: William Hayes
Raleigh resident Andrew Eicher recently celebrated his 30th birthday. This isn’t your average celebration, as this is the Triangle Sword Guild’s advanced Napoleonic Fencing class. Here, a birthday is celebrated by a round, or “bout,” of dueling per year of age, plus another for good luck.
Eicher is the Communications Officer for the Triangle Sword Guild, a club for Historical European Martial Arts, or HEMA for short. It kept him active when he started working full time after college.
“I was told about the existence of this club by one of our fellow instructors three years ago and I just was like, you know what? This is the era of me trying things that I want to do.”
The Triangle Sword Guild offers core curricula for medieval longsword, polearm and dagger, bolognese sidesword, and napoleonic fencing.
Beginners start with foam replicas, but Advanced students train with real metal weapons. Despite having to deal with the heft and length of the swords, these students can attack half a dozen times in the blink of an eye.
“I just wanted something that would get me outside, meet new people.”
That’s Jack Kessler, a beginner in the Napoleonic Fencing course. He just moved to the triangle area from Wilmington, NC, and this has let him build a new community for himself.
“It’s nice to see people my own age in Raleigh again, which is something that it’s a bit difficult to find back in Wilmington.”
HEMA is cross-disciplinary, it’s athletic and scholarly. Eric Fazekas is one of the instructors for the Napoleonic Fencing course. He has to study historic manuals of fencing, and then teach his class based on them.
“Sometimes they have diagrams we can look at to help; sometimes it’s just reading text and doing our best to envision what that stance or attack or sequence looks like”
HEMA primarily focuses on dueling, 1-on-1 confrontation. It may not give insight into how wars between armies were fought, but according to UNC History Professor Wayne Lee, it gives insight into how these skills were taught.
“I think you can actually learn quite a bit from trying to figure out how the material culture of the past works as opposed to trying to just sort of look at it and guess”
Europe isn’t the only subject the Triangle Sword Guild researches. Elissa Cannonwood is the President of the Triangle Sword Guild. She says one of the group’s biggest strengths is the breadth the organization takes in its research.
“We work with some really great folks who are who are recreating African martial arts and we’ve got an individual in our club who’s looking into like things that were happening in- in India and Persia.”
Cannonwood, Fazek, and Eicher all agree there’s never just one voice in a given style, and there’s no wrong way to “do” HEMA.
“We’re all out here to have fun. Like it can get competitive at times, but like ultimately, we’re all out here with friends poking each other with steel.”
The Triangle Sword Guild, and HEMA, as a whole, involves a collaborative sport. Eicher says it’s a community for anybody interested. I’m W. H. Hayes reporting.
