I was staring at an empty page for hours last week, attempting to parse what strange, niche topic I knew enough about to teach a class on. I didn’t want to choose anything actually useful like astronomy or entomology. I then thought of my interests not covered by existing classes. While I know a great deal about a number of different fictional worlds, I think if I tried to teach anyone about them, I would have a heart attack from the pure embarrassment in revealing the things I like.
Then it hit me. Something just mainstream enough to not make my audience think less of me — there’s a lot riding on that “just” — while being actually somewhat relevant to real life. I mean, 99 percent of people will never use any of this information, which would make it fit perfectly in with every other class at a public high school. The class is — wait for it — Medieval Weaponry, with a special emphasis on crossbows and polearms. If there’s anything that’s entirely useless that I’ve done extensive research on, it’s medieval weaponry. I don’t know how to make it — and I barely know how to use it — but I can certainly rattle off a bunch of names and draw approximations of the minute differences between a guisarme, a bill-guisarme, and a guisarme-glaive.
I think my fixation began when I was doing research for my fantasy novel, in which I gave a character a polearm without specifying anything further. This didn’t sit right with me, so I decided to do, as I phrased it then, a little “light research.” It took me three hours to decide that the polearm I wanted to use was a fauchard; but a fauchard is not always a fauchard. See, the interesting thing about weapon classification, and polearms specifically, is that nobody can agree on what exactly counts as what weapon. A fauchard to some people is a close relative of the glaive with a concave crescent blade, but to others, it’s a close relative of the glaive with a forward-facing hook on the back edge. There are a million different ways to craft a polearm, and while there are hundreds of names and attempts to try and classify every one, we run into the ever-present problem that humanity can never categorize everything nearly as much as we want to. A spear is not a partisan, a halberd is not a glaive, and yet the lines between all of these are far, far blurrier than one might think. Add scythes and sickles into the mix, and you’re no longer just having a conversation about the distinctions between weapons, but the nature of weapons versus tools itself.
This is just one of many scintillating conversations we could have as a class if the cowardly history department would answer my emails.
Fin Walling is from Minneapolis, Minn.
Their major is undeclared.
