Get our top stories follow io9.com Swordfighting: Not What You Think It Is To borrow a famous line, the problem with most people trying to understanding the true nature of historical sword combat is not that they're ignorant -- it's just that they know so much that isn't so. It's amazing, really, how a subject that so permeates our modern pop culture, and is so ubiquitous, is one which virtually no one any longer has any real world experience in, nor pursues for its original function. As a result, most all our conceptions of sword-fighting get it wrong. The reality of it is not what you think it is. Some readers will really get offended if you dare to suggest that they don't have an accurate conception of sword-fighting. It's pretty silly, since no one of them relies on this skill for self-preservation, nor makes it their profession. Plus, nearly everyone gets their information and opinions on it from the same essential sources: TV, movies, fantasy literature, video games, cartoons, comic books, dinner-theaters and renn-fairs fight shows. But where do those sources get their notions? Almost entirely from experience with sport fencing, Asian martial art styles, and pretentious historical role-playing societies. Yet, all these sources derive their conceptions of it from still earlier ones. And so on and so on. Where then did most of today's ideas on historical sword-fighting originate? When we trace it all back, we find that romantic beliefs about the nature of swordsmanship among knights and