One of the common questions that people ask me is how to understand and interpret a difficult sequence from our source material. I receive the question at events (often in the pub!), through my website, and on Facebook, mostly from people who have recently begun working with the sources, but also from people who have been working with sources for a year or two.

It is quite a fair and reasonable question. Working from source material that might be a few hundred years ago and in another language is not the easiest task! What can we do to make it easier? What is my own method for understanding and interpreting difficult sequences?

For the purpose of this article, I am going to be using examples from Liechtenauer’s longsword, although the same method may be used with any discipline. Not everyone needs to go through every single step; for example, you might already know what source and translation you intend to use, because you have a question about a specific paragraph in a specific translation. By setting out the whole methodology here, it should be clear where you can dip in and out of it as required.

Decide what source you are going to follow

This may sound obvious, but not always.

If I am practising “Liechtenauer’s longsword”, what does that mean? Longsword according to Liechtenauer? Well, that would limit me to the Zettel, because the expanded commentaries about the techniques mentioned in the Zettel were written by other people who created glosses Liechtenauer’s verses.

Even then, which version of the Zettel do I follow? Am I following the version found in the Nuremberg Hausbuch, or in the Goliath? Am I following the Ringeck version, or the Lew version, or the Talhoffer version? These are all slightly different from each other, and potentially lead us to different interpretations.

It is not a problem to choose one or the other. Just pick one, or find out what is the main source used in your club, and work with that. I have written before that honesty is important in martial arts, and one of the reasons for this is that it forces us to clarify exactly what we are doing and thinking and why. This is extremely beneficial in the process of interpreting a source!

Decide which translation you are going to follow

Not every translation is equal. Languages rarely have a perfect one-to-one mapping from the original text to the new language, especially for more complicated ideas. Every translation involves a certain amount of interpretation and decision making by the translator, and therefore every translation has a slightly different flavour and tone.

Some translations may be done more skilfully than others – I hesitate to call my own translations very good, as I have not studied historical languages in anything more than a cursory fashion, but they work well enough for me. Again, honesty is key here: is a translation a useful resource, or does the translation actually confuse matters more?

Try to work with multiple translations

Perhaps see what translations are available for your chosen source. You might find that there are more available than you realised! For example, into English, there are at least four translations of the Nuremberg Hausbuch, at least three translations of the Kolner Fechtbuch, and at least four translations of Ringeck. While the Wiktenauer is a phenomenal resource, there are other resources available as well, and acquiring copies of different translations will help you in your attempts to understand and interpret a source.

Try and compile the various translations, if at all possible, ideally in some fashion that lets you compare and contrast easily.

To do this, I like to create a Word document with a table, putting the original text (the transcription) in the first column, and then making additional columns for each of the translations I have been able to find. I set out one row per heading / verse / paragraph in the transcription, so that it is easy to compare across the table without formatting causing any problems.

I find that this lets me see where translations agree and disagree with each other, as well as letting me look at the original terms to try to work out where the agreement or disagreement comes from. This lets me decide which translation I might prefer as my main working translation, or at least lets me decide which translation is probably better for any given passage from the source. Seeing different people’s work on the same source can also spark ideas about how to consider the ideas that led to different translations, rather than hanging onto the precise words of a single translator.

If you have the skill, you could even compile your own translation. This is not an easy thing to do for most people, so don’t imagine that it is a mandatory part of the method! I’m often quite happy to work with other people’s translations when I know that I would struggle do a better job, or when I don’t have the time to create a proper, good quality version of my own.

For example, here is a section about the Zornhaw and its Ort, taken from the Codex Danzig (13r-14r). You might not consider these instructions to be complicated, but other people do, and they provide an excellent example for the purpose of this article. Notice how I set out my compilation of the material to make it easy to see what is happening in each piece of information, and how easy it becomes to compare translations with each other and with the original text.

Cory Winslow’s translation in the table above was drawn from the Wiktenauer. My translation is very similar in many ways, although I would change the pacing a little because I like my translations to read easily in English. Probably the greatest difference, in the interests of being entirely honest (yes, I should do it too!), is in the final line: Cory says “as painted hereafter”, and I give no such translation, because there is no such text in the Codex Danzig (which is what is shown in the transcription in the leftmost column). Why is this?

Well, Cory’s translation is, more accurately, of the version of this particular text as we see it in the Goliath, not in the Codex Danzig. The Goliath is a witness to the stemma of the Codex Danzig, which is a technical way of saying that the Goliath version was most likely copied from the Codex Danzig, or at least the version in the Goliath seems to follow after, draw from, and further explain the version in the Codex Danzig, in this particular sub-tradition of glossing or explaining the Zettel in a particular fashion.

What does this mean in real terms? Probably not very much to most of us, for most intents and purposes. If you are getting into sufficiently deep study of the source material to understand the stemma codicum of the Liechtenauer tradition and to care about which sources are witness to which sub-traditions, then it probably matters much more; otherwise, it’s nothing to worry about right now. Understanding at this level will hopefully come in time!

Parse the text and break it down

When you (inevitably!) reach a passage that gives you trouble, you need to parse it and break it down. Sometimes the instructions are just painfully wordy and dense, and you need to do something to make sense of them.

For example, let us consider the following sequence of instructions about how to perform the Zornhaw and its Ort, according to my translation above (just the instructions about how to do the thing, all other sections removed).

This is just the three glosses on performing the Zornhaw Ort, with the “break” removed, with the Zettel removed, and with the headings and introductions removed – just the raw instruction and explanation of the Zornhaw Ort. Even so, it is still not very easy to follow!

We can make it easier by “parsing” it, by which I mean breaking it down into more manageable chunks. If we assume each cell in the table above is a separately numbered item in a numbered list, then we would have the following list:

1. Mark, the Zornhaw breaks with the point all Oberhawen thrown against you, and yet is nothing other than a simple peasant strike. Drive it thus: when you come to him in the Zufechten, if he cuts at the right side of your head from above, then cut also, wrathfully, from above and from your right shoulder onto his sword, and without any parrying. If he is soft/weak at the sword, then shoot the point in straight forward and thrust him in the face or breast. Thus, set upon him.
2. Note that when you cut in at him with the Zornhaw, shoot in the point long to the face or breast, as described before. If he becomes aware of the point, and parries strongly and pushes your sword to the side, so wrench it upward, your sword by his blade, and go up and above his sword, then cut in to his head from the other side, still by his blade. This is called taking off above.
3. Note that when you cut in at him with the Zornhaw, if he parries you and remains strong in this parrying on the sword, then also be strong with your sword on his, and go up high with your arms and turn your hilt on his sword in front of your head, and thrust him from above into his face. If he becomes aware of your thrust, and he goes up high with his arms and parries with his hilt, then remain standing with your hilt in front of your head and set in your point below at his neck or at his breast between both arms.

That probably doesn’t look any easier. So we need to parse it further:

1. Mark, the Zornhaw breaks with the point all Oberhawen thrown against you, and yet is nothing other than a simple peasant strike. Drive it thus:
   1. when you come to him in the Zufechten, if he cuts at the right side of your head from above, then cut also, wrathfully, from above and from your right shoulder onto his sword, and without any parrying.
   2. If he is soft/weak at the sword, then shoot the point in straight forward and thrust him in the face or breast. Thus, set upon him.
2. Note that when you cut in at him with the Zornhaw, shoot in the point long to the face or breast, as described before.
   1. If he becomes aware of the point, and parries strongly and pushes your sword to the side, so wrench it upward, your sword by his blade, and go up and above his sword, then cut in to his head from the other side, still by his blade. This is called taking off above.
3. Note that when you cut in at him with the Zornhaw,
   1. if he parries you and remains strong in this parrying on the sword, then also be strong with your sword on his, and go up high with your arms and turn your hilt on his sword in front of your head, and thrust him from above into his face.
   2. If he becomes aware of your thrust, and he goes up high with his arms and parries with his hilt, then remain standing with your hilt in front of your head and set in your point below at his neck or at his breast between both arms.

All I did was to copy and paste the previous list, and then add a few “new line” and “indent” commands. Suddenly, it begins to look better! But maybe not quite as good as it could:

1. Mark, the Zornhaw breaks with the point all Oberhawen thrown against you, and yet is nothing other than a simple peasant strike. Drive it thus:
   1. when you come to him in the Zufechten,
      1. if he cuts at the right side of your head from above,
         1. then cut also,
         2. wrathfully,
         3. from above and from your right shoulder
         4. onto his sword,
         5. and without any parrying.
   2. If he is soft/weak at the sword,
      1. then shoot the point in straight forward
      2. and thrust him in the face or breast.
      3. Thus, set upon him.
2. Note that when you cut in at him with the Zornhaw, shoot in the point long to the face or breast, as described before.
   1. If he becomes aware of the point, and parries strongly and pushes your sword to the side,
      1. so wrench it upward,
      2. your sword by his blade,
      3. and go up and above his sword,
      4. then cut in to his head from the other side,
      5. still by his blade.
      6. This is called taking off above.
3. Note that when you cut in at him with the Zornhaw,
   1. if he parries you and remains strong in this parrying on the sword,
      1. then also be strong with your sword on his,
      2. and go up high with your arms
      3. and turn your hilt on his sword in front of your head,
      4. and thrust him from above into his face.
   2. If he becomes aware of your thrust, and he goes up high with his arms and parries with his hilt,
      1. then remain standing with your hilt in front of your head
      2. and set in your point below at his neck or at his breast between both arms.

Immediately, this becomes much easier to follow! We can see a clear “if, then” structure to all of these instructions. We don’t worry about item 1.1.1.3 if condition 1 doesn’t happen in the first place; if he comes with an Underhaw, instead of the Oberhaw, then we do something else because the stimulus does not satisfy condition 1.

If he comes at you with an Oberhaw (point 1), in the Zufechten (point 1.1), and he aims his Oberhaw at the right side of your head (point 1.1.1), then carry out the instructions as follows. All I did to make this list was just hit “new line” every time a new component piece of an instruction was introduced, to make it easier to follow, while indenting each new “if, then” statement.

Interpret the parsed instruction

Once you have parsed the instruction, to the most indented and new-lined extent that you reasonably can, you have a very simple structure to follow.

My advice is to treat each item as a separate instruction to be performed sequentially, i.e., one after another, rather than trying to make it all flow together in a single action. Of course, this is going to be far too slow for sparring! Yes, I understand that. But you will not be able to perform the full technique in a single, fast, fluent action until you understand the component parts and can perform each of them perfectly in isolation and sequentially. Once you achieve this skill, you can begin to work on making things flow together, but not before.

When you consider each new line in the list, ask yourself the following questions:

• what is the stimulus I need for this?
• what is the result I am hoping to achieve with this?
• how do I follow the instruction in the simplest fashion possible, with as few discrete motions as possible?
• can I do this while wearing full gear (i.e., by using gross body movements that can be done under stress and in gear), or does my interpretation only work when wearing just a t-shirt and light gloves (i.e., using fine detail movements that are probably too fine detail to be useful under stress or when wearing full protective gear)?

If you can understand every single line in the list above, according to these questions, then you may well have a sensible interpretation! If every item makes sense, and you understand the purpose of each discrete motion, and you understand what stimlus leads to each response, then this is good.

Train your interpretation!

Simply interpreting the Zornhaw Ort doesn’t make you a master of the Zornhaw Ort. You need to train the technique to become any good at it at all. Put in the repetitions, the elbow grease, the sweat equity, whatever you want to call it.

Train it sequentially, in discrete steps, nice and slowly, until you understand what you are trying to do. Until you physically understand what you are trying to do, not just mentally, but until your body knows and understands where it needs to be and what it needs to do to achieve each of the discrete goals you set for it. Macho, full contact, balls to the wall training has no place here. Do it slowly and precisely until you understand the thing.

Chunk your interpretation

Once you understand the thing, allow yourself to combine steps. Don’t combine everything at once. Consider the Zornhaw Ort as described above. If you list every step in this sequence, as part of a single sequence (extraneous steps or discussion removed), you have the following:

1. When you come to him in the Zufechten,
   1. if he cuts at the right side of your head from above,
      1. then cut also,
      2. wrathfully,
      3. from above and from your right shoulder
      4. onto his sword,
      5. and without any parrying.
         1. If he is soft/weak at the sword,
            1. then shoot the point in straight forward
            2. and thrust him in the face or breast.
            3. Thus, set upon him.
               1. If he becomes aware of the point, and parries strongly and pushes your sword to the side,
                  1. so wrench it upward,
                  2. your sword by his blade,
                  3. and go up and above his sword,
                  4. then cut in to his head from the other side,
                  5. still by his blade.
                  6. This is called taking off above.
         2. If he parries you and remains strong in this parrying on the sword,
            1. then also be strong with your sword on his,
            2. and go up high with your arms
            3. and turn your hilt on his sword in front of your head,
            4. and thrust him from above into his face.
               1. If he becomes aware of your thrust, and he goes up high with his arms and parries with his hilt,
                  1. then remain standing with your hilt in front of your head
                  2. and set in your point below at his neck or at his breast between both arms.

There are 18 discrete steps in the first branch of this sequence (following 1.1.5.1), or 17 if you disregard the final item as being merely a naming instruction rather than a physical or situational instruction. And this is before we even get into the Winden actions in the second branch (following 1.1.5.2)!

This probably looks like an awful lot of information. It is! Why do you think you have so much difficulty pulling it off in sparring? There are so many opportunities to make mistakes and not follow the instruction quite to the letter. This is exactly why following the sources and what they say is so critically important if you want to learn to fence properly: they give you all the information you need, step by step. You just have to learn how to follow all the instructions without skipping steps or changing things. That’s tougher than it sounds. Believe me, I know, from long experience of skipping steps and doing it wrong!

Train it all, step by step, paying attention to the questions you asked yourself (stimulus, result, how to do it in the fewest steps, gross motor actions, etc.).

Then allow things to chunk. What do I mean by this? I mean combining discrete steps into compound actions, so that you can do several things at once, or at least by minimising the time between sequential motions, and so that you can consider a series of steps as a single action. For example, the previous list, chunked:

1. When you come to him in the Zufechten,
   1. if he cuts at the right side of your head from above,
      1. then cut also, wrathfully, from above and from your right shoulder onto his sword, and without any parrying.
         1. If he is soft/weak at the sword,
            1. then shoot the point in straight forward and thrust him in the face or breast. Thus, set upon him.
               1. If he becomes aware of the point, and parries strongly and pushes your sword to the side,
                  1. so wrench it upward, your sword by his blade, and go up and above his sword, then cut in to his head from the other side, still by his blade. This is called taking off above.
         2. If he parries you and remains strong in this parrying on the sword,
            1. then also be strong with your sword on his, and go up high with your arms and turn your hilt on his sword in front of your head, and thrust him from above into his face.
               1. If he becomes aware of your thrust, and he goes up high with his arms and parries with his hilt,
                  1. then remain standing with your hilt in front of your head and set in your point below at his neck or at his breast between both arms.

That is much simpler than before, in terms of number of steps – yet is it exactly the same text, just with some of the new lines removed. Once you can train this, in these discrete steps, allow for further chunking:

1. When you come to him in the Zufechten,
   1. if he cuts at the right side of your head from above,
      1. then cut also, wrathfully, from above and from your right shoulder onto his sword, and without any parrying.
         1. If he is soft/weak at the sword, then shoot the point in straight forward and thrust him in the face or breast. Thus, set upon him. If he becomes aware of the point, and parries strongly and pushes your sword to the side, so wrench it upward, your sword by his blade, and go up and above his sword, then cut in to his head from the other side, still by his blade. This is called taking off above.
         2. If he parries you and remains strong in this parrying on the sword, then also be strong with your sword on his, and go up high with your arms and turn your hilt on his sword in front of your head, and thrust him from above into his face. If he becomes aware of your thrust, and he goes up high with his arms and parries with his hilt, then remain standing with your hilt in front of your head and set in your point below at his neck or at his breast between both arms.

This is almost beginning to look like the translation in the first table above! The indentation at the decision-making points tell you what stimulus you are looking for, but the instructions are more or less verbatim according to the translation, just with the guff (one of my favourite “technical terms” for unnecessary stuff) removed .

Understanding your interpretation

Once you choose your source and choose your translation, you can parse it and break it down until you have individual, discrete steps.

Once you have your individual, discrete steps, you can ask yourself important questions so that you develop your understanding of why each step occurs the way it does and is written the way it is.

Once you have this understanding, you can train the action in discrete steps, making sure everything is correct. This is how you develop your physical understanding of the action and the sequence, of the stimuli and responses within.

Once you understand all of this, and can perform the discrete actions well, you should begin to chunk it all back together. Each chunking step brings more information, more discrete steps, into a single “chunk” of instruction. Each time you chunk information together, you come closer to reassembling the original instruction – but, critically, with the understanding of why each individual part of the instruction is there, due to your parsing efforts.

Eventually, you chunk everything so far that the list described above becomes, with my modifications in italics:

1. When you come to him in the Zufechten,
   1. if he cuts at the right side of your head from above,
      1. then do the Zornhaw.
         1. If he is soft/weak at the sword, then set upon him. If he […] parries strongly and pushes your sword to the side, do the taking off above.
         2. If he parries you and remains strong in this parrying on the sword, then do the Winden and stab him in the face. If […] he goes up high with his arms and parries with his hilt, then stab him elsewhere.

This looks nice and simple, for a change!

Conclusion

However, if you tell this fully-chunked sequence to a beginner, you can see just how much information the sequence has lost. You understand that information, so it is not (necessarily) lost on you; but unless someone else has gone through the same parsing, training, and chunking processes, they won’t be able to understand the sequence the same way you can. Even your most skilled student or training partner will not be able to understand it the same way until they go through all of these steps with you.

Of course, a good instructor will be able to convey all of this information relatively quickly. If it takes you a month to understand this sequence in this much detail, that doesn’t mean it must take a month for all of your students to understand it in as much  detail. I can teach all of this to my students inside a single two-hour session, with time to spare for further training and attempting to apply it in sparring games. This is one of the advantages of having access to a skilled instructor! (By the way, you can hire me to teach at your event, or you can arrange a residential course to come and study with me for a weekend if you would like to experience this in person.)

But even if you are not yet a skilled instructor, and you are just starting out on your journey of studying HEMA, there is no reason to be disheartened! Skilled instructors purchase their experience and skills with a significant investment of sweat, time, and effort. If you invest enough time and effort, and lubricate the learning process with your sweat, then you will develop similar knowledge, understanding, physical skills, and teaching skills.

This is just the section on the Zornhaw Ort that we have considered in this article, and even then, only from a single source: the Codex Danzig (or, more specifically, my translation of this section from the Codex Danzig). There are other sources that may discuss it or illustrate it differently. This holds for the entirety of the “Liechtenauer tradition”, that different sources within the “tradition” describe actions differently, or sometimes similarly. And we have to interpret every action following this methodology.

At least, I spend my time and effort interpreting every action according to this methodology. I think it is justified, and I believe that the various videos of me sparring with different people show that my understanding and application of the techniques and system is improving every year. I would recommend adopting this methodology for your own interpretative work until you come up with a better methodology or have sufficient understanding to take shortcuts without a problem. With enough practice, there is no need to parse to the same extent, or to chunk back up to the same extent, because you can look at an original source (perhaps the original text in transcription, perhaps via translation) and understand what it is talking about and how to apply it in practice. Now there is a good long term goal for you!

I hope this article has been helpful. If you have any questions, I would be more than happy to discuss the matter with you. If you would like to hire me to teach this methodology with some examples at your club or event, please feel free to contact me! Hopefully, this inspires you to go away and think about your source material in more detail. If I manage to achieve this, then I will be happy.

Keith Farrell

Keith Farrell teaches HEMA professionally, often at international events (why not hire me to teach at your event?), and has an interest in coaching instructors to become better teachers. I teach regularly at Liverpool HEMA, and help behind the scenes with running HEMA in Glasgow at the Vanguard Centre.

I have authored Scottish Broadsword and British Singlestick and the award-winning AHA German Longsword Study Guide, and maintain a blog at www.keithfarrell.net where I post regularly.