By the Sword: A History of Gladiators, Musketeers, Samurai, Swashbucklers, and Olympic Champions (10th Anniversary Edition) by Richard Cohen (December 2007)
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Overview: Napoleon fenced. So did Shakespeare, Karl Marx, Grace Kelly, and President Truman, who would cross swords with Bess after school. Lincoln was a canny dueler. Ignatius Loyola challenged a man to a duel for denying Christ’s divinity (and won). Less successful, but no less enthusiastic, was Mussolini, who would tell his wife he was “off to get spaghetti,” their code to avoid alarming the children.
By the Sword is an epic history of sword fighting—a science, an art and, for many, a religion that began at the dawn of civilization in ancient Egypt and has been an obsession for mankind ever since. With wit and insight, Richard Cohen gives us an engrossing alternative history of the world.
Sword fighting was an entertainment in ancient Rome, a sacred rite in medieval Japan, and throughout the ages a favorite way to settle scores. For centuries, dueling was the scourge of Europe, banned by popes on threat of excommunication, and by kings who then couldn’t keep themselves from granting pardons—in the case of Louis XIV, in the thousands. Evidence of this passion is all around us: We shake hands to show that we are not reaching for our sword. A gentleman offers a lady his right arm because his sword was once attached to his left hip. Men button their jackets to the right to give them swifter access to their sword.
In his sweeping narrative, Cohen takes us from the training of gladiators to the tricks of the best Renaissance masters, from the exploits of musketeers to swashbuckling Hollywood by way of the great moments in Olympic fencing. A young George Patton competed in the 1912 Olympics. In 1936, a Jewish champion fenced for Hitler. Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone were ardent swordsmen. We meet their coaches and the man who staged the fight scenes in Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, and James Bond’s Die Another Day.
Richard Cohen has the rare distinction of being both a compelling writer and a champion sabreur. He lets us see swordplay as graceful and brutal, balletic and deadly, technically beautiful and fiercely competitive—the most romantic of martial arts. By the Sword is a virtuoso performance that is sure to beguile history lovers, sports fans, military buffs, and anyone who ever dreamed of crossing swords with Darth Vader. With wit and insight, Richard Cohen gives us an engrossing history of the world via the sword. 10th Anniversary Edition includes a new Preface by the author.
Genre: Non-Fiction, Sports, Fencing
"The author, a four-time Olympic fencer (and former publishing director for an eminent British house), packs this history of sword fighting with so much detail that even the most drastically uninformed reader will come away with a deep appreciation for the sport that started as a way of life. Cohen begins at the very beginning: in Egypt, circa 1200 B.C.E., when depictions of fencing matches began to turn up in artwork decorating the walls of pharaohs’ temples. Fencing was widespread throughout Asia, and the Romans, too, engaged in the pastime now and then, but mostly they used it as combat training. For centuries, the sword was the primary weapon of war, but as newfangled weapons appeared on the scene, swordplay became the domain of the duelist and the sportsman. As fashions changed, and men stopped carrying swords everywhere they went, duels became more formal and eventually fell out of fashion. Swords–and their relatives, epees and foils and sabers–became primarily items of sporting equipment. Cohen traces this evolution gracefully, anchoring the story in history, offering up plenty of social and political context, and introducing us to the most notable swordsmen. A definitive history." ~Booklist"Cohen’s enthusiastic history of the sword and of swordplay captures the adventure, romance, danger, and intrigue that the weapon has represented throughout world history. The narrative contains superheroes, villains, underdogs, spies, alchemists, movie stars and champions. Rather than use a purely chronological structure, Cohen (who has written for the New Yorker) takes apart many of the influences that fencing has had on society and vice versa. Barely a subject escapes his eyes: metallurgy and the quest for a sword that would hold its edge and remain strong; the damage swords can do to a body (including purposeful gashes across the cheek); judicial duels (it was believed that God would intervene on behalf of the innocent party, who would win regardless of fencing ability); the history of the Musketeers; swashbuckling movies; modern sport fencing (which countries and even families reign supreme and why), Fascists (Mussolini and many higher-ups in Hitler’s regime fenced), cheating and the Olympics. Staying away from an impersonal history, the author extends his own involvement with the sport he was on the British Olympic team four times (1972, 1976, 1980 and 1984) by visiting as many of his subjects as he can, from the historically superior sword-making city of Toledo to Gretel Bergmann, a figure in a Nazi fencing scandal. There are copious playful asides as footnotes filling the reader in on wonderful facts and anecdotes. For those with even a casual interest in fencing, Cohen’s work will be a delightful read; he brings the daunting breadth of the history of the sword within easy reach of the curious." ~Publishers Weekly
"The culture of the sword has given us everything from words like prizefight and freelance to such customs as shaking hands, the military salute, or men buttoning their coats on the right. Cohen’s exuberant history of swordplay begins with an account of his own 1972 "duel" in London, then leaps into the story of civilization as measured through the evolving technology and customs around broadswords, armor, lances, foils, sabers, rapiers, and epees. Readers wanting only to escape into chivalric tales from Musketeer days will not be disappointed; however, the polished writing and masterly use of centuries of anecdote should lure them through equally vivid sections on Roman gladiators, medieval knights, Japanese Samurai, and the swashbuckling crazes in Italy, Spain, France, England, and Hollywood. (According to Cohen, a British publisher and Olympic fencer, actors Douglas Fairbanks Sr. and Jr. were exceptional fencers, while Tyrone Power might not have opened a pi$ata without a sword double.) Cohen perhaps didn’t need to explore the sword proficiencies of American presidents, but this is a small matter in a work so rich in social history: Cohen investigates the sword duels of Ben Johnson and Voltaire and the real source of Cardinal Richelieu’s hatred of sword dueling. A fascinating story told with literary verve and the pride of a longtime practitioner; highly recommended." ~Library Journal
"Throughout this history of "swordplay"—from its first depiction, in an ancient Egyptian mural, down to modern tournaments where hits are logged by electronic sensors—Cohen draws upon his own experience as a sabreur who represented England in the Olympics. (One impressive photograph shows him in midair, executing a "horizontal flèche.") He concentrates, naturally enough, on the Western fencing tradition, of which he is a product—its manuals, masters, champions, famous duels, and lore. Cohen loves the punctilious dressage of fencing—citing with approval the Victorian masters who honed their pupils’ footwork by making them stand on tea trays—and is particularly drawn to instances where this vanished world has given us a cultural legacy. Men button their coats left over right, he says, to accommodate the swords that are no longer by their sides, and we shake hands, apparently, to show that we are not about to draw our swords. His narrative style, too, with its outspoken opinions and talk of fair play, embodies the "heroic archaism" that so evidently delights him." ~The New Yorker
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