A few weeks ago, I experienced my first true injury caused by swordplay. We’re not counting the various bumps, bruises, and banged-up fingers that come from regular training—those occur so frequently as to become a non-event. Here, I took a hard thrust to the chest that sent me to the ground, the wind knocked out of me such that it took a good few seconds before I could reassure my opponent I was, in fact, all right. At first I worried I’d cracked or broken a rib, but thankfully it only turned out to be intercostal muscle strain—painful as heck, but with a much shorter recovery time. Three weeks later, I’m not at 100 percent but see the light at the end of the tunnel.
In the immediate aftermath, the thoughts that floated through my mind were as follows:
- “Ow.”
- “Well, now you will have firsthand experience in writing a warrior recovering from a hard hit like that. Great research!”
- “See, this is what writers don’t understand about training with safety equipment: this could have been avoided if I’d worn proper chest protection and would have been catastrophic if I hadn’t worn a gambeson.”
- “Fucking ow.”
Sword fighting is dangerous—that should go without saying. It is a martial art, a lethal art, the blade developed as an instrument used to end a life. That means training, too, is dangerous. A blunted weapon is still a weapon. Even with every precaution taken, injuries happen: we hit harder than we meant to, someone steps the wrong way, you get caught up in the moment and think it’s fine to fight someone in partial armor without a chestplate (see above). We do our best, but ultimately, we recognize the risks inherent to our practice.
Yet when writers ask me for advice as a swordsperson, this perspective often feels lost. I get asked about fight scenes, or the finer details of wielding a specific weapon, or historical accuracy. And all of these are important factors when writing about a warrior’s life, to be sure! Improving my fight scenes was certainly foremost in my mind when I took my first Taste of the Knightly Arts class with the Chicago Swordplay Guild eight years ago (that, and a lifelong desire to be Joan of Arc or Éowyn or a Jedi). In that regard, I succeeded in my initial goal long ago, to the point where I believe writing fight scenes has very little to do with martial mechanics or realism and far more to do with determining the purpose they serve in your story. While I’m very meticulous about blocking out fights in my own writing, as a reader, I’m rarely paying attention to whether the movements feel realistic or if the writer knows the difference between a parry and counterattack. I’m invested in the emotional state of the character or the implications the fight has on the plot. Real one-on-one fights are short, messy, and often boring. There is always going to be a bit of dramatic, not-necessarily-realistic embellishment to make it an engaging moment in a story.
Thus it’s the finer details—scenes featuring training sequences or a swordsman’s everyday life—that tend to pull me out of the moment. Warriors sparring with sharp swords (PLEASE STOP DOING THIS) or sparring without padded jackets or helmets. I’ve read so many stories where a character comes away with a bruise that should have been a broken bone. It bears repeating: Blunt swords can still break the skin without proper protection. They certainly can break a finger, sometimes even with the proper protection. If your characters are fighting with wooden practice swords, they will be heavier and less flexible, perfectly capable of dealing that same force damage. In a visual medium like television or film, I understand the need to do away with some of this—the helmet hides a character’s face, wooden swords aren’t as fun to look at as sharp ones, and few people can pull off looking sexy in a gambeson. But I can only tolerate it up to a point, and far less so in prose, where the visual component doesn’t factor in nearly as much.
In sword class, we talk a lot about how fundamentally different our twenty-first-century lives are from the intended audience of medieval fencing manuals. Fourteenth-century master Fiore dei Liberi’s treatise Il Fior di Battaglia, which forms the basis for the tradition in which I train, was written for an Italian nobleman who was already an experienced fighter. Fiore himself was an accomplished fencing master who trained several condottieri, Italian military leaders of the late Middle Ages. They weren’t spending their days in front of screens or studying swordplay as a hobby. If you are writing a soldier, mercenary, D&D adventurer, or similar, you’re writing someone whose life is already full of violence, risk, and danger. In such an environment, they literally can’t afford to take needless risks that might put them in harm’s way before they’re even able to reach that big climactic battle.
Sometimes I feel like the OSHA compliance officer of SF/F storytelling, and there’s an argument to be made that, in the same way I care less now about the finer details of fight scenes, the finer details of training sequences are secondary to the overarching story, especially in a fantasy world where the rules might be different. But to me, including those details reflects a deeper understanding of the violence in which so many of these stories are steeped. Fantasy can be escapism, yes, but so often these grand, sweeping epics like Lord of the Rings or The Witcher feature far more beheading or disembowelment than the average reader of this essay will ever encounter. I intimately understand the appeal of these stories—hell, my fantasy novel currently on submission is about a soldier-turned-accountant and a washed-up battle mage—but the escapism should still come with some acknowledgement of reality. What is fiction, after all, but a reflection of our world?
Upon achieving the rank of Scholar within the Chicago Swordplay Guild, one swears the Scholar’s Oath, based on that sworn by members of the sixteenth-century London Maisters of Defence. It is something I’ve always taken deeply seriously, especially this line:
To respect this art, and never lose sight of its lethal nature.
As writers of swordsfolk, we should all strive for the same.
© 2025 Suzanne Walker
