When is a halberd not a halberd?

[Erpingham]

When it's in a saga, of course.  Older translations of sagas often contain references to halberds and bills which disguise the fact they are trying to grapple with terms in the original that don't directly translate.

For those perplexed by the confusing polearm terminology of Norse sagas this article explores the question in depth.

[Duncan Head]

Interesting, thanks.

A bit surprised at atgeirr apparently meaning a heavy spear, and in earlier Germanic usage "a heavy spear (as opposed to a light javelin)", since Ian Heath (Dark Ages fig.120) writes of Anglo-Danish huscarls using "javelins of a type called aetgar" - I expected them to be  forms of the same word and weapon. I wonder where Heath got that usage from?

[Erpingham]

A quick google suggests it is from the description of the housecarles "gifted" to Hardacanute by Earl Godwin in 1040. 

MJ Swanton noted in his thesis :

The  single  use  of the word  ategar in the connected  prose  of  an English writer,  occurs in Florence's Latin  description  of  the accountrement  of Godwine's retinue  in 1040 A.D.  when the  arms of each warrior  included: lanceam quae  lingua  Anglorum ategar appellatur  It  is not  certain  however,  that  by  this  time, lancea signified  anything more than  an ordinary hand-spear.

He notes that all the other uses of aetgar were in glossaries, where it translated various Latin words for spear.  For those looking at the thesis, the aetgar section starts on p. 521 .


 

[Duncan Head]

Thanks again.

[Andreas Johansson]

Interesting.

The idea that höggspjót and atgeirr are more-or-less the same thing was evidently shared by the translator of Njal's Saga that I read long ago; atgeirr was there rendered as huggspjut.

[Erpingham]

I think part of the problem is we are typology-focussed much more than our ancestors.  Certainly, it is pretty hopeless task to precisely assign terms to illustrations of medieval pole weapons when their users didn't really care that much.  What did a guisarme look like and was it the same as a bill or what we now call a glaive (which meant a spear)? Why did the illustrator of Gawain and the Green Knight show what in the text was a guisarme as a weapon that looks very like a sparth?

[Andreas Johansson]

I'm not sure it's necessarily a difference between ancients and moderns - it might just be that trying to make sense of stuff like this attracts nitpickers and sticklers for consistency like us. It's not too long since I had to point out to a guy in the arms industry that he'd used a single initialism in three different senses within the same document. Which was meant in each instance was probably obvious to him and approximately three other people. And this was a highly educated man writing a formal text on a subject he knows very well.

[Nick Harbud]

I'm still grappling with the arguments surrounding the kidon.....