Forging Terminus Est

Lane Haygood · 03 Jul 2008, 04:01 · from 2008-July.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: lhaygood at gmail.com (Lane Haygood)
Date: Wed, 2 Jul 2008 23:01:30 -0500
Subject: (urth) Forging Terminus Est
Message-ID: <486c4f1f.0405560a.1f07.6b45 at mx.google.com>

I practice several blade arts like Filipino kali and Kukishinden Ryu Kenjutsu. Cutting with a sword is no easy feat, but I just don't see the benefit of a sliding bit of weight in a two-hander like TE.

Lane Haygood
Sent from my AT&T Tilt 

-----Original Message-----
From: Transentient <transentient at gmail.com>
Sent: Wednesday, July 02, 2008 10:36 PM
To: The Urth Mailing List <urth at lists.urth.net>
Subject: Re: (urth) Forging Terminus Est

>     So I?ve changed my mind about the improbability of Wolfe?s  
> putting a mercury channel in Terminus Est.    I think a craftsman  
> could have forged the sword without resorting to unknown technologies.

I never really considered that there was an actual channel of mercury  
running down the core of the blade. I always assumed this was just how  
Severian described some bit of lost tech.

You don't need to do use anything like a channel of liquid metal in a  
sword to make it a good tool for cutting heads. All you need is a good  
edge. The rest is up to the skill of the practitioner; I am sure the  
executioner's guild trained Severian very well in how to cut so that  
the blade's balance is forward or backward.

(Surely I'm not the only one on this list who has practiced a Japanese  
sword art like Iaido or batto?) 
_______________________________________________
Urth Mailing List
To post, write urth at urth.net
Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net