Dussak - weapon or training tool?

[M D McCullough]

Here is what wiki says-

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dussack

(although I am in agreement that names were interchangeable in translation)

[Bjarne Hoeglund]

Hello dear friends,
I´ve recently bought this sword on an auction in sweden.
It is 53 cm long in total. To me it looks like a dussak, but from what I´ve read here, there seems to be an open question whether the dussak was ever made as a metal sword.

I´m not sure if this will bring any light upon this question, but I wanted to share my finding with you.

Best regards,
Bjarne

[Julius D.]

Originally posted by Paul Hansen
I believe that is a very big assumption. The Bauernwehr is more like a big knife, and the Sax had been out of favour for centuries. How people fought with the Sax is anybody's best guess.

The Messer comes closer to the Dussack, but it still is not the same.

It seems to me that the Dussack is a weapon that stand quite on it's own.

It looks like a very no-nonsense piece of hardware; to call it anything but a weapon would be to do it disservice. You never hear someone refer to a machete as a farm implement even though that was its basic function - depending on region and era. I have Haitian relatives who still own the machetes they brought over from Haiti and they aren't cutting sugar cane with'm anymore! Or whatever the crop is over there.

[Hugh Fuller]

I asked your question to the guys re-enacting landesknechts at the Jamestown Military Through the Ages event this past weekend. They had a number of wooden ones around and they said that they were initially used as practice weapons, similar to the wooden wasters that we use, and that there eventually evolved a fencing school using them whose point was to draw first blood from the opponent's face. Sounds a lot like the German Deulingf Scar fad, if you ask me.

[Julius D.]

Why the face? I mean, why not draw blood from other areas of the body? I'd hate to walk around with a heavily scarred face just to say I'm the Dussack champ.

[Neil Langley]

Originally posted by Julius D.
Why the face? I mean, why not draw blood from other areas of the body? I'd hate to walk around with a heavily scarred face just to say I'm the Dussack champ.

And yet scars on the face were 'popular' with the Prussian military at the turn of the last century for similar reasons - I suspect this was where the idea came from. As the scar makes a statement it is not good if it is not visible - hence the face.

Try this link for more details: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_fencing

There truly is 'nowt as queer as folk'

Neil.

Edit to add this link (it's on the page above too) - not for the squeamish!: http://encyc.bmezine.com/?Dueling_scar

NWL

[Sa'ar Nudel]

I was looking for info over the net regarding the dussak and found this thread. I'm aware of most of the posted links. I do a little research about peasant weapons and i travel through Europe to find remote arms & armor collections. It had happened to be that I was in Bratislava about two years ago to visit a large temporal exhibition dealing with Austro-Hungarian weapons from 1600 to 1900. Look at the pic attached, sorry for the bad quality (reflection etc.) - ignore the saber and focus on the dussak at the bottom; except the straight blade it is of the classic form, integral self hilt with the little decorative curl. This was the only one I've ever seen untill...

[Sa'ar Nudel]

I was in central Europe two weeks ago for a short trip and managed to find this piece.