Editing Sword (section)

=== Swords and dual wielding ===

If you go to battle with a one-handed sword, you'd generally want some other weapon in your off hand as well. Ideally it should be a shield or a buckler, but lets face it: if you're going into battle, a sword is probably your sidearm, and your main weapon is likely to be two-handed or incompatible with shields in some other ways, and if you use a sword for self-defense against bandits or assassins on the town's street, chances are you didn't bring a huge-ass shield as part of your civilian outfit, and the only other weapon on you would likely be a dagger. So you grab your ''other'' sidearm, like a dagger or a small axe, or maybe even a mace or warhammer. Why not another sword? Well, wielding a single sword requires a lot of skill and attention to do it properly, and operating two requires ''more'' than twice of both, since you use the other sword with your off-hand, which by definition is weaker and less dexterous. That's not to say, master swordsmen didn't try it - some of them did, often with quite a success on tourneys and duels, but none of them was crazy enough to go to war with double swords when sword and something less skill-intensive is so much more sensible. Once you got two weapons in your hand you ''do not'' get to attack twice as often, like it's normally portrayed in traditional or video games - a good attack move requires muscle effort from a whole body, but by attacking with both hands simultaneously (like with showy "scissors" move movies and video games so love) you can only use your arms and to an extend shoulder strength. What dual wielding is really about, is attacking with one weapon and defending with another. This allows you to parry an enemy attack with one weapon and simultaneously retaliate with another, or attack with one weapon without compromising your own defense (much). So contrary to how it's normally portrayed in media and games, dual-wielding is a defensive technique rather then offensive one. And you'd need that extra defense, since with one-handed weapons you would have lower reach. This is also the reason why people didn't block enemy attacks by both their weapons crossed, which is another showy but extremely impractical move popularized by media - one weapon is almost always enough to deflect a blow, and using both you'd just throw away the immediate counter-attack feature, which is the prime selling point of double-wielding. Now double-wielding might look to you like a poor man's sword-and-shield style, but there is one more thing: your options for attack angles are doubled with two different lethal weapons no less, which makes defending against your attacks hell of a lot more difficult for your opponent. Sure, shields and bucklers could and would be used for bashing people, but it's nowhere near as lethal as dagger or axe to the face.

Now, in the Renaissance there was such a thing called the main-gauche or "parrying dagger," but these usually required special training to use effectively, and some models came with specialized designs to aid in parrying; for example, "swordbreakers" had notches to catch the enemy blade and twist it out of their hands, while the trident dagger had spring-loaded sides that could also catch the blade. However, daggers were not used to attack unless the wielder was able to lock blades and close in... which would put you in range of the other guy's dagger as well.

Another notable exception are the Chinese Butterfly Swords, a pair of short single-edged swords used in Wing Chun martial arts. The blades have to be short so that the user doesn't accidentally stab themselves as they swing them around; its also very handy to keep them short since using the swords just require the same moves as unarmed Wing Chun, so no specialized training was needed if you were already a practitioner. As far as we know, these were never used as battlefield weapons, but were pretty handy in a street fight.

There were also several schools of swordplay that focused on the use of two full-sized swords, such as the Japanese Niten Ichi-Ryu school founded by the swordmaster Miyamoto Musashi, but these took years of training to become proficient in let alone master. Generally, these schools required that would-be practitioners have extensive experience in wielding a sword in the off-hand and strongly advised against use by amateurs.