Humans and Things-on-Sticks
26th May 2024
I was choreographing a staff-fighting scene, and got to thinking about one of my favorite pole arms, the Japanese naginata. It was considered a women’s weapon, for defense of a small place like a castle corridor. Something like it appears in the Cat Among Dragon books, where female Azdhagi use their version, and Rada Ni Drako does as well. I’ve gotten to play with one once, carefully supervised. Like many pole arms, it derived from a scythe, a long curved blade on a long stick that was and is used to harvest hay for various uses.
That sent my mind wandering to how many basic tools and other things can be summed up as “a blade or a lump on a stick.” The Polish war hammer*, carpenters’ hammers, machetes and scythes and pruning hooks and sickles and the naginata and the pole saw, bow saws (two sticks), hoes, rakes (sticks on sticks), almost everything starts as “a thing attached to a stick.”