The Ethical Core of Highland Broadsword Fencing

• Christopher Thompson

The art of the Highland broadsword was created in conditions of extreme violence. The wars that shook Scotland in the 16^th-18^th centuries, and the bitter feuding of the "Age of Forays," involved scenes of horror such as the burning of a church full of men, women and children in the prelude to the battle of Blar-na-Pairc, the suffocation of hundreds of villagers by their clan enemies who walled them up in a cave and deliberately smoked them to death, and the massacre of Glencoe with its betrayal of hospitality.

None of these things happened because the Highlanders were savages, as certain writers with an anti-Gaelic agenda would have us believe. Even worse things have been done in modern times by the most "civilized" nations of the world. Rather, these horrible things happened because atrocity is in the nature of war itself. When we decide that our enemies are no longer human, there is no limit to the crimes we will commit against them. So why is it that, in the midst of all this violence, the expert swordsmen of the Gaelic world were so reluctant to take human life?

Even though Gaelic culture was a warrior society, the vast majority of Highland warriors would not have been expert swordsmen. They would have been well-trained and skillful, to be sure. But men who were truly devoted to the art of swordplay would still have been rare. And it is these men, such as Big Malcolm McIlvain and M’Comie Mor, who are often portrayed in Gaelic lore as being the most forbearing, the least touchy and prone to take insult, the most reluctant to fight or to kill when they did have to fight.

It is common in modern society for people to profess to be appalled by any sort of violence at all. Yet if you look more closely at their words and actions, a different picture emerges. They may be appalled by a punch thrown at a bar or by the concept of war in the abstract. But they are still inclined to be quite callous about the idea of terrible things being done to those they consider "the bad guys"- whether that means the civilian population of a "terrorist" country we’re at war with, or the "oppressive" victims of those same terrorists if they happen to be on the other side of the conflict, or whether their hatred is reserved for a particular social group, such as yuppies or rappers or whomever. Whatever their words about violence, the shadow remains inside them under the surface, unconstrained by anything because it has never been confronted. All it would take would be the right set of circumstances for such "good" people to participate in something truly evil.

The study of a martial art allows us to directly confront our own shadow, the part inside each of us that would be capable of committing an atrocity. By understanding the art of violence intimately, we can come to terms with it on a level that may not be possible in any other way. In Highland society, only those who truly devoted themselves to mastering the broadsword would have had the chance to pursue this process to its conclusion. And it is these men who rejected all unnecessary violence, even in the midst of upheaval and war. It is these men who learned to respect the humanity even of their enemies, seeking to do no more than wound an opponent unless he gave them no choice but to kill.

They studied the art of the sword until they were nearly invincible in single combat, and the conclusion they came to, in the words of broadsword master Archibald MacGregor, was "Anything but taking the life."

This was by no means a position of weakness or an unwillingness to fight if they had to. The level of skill required to deliberately spare an opponent’s life in a sword fight is far higher than that required to kill him.

The current revival of western martial arts involves a great deal of macho fantasizing about the "lethally effective combat arts" we supposedly practice. But as lethal as these skills may be, that was not their ultimate purpose in the words of the warriors who actually perfected them, at least not in the case of the Highland broadsword. Studying an archaic combat art solely in order to become as deadly as possible with a weapon no one uses anymore is a truly useless way to spend one’s time. But taking up the sword in order to confront one’s own shadow- I believe that is what the great masters of the broadsword were actually doing, and that purpose is as worthwhile now as it was three hundred years ago.