Hirdmenn

It was spring 2015 when the city museum of Espoo was planning on how to attract audience to its upcoming "Gladiators, Deaht and Glory" Presentation done together with the Colosseum museum of Rome. I (Arttu) am in a firm believe that it was the Idea of museum lecturer Tiuku Talvela to hire performers to create a gladiator fight show.  After a complicated recruiting shenanigans a team of three people was put together. A long time reenactor, a teacher of viking age reenacting combat and ancient artisan Julius Väliaho was chosen. With him a HEMA instructor and experienced stage combat performer Joeli Takala plus a dancer and choreographer with a background in martial arts Arttu Peltoniemi. Julius and Joeli had trained HEMA together in Grieswartt fencing club, and Arttu and Joeli had worked together in stage fight choreographs at the Finnish National Opera. The additional luck was in that everyone in the group had large and useful artisan skill set.  The preparations for the gladi...

And how to train it Even though there is a lot of source material for 15th century HEMA, the quantity and details of descriptions become less when we dive deeper into the dark age and antiquity. We have thus far done a gladiator fight show as  Servi Morituri  for Espoo city museum, and a short movie presenting a late 9th-century fight  with Ruined Films. Both are of an era from where we don't have more than a couple of fragments to read about the fighting technique, so we have to go on discovering it through indirect ways. (Other less serious productions like this fantasy action flic HOME have also been done.) In Servi Morituri we approached the fighting trough contemporary art of the time, wounds in bones that are considered belonging to dead gladiators, writings of Galenos, later manuscripts explaining fighting on a similar kind of weaponry, and most importantly by inspecting and testing what kind of effects the gear has for fighting. Our stance is that having as ...