I am working with swords tomorrow, so broke out one of my favorite books, one that I have read three times, and skimmed through reading the passages I bracketed on my second reading. Richard Francis Burton was the most combative scholar who ever lived. He wrote dozens of books by hand in an age when writing in any field did not work with blinders on. The study of one subject was the study of all subjects. I have written much about what I disdain and abhor about the British Empire in Victorian times, but there was much that was so much richer than now.

Burton fought with the sword in duels, with his fists in the ring, with a pistol in battle—in which he had a Somali spear run through his face—and even beat up his nanny when he was a toddler. His life was a fight from the start, and he attacked his subjects of study likewise, and with a keen penetrating eye that sought the Why, not just the How, to better understand the Way. In Burton’s day a writer was expected to illustrate his own work—good God, I’d be a stick-figure laughing stock!

In my opinion, anyone who is to understand the soul of the swordsman should read two books: The Book of Five Spheres by Musashi, and the Book of the Sword by Burton. Musashi was the greatest swordsman to have written, and Burton was the greatest scholar to also be a notable swordsman—considered unbeatable in his day.

Richard F. Burton

1884, Chatto and Windlass, London; 1987, Dover, NY, 299 pages

With 293 illustrations, many by the author

This is the first of a work that was projected to run three volumes. This is the introduction to the origins and forms of the sword. Burton traces the weapon's origin from prehistory to the close of the Roman Period. He points out that the idea of the sword is a cultural phenomenon, a universal martial expression that evolved from various sources into a broad family of weapons, that remain an indentifiable ‘family’ of tools despite their wide variety and diverse origins. The introduction runs to 26 pages and is focused on the meaning and psychology of the sword.

The chapters of the book are:

1. Preamble

2. Man’s First Weapons

3. The Weapons of the Age of Wood

4. The Copper Age of Weapons

5. The Age of Alloys

6. The Early Iron Age of Weapons

7. The Sword: What is it?

8. The Sword in Ancient Egypt and in Modern Africa

9. The Sword in Khita-land, Palestine, Canaan…

10. The Sword in Babylon, Assyria…

11. The Sword in Ancient Greece

12. The Sword in Ancient Rome

13. The Sword Amongst the Barbarians…

The book has a list of illustrations so you can look them up, and has a ridicules variety of weird weapons. Burton’s point throughout is that the sword represents a superior human impulse, and that the loss of this impulse, the transference of human identity to ‘the gun’ to machine warfare, represents a possible death of the human spirit. His Gnostic yearnings show through in this work, which was dear to him.

Burton holds out the possibility of numerous origins for the sword and notes four definite progenitors: the carved club, the lengthened knife, the oar or paddle, and the boomerang, a weapon which he spends a lot of space on.

For his day Burton was a revolutionary iconoclast that constantly pointed out the value, ‘nobility’ and accomplishments of non-European civilizations and even pre-civilized cultures. He was hated and reviled by racists, and was known among his peers as ‘that damned white niցցer’. I point this out because I am about to quote Burton at length in some passages that will seem to the modern reader a bit too ‘Eurocentric’ for our current liberal cosmology. Keep in mind that he preferred Islamic company to Christian company, and noted that ‘possession of the sword’ by a warrior people elevated them above savagery.

Burton’s concept of the sword as ‘the white arm’ is the ability of a weapon of sword-length to instill honorable behavior by virtue of the fact that it demanded face-to-face confrontations, and winnowed out the ‘weak-willed’ and ‘mean-spirited’ from the process of combat to enough of a degree as to cultivate a sense of shared humanity between combatants. Burton’s concept of the sword was as a bulwark against savagery. It may seem hokey today. The idea is that if leaders at least, were bound by a code of honor based on swordsmanship down to squad level, that less recourse would be made to nasty choices and brutal measures on the part of conquerors.

Aside from the fact that his mechanical observations are first rate and experience based, his greatest gift is to the perpetual society of swordsmen. This loose association of blade enthusiasts continues to survive despite the complete overtaking of warfare by machinery and of settling disagreements by a legalistic system that Burton would surely decry as ‘a mean squabbling of women’. The legacy that he left us is moral to the point of metaphysics. I will leave you with some quotes of his concerning the cultural significance of the sword:

“The history of the Sword is the history of humanity…It was the ‘key of heaven and hell’; ‘If there was no Sword, there would be no law of Mohammed…To surrender the Sword was submission; to break the Sword was degradation. To kiss the Sword was, and in places still is, the highest form of oaths.”

“She [the sword] diffused everywhere the bright lights and splendid gifts of war… War, again, benefits society by raising its tone above the ineffable littleness and meanness which characterize the everyday life of many…In the presence of the Great Destroyer, petty feuds and miserable envy, hatred, and malice stand hushed and awe-struck…”

After 15 pages of this kind of commentary it becomes clear that Burton saw the sword as a living symbol of what is best in the warrior. He bemoans ‘bald utilitarianism’ as the death of meaningful living. He was looking at an industrializing world as if he were Robert E. Howard seeing the future through a Tolkienesque prism. If he would have lived to see it, World War One would have seemed to him the realization of hell on earth; the death of meaningful war. Throughout his Book of The Sword he reminds the swordsman that he is holding more than a tool in his hands; something that separates him from the worst in his own kind.

Burton was an awesomely complex and vital character on the world stage, who has been hidden from view by intellectuals and historians as much as possible, having fortunately been largely suppressed in his own day by the Victorian world distraught by the breadth and depth of his observations. If you are interested in the man that wrote this book go to the blog page on this site and read Into The Mountains of Madness, and go to the fiction page and check out The World is Our Widow.

We should not forget this man, particularly, when we have a sword in hand.