Christian Tolber was introduced to swordplay in the late 1970s. It was not until the 1990s that he discovered historical fencing manuscripts, taking to the study. Since 2001, Tobler has been publishing, translating, and interpreting various historical sources, becoming one of the first to publish academic works and a prolific practitioner within the historical fencing community. Additionally, he and a friend, Carl Johnson, formed the Order of Selohaar in 1979 to bring back the chivalric codes of the Medieval Era for the modern person. Today, Tobler took some time to talk about his time in historical fencing, the Order of Selohaar, and some misconceptions from the Medieval Era. This is the first part of a two part interview. Read the second part here.
Martial Arts of Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow: Hello and welcome Christian! Thank you for joining us for a conversation!
Christian Tobler: I appreciate being here.
MAYTT: When did you start training in what’s now known as HEMA?
CT: I’ve been involved with various forms of sword play, mostly homegrown originally, since the very late 1970s. It was really about 1995 or early 1996 when I first became aware that this stuff actually even existed; that there were surviving manuscripts, showing how people really fought as opposed to what we saw in movies or what Recreationist societies just made up in their backyards. Guilty as charged myself, originally. It was right about then and the current crop of researchers that started around the same time as myself was really facilitated by the growth of the internet – being able to share that information, share scans of manuscripts, and nascent translations. That’s really a big part of the genesis of my involvement with it.
MAYTT: Since the late 1990s, what was about historical fencing that made you stick with it for as long as you have?
CT: It filled the gap in what I call a chivalric tool set. In 1979, I co-founded, with my best friend Carl Johnson, the Order of Selohaar, which is a modern chivalric fellowship, bringing certain traditions from the past into the present. We had our own version of how we approached swordsmanship, but it was not authentic, and it was not couched in chivalric culture. Finding this stuff is part of a larger craft that I work with, and I think there’s always something to learn. Since the time I came out with my first book in 2001, our knowledge base of this is a hundred times what it was then. There are new manuscripts to find, there are new things to translate, there are new things to interpret, and there’s new students to interact with, which always keeps things lively as well. It’s extremely rewarding both physically, spiritually, and mentally, and those rewards continue to come.
MAYTT: How would you describe your training experience when you first started HEMA during the 1990s?
CT: Initially, I would use the word comically. I think a big mistake a lot of early practitioners of this – when I say earlier, I mean earlier in this iteration. There was a raft of influence, interest rather, in the nineteenth century, but the latest incarnation of wanting to look at this material was beset with a lot of early adopters like myself, trying to look at limited material, looking at illustrations, and trying to just work from those. Most of those interpretations that came out of that approach were grievously wrong. I would say the first steps into this were extremely awkward and prone to misinterpretation. It’s really when we started looking at the text heavy sources that allowed us to get really a better grip on what was there. Then that, in turn, made the illustrated sources make more sense.
MAYTT: I see. It was a lot of trial and error, especially with, “We can’t read the text. We’ll just do the pictures and just work our way from there.”
CT: Yeah, let’s lean heavily on the error part of that trial and error. [Laughs]
MAYTT: You brought up one way that the training has evolved as the translations have become so much better than they were before, but how else have you seen HEMA training evolve or change since you started?
CT: There’s a number of things. First, you have a much larger population of people doing it, so you have more people to play with and more people to bounce ideas off of. That tends to lead to better refinement. By the same token, there’s a larger marketplace, so it’s worth the while for someone like myself to not just do one book and walk away, but to keep digging and bringing more materials for other people to use. There’s been a tremendous growth in gear that’s available. When I started in the mid-1990s, there were no reasonable blunt swords to play with. Everything was done with wooden wasters or padded weapons or whatever sticks and stones one could lay their hands on. The growth of gear and there being enough marketplace to develop and sell gear like that really has been a game changer to be sure. I think also with how many practitioners and clubs and schools are out there too, there’s been more focus on the fitness aspect of it as well. I think there’s probably a greater amount of athleticism that’s been brought to bear in doing this. We know, I think, enough about the basic mechanics of what we see documented in these treatises to now do some physical refinement on not just the gross motor actions, but how to make them very efficient. That’s certainly something that’s done nothing but get better over the years.
MAYTT: What specific aspects did you want to bring about or bring back from the age of chivalry here into the modern era?
CT: There there’s various forms of the chivalric code and treating the basic values of courage, trustworthiness, the willingness to defend the helpless, and charity, are things that are ensconced in that code. The idea of bringing them into the present requires some considerable changes, and I qualified this as an idea of expanding the enfranchisement involved in it; much as we can look at the rights that the founding fathers of the United States created that really only applied at the time to land owning white guys, hopefully we’ve extended a lot more, not imperfectly, but certainly extended them further than what existed in the eighteenth century. I look at the same thing with the chivalric code. Obviously, it was written for warrior aristocrats for how they treated each other with some emphasis on the protection of the poor and the church. Trying to draw that forward involves looking for ways to enfranchise other people with those values and not have them contained merely to a wealthy class. It’s a process of taking and taking the good without the constraints of the classism and burdens of that that were present in the Middle Ages.
MAYTT: I see. Since the Order of Selohaar’s beginning, what goals do you feel that you have accomplished, and did you find other goals or hurdles that just came up along the way as you were trying to bring these chivalric codes to modern people?
CT: This very much ties in, I think, with the research I’ve done on the fighting side. A chief area of my focus and a number of other researchers as well is not looking at these treatises in a vacuum and say, “I want to work through this technique. I put my left foot here and then I step with my right, and I deliver a cutting, blah, blah, blah, blah.” What is the context of these things? Who were they written for? What does the culture look like that surrounded them? That opens up a whole frontier, a whole new set of vistas into that world in the past. When I was a younger man and at the height of the New Age Movement, if you will, there was this whole focus on this idea of living holistically, of having a worldview that incorporates nature.
Our place in the overall cosmos, looking at everything, is connected. The more you dig into how medieval people thought and how things were set down in writing across various disciplines, you find a very holistic view. In fact, some of our fighting treatises are nested into what are called house books, which you can think of as kind of small home encyclopedias. You’ll find fighting techniques sandwiched in between herbal recipes, calendars with the saints’ feast days calculated out in them, and maybe advice on veterinary treatment for horses. All these things were not viewed as things that were unconnected to each other, but things that belonged lumped together. We find a lot of symbolism in the way things are structured in the fighting treatises. For instance, why in the German longsword tradition do we have four primary guards? Well, because four is a very magical, if you will, number at the time, there were four bodily humors.
There are four elements, four cardinal directions, four seasons. I could go on ad nauseum. People thought in correspondences of four when it came to physicality, the physical world. When we look at how the initiative, how who has control in the fight is explained, we have three words. The Germans use vor, which means “before;” nach, which means “after;” and then a third word, indes, which is a little trickier to translate. It largely means “in the moment,” if you will – simultaneously. The idea of the before is if I am acting in the before, I have acted before you can act, or I have forced you to do something. If I’m fighting in the nach, which is the after, I am responding.
Why is it three? Because the post-classical world couches all its philosophical discussion in terms of dialectic: thesis, antithesis, and synthesis; there’s the holy trinity; there’s innumerable correspondences of three as well. You start peeling those layers of the onion back and you find all these connections. You see that there is a worldview that is present throughout their entire culture and that informs the fighting as well, and that the fighting, in turn, informs some of that culture on top of that.
MAYTT: That’s interesting. I guess some layman practitioners or layman martial artists would be so inclined to figure all that out.
CT: What’s interesting though, so I’ve done a presentation called The Three and the Four Swordsmanship and the Seven Liberal Arts that talks about all these connections, and it’s always pretty enthusiastically received even by people that have not looked into that kind of thing at all. They really come away with a, “Wow, that’s really cool,” and make some things that make sense to me that maybe didn’t make sense before, even just about how the fighting art is structured or what certain traditions are ensconced in it. Not everybody wants to do the legwork for that kind of view as it were, but there’s a pretty receptive audience, surprisingly.
MAYTT: Absolutely. Once you bring up the fact that these medieval people were pretty philosophically and theologically adept at whatever they were doing at the time, it shatters all the misconceptions.
CT: It’s a common thing. Why do people believe conspiracy theories theories about, “Oh, hey. The pyramids were built by aliens,” or some such nonsense? People don’t realize that people a thousand years ago or three thousand years ago were just as smart as us. They just didn’t have as much technology; sometimes even the technology they had is astonishing to people that are not educated in that. But you break one myth at a time. The first thing you have to do when somebody is brand new to any of this, particularly on the martial arts side, is get them past the idea that swords weigh ten pounds. You have got to start small.
MAYTT: Continuing on with your Order, in your view, since its inception and it has included the historical fencing aspect in it, how have you seen the Order and maybe others like it help further HEMA here in the United States?
CT: Ah, good question. Particularly early on, I would say when we got into the early 1990s and these more formal competitive tournaments were happening, there was a real desire to be completely disconnected, on the part of a lot of HEMA practitioners, from anything that looked remotely like Medieval or Renaissance Reenactment. It’s hard to do that if you’re going to explore the armored combat portion of the medieval traditions, which is a huge part of what those martial arts are all about. I think the fact there were serious practitioners that were already doing this and they’re not afraid of being called sissy martial artists because they’re wearing period clothing or period armor.
I think helping to break some barriers there has been a contributor to the larger one. Also, I do look at things in context, I think that has allowed us to get a more clear-eyed view of what the treatises are really about and how they were culturally used; both understanding how period violence really worked, how maybe the legal systems then affected constraints on violence and understanding the context of how different weapons and different scenarios – what those things meant culturally. For instance, when you look at the documented armor techniques, armor for fighting in armor on foot, almost all of that stuff is geared towards fighting some sort of a duel. It’s not warfare in general; it is judicial combat, and you have to understand the context of that to make sense of it.
I’ll give you a good example of that. In one set of illustrations, you’ll see a depiction of a judicial duel unfolding in armor and you’ll see one guy is casting his spear at his opponent. A lot of people will say, “Well, how much damage is that going to do against somebody in armor?” And I’m like, “Well, there is some actual physical practicality there. You might knock them over – a thrown spear packs quite a punch – but more importantly, it’s actually the result of tradition. The whole idea of the plaintiff in a judicial duel being required to throw something to start the duel. It’s something that dates back to the Migration Era in Europe. Knowing that cultural context makes sense of what you’re seeing – all combat is ritualized in one form or another. Even gang violence in modern American cities; there’s some sort of a code that governs how that violence happens. You need to look for those underlying codes; the things that explain some of the otherwise nonsensical things that you might find in a treatise – that there may be a law or tradition that underpins that. We’ve tended to do very deep dives into that aspect of it, and I think that brings a lot of information to the larger extended community, if you will.
MAYTT: Wow. I would never have thought that the plaintiff would have to throw something to start the match.
CT: It gets better. Here’s a really funny thing. There’s a series of armored combat manuscripts that are known as the Gladiatoria series, and they’re called that because the snazziest one, which is actually the latest of the series from the 1440s is actually titled that, but there’s a place where the duel is starting and instead of throwing the spear, the combatant has a gimmick sword where the pommel can be unscrewed. He unscrews the pommel and hucks that at the other guy to have fulfilled the obligation of having thrown something, but without having to part with his spear. The letter of the law and the spirit of the law are two different things.
MAYTT: That’s interesting. One more question on the Order, which has its sort of ritual magic. How would you explain that this magic is different from other types of magic?
CT: Okay, a good question. One thing to make very clear is the Order’s ceremonial practices are not religious in nature. In fact, I take very, very good care to make sure to newcomers and all when we do have a ceremony that much of the stuff we have was devised internally. This is not some intrinsic truth handed from the heavens. It’s really to have a set of symbols to work with in creating community within the group. I will say though that a number of the correspondences that we use in some of our ceremonial dovetail quite precisely into some of the symbolism I talked about before with the correspondences of three and four.
I also would like to make sure what we do in our ceremonies actually draws from some of the martial arts lore, but not the other way around. Any interpretation we do on fighting manuscripts is strictly based on what we see there and what we can document in the culture as it existed in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries. There’s the Order of Selohaar, but the actual fight school is the Selohaar Fechtschule, which loosely means fight school. There are members of the fight school, particularly in the remote chapters, that are not members of the Order. In other words, the fight school is part of under the umbrella of the Order, but not everybody is an Order member and takes part in all the ceremonial aspects. There are people that are my students and my student’s students that are part of the organization but are not Order members.
They’re separate, although slightly overlapping activities in the group. That aspect of the group goes all the way back to 1979 and 1980, with lots of changes, including quite a bit of borrowings from the Abrahamic religious traditions. An interesting thing that a lot of people don’t know is that a lot of that magical lore existed quite comfortably side by side with Christianity. In Europe, particularly in late medieval Europe, we find treatises on magic that make copious mention and note of incantations of the saints and such. These things were tolerated. A degree of astrology was tolerated as there was a degree of Late Antiquity lore about the gods. There’s a whole vogue in the fourteenth and fifteenth century for, I would call, pop astrology. It’s almost like their version of the corny newspaper horoscope thing. In Germany, it’s called the Planeten Kinder, the Children of the Planets.
Rather than a big focus on the zodiac signs, it actually is a big focus on what planet is supposedly influencing. There’s a whole bunch of lore about that, and you can crack open books that have fight lore that at the beginning of it, along with other stuff, there’s these illustrated pages on the planet, the Children of the Planets. Incorporating some of that stuff is fun and livens up some of those correspondence as I spoke about before; I talk about those in that presentation I mentioned earlier on. Now, I would say our ceremony would be more familiar to a practitioner of Freemasonry than it would be to somebody coming out of 1965 Wicca or something like that. To underscore the fact of what I say that the ceremonial is pretty much a bonding thing and a psychological thing. I myself am a card-carrying atheist. I do not believe in the literal existence of any supernatural entities. There are other people in the group that are practicing Christians, and they may internally map some of our symbolism onto the symbolism they know elsewhere. It’s a nexus point, not a faith.
MAYTT: You are a prolific writer and translator of chapters, articles, books, and manuals since 2001. How important do you feel the academic aspect of the HEMA movement? Would practitioners be missing out on the experience if they chose not to participate?
CT: There are a lot of folks that are interested in that, but there’s plenty of folks and probably even more so who just want to play with swords. One of the things that you have to do as an author when you’re presenting material like this is you have to realize people all come to this material, come to this movement if you will, for all different kinds of reasons. There are people that are exploring what we’ve discussed; there are people that just want to pursue it as a vigorous sport. There are people that belong to historic reenactment associations, and they want to add a level of authenticity to how they present the fighting portion of what they do. There are people that come at this from all different angles.
They don’t want to do boxing, they want to do this too; they want to be Aragorn. It’s all over the map. You have to respect people’s different journeys that they’re on for that. I make a big point of that in my how-to books. My ask is that you come to the material honorably. Don’t come in with such a big ego that you’re willing to hurt people, injure people doing this. Approach it honestly and by being honest about what your goals are. That’s my only ask on it. Other than that, I’m at your service as an instructor and researcher. Lots of different motivations.
MAYTT: On the flip side of the academic aspect is the tournament or the competition side. With your twenty years of tournament experience, how has that helped you better understand the techniques and principles discussed in the manuals?
CT: My argument is that the German and Northern Italian traditions of the fifteenth century are, at heart, armored traditions – being able to carry yourself effectively in armor. The kind of stances usually favored in the material are with an eye towards it being practical – a body carriage that works in armor and the consequences that wearing armor imposes on you. For instance, an adult male’s normal center of gravity is roughly at the navel. Put on a full harness of plate armor of the fifteenth century, that center of gravity moves up to the top of your sternum, essentially just with how helmets and breastplates being thicker than arm and leg armor, your center of gravity moves northward. An upright carriage is very important. Having fought in armor for many years before I even knew that this material was there, I think it was a big bonus in interpreting the material. That physicality informs that.
This is the first part of a two part interview. Read the second interview here.
Martial Arts of Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow 