Dr. Bret Devereaux

I own a long sword.

It would be quite hard to wield with one hand.

Yeah.

Well, yeah, it's also a balance question.

Yeah.

You know, one-handed sword, the balance tends to be closer to the hand to allow you to control it really with your wrist.

And often, especially for ancient one-handers, the hilt is kept quite short so that it's meant to tightly sandwich your hand so that the guard is right up against the top of your hand and the pommel is right up against the bottom to create more contact surface.

so that you have a little more purchase on it.

Whereas with a two-hander, you actually want to extend that hilt way out to give you a whole lot of leverage, and your left hand is way at the bottom of that.

You don't hold it like a tennis racket with your hands together.

Your left hand is way at the bottom to separate your hands as much as possible to get all that leverage, and you're pivoting around your dominant hand using your other hand to turn.

And, you know, of course, folks can – there are whole YouTube channels on swords and wielding and stuff that are just like go –

Talk to them.

I mean, so Tolkien is, I think, pretty clearly here riffing off of Herodotus' account of Thermopylae.

It's worth noting that the Greeks don't win at Thermopylae.

No.

So it's a similar sort of thing.

Now, the tricky part here is that I think we generally think here that Herodotus is embellishing Thermopylae quite a lot and is maybe exaggerating Persian losses quite a bit.

But we get this sort of implication of like waves and waves crashing on the Greek line and failing, having to, you know, multiple men having to overwhelm individuals to bring them down.

Generally, in battles where we have better evidence, an attacking force simply isn't going to maintain cohesion while taking five to one losses, like psychologically, they will fall apart, and then be pushed back.