The Letter for the King

The Letter for the King | Official Trailer | Netflix
Entertaining little sword & sorcery adventure about a group of teenagers on their way to becoming knights and the misadventures that befall them. One of the group is a girl because this is the 21st Century and we can't have the guys going off on an adventure all by their lonesome. In my neanderthalish mind I seriously doubt any girl ever took take up arms. But the world is full of strange and wondrous things, so I suppose it's possible that it did happen on occasion.

Then again, police dramas on TV inevitably include a high speed car chase. I thought the TV people probably heard about one such incident and based all their car chase scenes on that one incident. Then I moved to Phoenix and I discovered that there was one every day.

So I suppose it's possible that tough girls went to war more often than you or I might suppose. Because between the skimpy records from dark ages and our cosmic insight, supposition is all we've got.

There's a scene of a horse and rider jumping off of a cliff and another of the same horse and a different rider jumping off of a sailing ship. That was pretty cool. All land in the water.

There are a few fight scenes, lots of scenes of people galloping their horses across the landscape, and lots of wisecracks from our wanna be knights.

Poking versus Cutting

    I don't recall exactly where I heard this, maybe talking to Jack, but there are basically two kinds of swords. There are cutting swords, like the Viking broadswords and Japanese Samurai Swords, and then there poking swords, like the ones used in fencing. The part that was new to me was that poking swords were developed to counter chain mail. Cutting through chain mail with the edge of a blade can be tough going. You have a much better chance with a thin, sharp point. If you can get the point into the gap between links, it will not take as much force to drive a narrow wedge between then and so open them up, which allows the point to sink farther in and do some damage.
    I found the picture on a blog from a person who was taking a course on medieval sword fighting.


Medieval sword fighting techniques
B RYTHARIUS

Update November 2025 replaced link with one that goes to actual post instead of just to the blog. Replaced the missing video with something sword related as I have no idea what the original video was.