11/07/2025
Today we bring you updates to Johannes Liechtenauer, our namesake master!
https://wiktenauer.com/wiki/Johannes_Liechtenauer
Johannes Liechtenauer was the grand master of the best-documented fencing tradition of the 14th and 15th centuries, and his personal teachings are recorded in a 356-line poem called the 𝘡𝘦𝘵𝘵𝘦𝘭 ("Record") and 26 "figures" arranged into two trees. This poem outlines his teachings in "obscure and cryptic words" which helped initiates remember them but were meaningless to outsiders. Liechtenauer's poem was used in some form by most German fencing authors of the subsequent two centuries.
The English translation of the Rome version by Christian Henry Tobler is now joined by Wiktenauer director Michael Chidester's rhyming translation of the same (including a mountain of footnotes), as well as a translation of Talhoffer's (Copenhagen) version of the long sword by Rebecca L. R. Garber and a translation of the Krakow version of the long sword by Mike Rasmusson. (Since the rhyming translation doesn't conform to the rubric of translation statuses that we use, a new category of "poetic translation" was added to the rubric and perhaps more people will contribute artistic translations in the future.)
As you may have guessed, this is the latest page to receive a facelift and modular layout upgrade! These translations are joined by ten transcriptions by Dierk Hagedorn and one each by Dieter Bachmann, Michael Chidester, Filip Lampart and Martin Fabian, Kevin Maurer, and Werner Ueberschär.
With the modular display, you can choose which columns to display using the checkbox controls, allowing you do drill down to just the thing that interests you, or display all 24 columns at once if you like scrolling sideways or have a truly colossal monitor.
There are also checkboxes that show or hide the extra verses included in some copies, so you can examine the variations in the Record that appeared over the course of its history. And there's a checkbox at the top of the control panel that will hide all the footnotes if you want to view a clean copy.
In addition to the 20 manuscripts that present unglossed copies of Liechtenauer's Record which are included here, there are about 30 more books and manuscripts which include portions of it as part of longer glosses or other works (as well as two versions of the variant attributed to H. Beringer).
We don't usually include later quotations from a text directly in the article for that text on Wiktenauer, but in the future we'll probably create a separate article that places all 50ish recensions of Liechtenauer's poem on the same page with appropriate controls, for the benefit of the ten or so people in the world who need that exact tool.
Pictured: Liechtenauer's 26 figures on mounted fencing laid out in two trees, from the Rome manuscript (aka the Starhemberg Fechtbuch, Cod. 44.A.8 in the Biblioteca dell’Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei e Corsiniana).
