Everything movies taught me about archery is wrong. This is a complete mind-blower. 8D
If you are even remotely interested in archery or medieval combat, check this out, it’s just great!
OMFG EVERYONE PLEASE DROP WHAT YOU’RE DOING AND WATCH IT RIGHT NOW O_O
HOLY HELL
Not only is this fascinating, there are a lot of images from art history here. It just goes to show that what you can learn from the past isn’t limited to facts you can know, but things you can do.
Lars Andersen originally started using bow and arrow to fight in pretend battles during Larps (live action role play) events, where he played a soldier in a medieval-inspired army. While Larps can be about anything – the Danish/Polish Harry Potter inspired larp College of Wizardry (cowlarp.com) recently got world-wide media attention and there wasn’t a rubber sword in sight there – many Larps take place in fantasy worlds inspired by J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. And it was at one of these Larps, that Lars started to learn to shoot fast while moving.
In 2012, Lars Andersen released his video, “Reinventing the fastest forgotten archery”, where he showed how he had learned to shoot from old archery manuscripts. Using these old, forgotten techniques, Lars demonstrated how he was now the fastest archer on the planet, and after its release, the video got 3 million hits on YouTube in two days.
Since the 2012 video was released, Lars has studied and practiced, and he is now able to fire three arrows in 0.6 seconds – a truly stunning feat making him much faster than the legendary fictional archer Legolas (played by Orlando Bloom in the Lord of the Rings movies).
The time benchmark he was trying to achieve, according to the video, was the expectation of the speed at which “Saracen“ archers were expected to shoot. In fact, most of the source material as far as I can see isn’t European.
A lot of the techniques described are also used in Mongolian Archery, which requires being able to shoot from horseback, and is traditionally practiced by men and women. You can see a video here.
@queenkiddo you’re interested in archery, right? Thought you might like this x
Still my favorite story from the Lord of the Rings set: Viggo Mortensen bonded so much with the horse he rode in the movies that after filming was over he bought it from its owner. If that doesn’t warm your heart I don’t know what could.
don’t forget that he also bought arwen’s horse for her stunt rider when she couldn’t afford it awww
also sort of relevant viggo also bought the horse that costarred with him in the movie hidalgo and subsequently took the horse (tj) with him to the red carpet premier.
Also most of the Riders of Rohan are actually women because when they put out that call mostly women showed up with their horses and the costume team just stuck beards on them.
if this isn’t the best post i don’t
So you’re saying the entire Rohan army could have killed the Witch-King of Angmar.
Witch King: No living man can kill me!
several thousand riders of Rohan: *rip their fake beards off*
Wolf in Shepherd's Clothing 