Why do sabers generally lack pommels?

I have honestly never seen any saber with a more substantial tang then any other type of sword, the only exception being the occasional riveted full tang type designs.

As for complex guards, most sabers have relatively simple constructions - often just a knucklebow like on the British 1796 LC, maybe with side-bars to protect the back of the hand, bell-guards, Mameluke-style crosses, etc. Compare this to more elaborate complex-hilted cut-and-thrusters which typically do include pommels. Even baskethilts have pommels. I can't imagine how it would be a disadvantage.

Heck, there were historical baskethilt sabers, and other types of sabers that were indeed made with pommels. So it's not like you can't make them that way. The preference seems to be almost universially towards sabers without them, though, and I'm curious as to why that is.

The "simple" guards you mentioned along with the metal grip parts, with the knuckle bow and grip of the 1796 LC saber as a prime example, are as heavy, or even heavier than many pommels. The tangs of all the antique sabers I've examined, mine included, are very thick. On the order of 7-9mm in thickness. That, coupled with the very rapid initial distal taper of the blade, makes for a saber blade that doesn't need a pommel. At least the ones I have are that way. Dave may be able to add additional thought on this. He has more original sabers than I've owned.

It's in the way the blade is constructed. Pommels weren't ever used for balance or counterweighting really, (for changing the "front heaviness" as it were) --they were used to adjust rotational behavior of the sword while it is in motion. These changes in mass distribution affect the location of the rotational nodes that let the sword hit as hard as it can for its weight, and the goal is to put the forward pivot point where the blade contacts the target. The mass distribution in the blade itself determines what size pommel is necessary to maximize the force it can generate at the cutting area, which is as much about the agility of a blade as it is about the amount of weight at the cutting area (since doubling the weight of a sword will double the force at impact, but doubling the SPEED of a sword will QUADRUPLE the force at impact)
Some sword blades maximize their performance with pretty sizable pommels, like certain type XIVs, some require very little weight in the pommel, like most gladius blade forms, and some work best with no pommel at all, like bronze age swords and cavalry sabers that already carry weight in the guard.
As Mike mentioned, saber blades have a mass distribution that involves a complex distal taper and an impact point further up on the blade than your average cruciform sword. Such a blade does not demand a pommel, as adding one would put the forward pivot point too far from the cutting area.

My guess is that once you reach the pattern era, it's easier to mass-manufacture swords that don't have separate pommels that need to be fine-tuned, so they opted for blade designs with a distribution that doesn't need one. Just have the guard and "pommel" effectively one piece to make and get your swords out to your soldiers.

If you've got the time to let your brain hurt for a bit, read more of this sort of stuff here:
www.thearma.org/spotlight/GTA/mo ... mpacts.htm

Sword making and the engineering aspects are not strong suits of mine, more so the history and swordmanship aspects.

Placing a type of sword in historical context by time period and culture is relavant whether or not the swordmaking protocols vary somewhat.

The classic saber is an oriental weapon that migrated into western usage primarily as adaptations of mongol/chinese or turkic weapons types. These swords never used pommels stones in their sword craft that I'm familiar, thus a fundamental design difference from the Germano-Roman tradition of medis and rennys.

As already mentioned, the evolutionary pallasches, straight military swords do utilize pommel stones into the early 19th Century. Point weapons do appear to be influenced by a need for lighter points and a more neutral balance is conducive to better point control for thrusting.

The 19th Century western military sword is a whole 'nother animal that takes its own path, true to some engineering fundamentals, but varigated by a long standing argument over the functionality of the cut and thrust elements of sword play.

Hi all,

My thought on this is that some sabres do have pommels, which are often incorperated into the guard.
Sabres also have a fair bit of metal furtinature in the handle, be it an elaborate guard or a metal spine and ears. These all weigh and all add up. So having a seperate pommel is not necessairly needed if you are getting the weight you want from the metal fittngs on the handle.

With regards to sabres having beefy tangs, this is not a universal rule.

Here is a tang from a French 1855 pattern sabre.


Here is the pommel. It has some weight!

Regrettably, Hank Reinhardt wouldn't be able to enjoy said jian seeing as he's deceased...

Those are good points, however. There are definitely African and Arab swords that have pommels, and depending on how much you consider ancient cultures to be 'Western', they all had pommels of some sort, sometimes fairly hefty, from even the Bronze Age. The first iron swords from Luristan, now in Iran, had large pommels.

So I think that pommels are fairly common wherever you have straight swords, to facilitate their use in the cut; when you have curved swords, they're less necessary because the curve changes the mechanics of cutting to some degree.

Bogus:

Oh dear! I may have passed along "bad word" as it were. In the interest of context, I'll provide the paragraph I was referencing, found on p. 79 of The Book of Swords.

"Curiously enough, the European sword appears to be the only one where the pommel acts as a counterweight to the sword. Although the evidence is too sketchy to be presented as a fact, the practice seems to have started sometime around the 7th to 8th century AD. (Although some Japanese swords have long tangs which help in the balance of the sword, there were no weighted pommels.) Weighting the pommel changes the balance of the sword and allows a heavier blade to be manipulated as if it were a much lighter sword."

Without some critical criteria and a large sample of swords it kind of hard to make sense of any of this. The question was why do sabers generally lack pommels? Which sabers are we refering to. The 1796 was used as a case in point. Light sabers of 2.25lbs or less and highly tapered in their foibles don't need counter weight because it would pull the point of percussion too far back on the blade and lighten the blow on a sword that is so light bladed to begin with you need all the leverage you can get. The swords "usually" used as the basis for the european model of the 18th Century came from Turco-Persian (Indian in actual origin) models.

You used a picture in you last post of a "saber with a ball pommel". It's a transitional mongrel. That is a walloon pallasch hilt mated to saber blade. The walloon was a better thrust weapon than a cutter. I can't imagine how this would feel in handling. Eventually half-baskets replaced most full baskets in order to accomodate wrist cuts while better protecting the hand.

None taken. I don't think it's an oversimplification, but I certainly didn't make my terms very clear. "Balance," that is, static balance (the kind of thing where you stick out two fingers and make a little seesaw out of your weapon to impress people like Orlando Bloom in the first "Pirates of the Caribbean" movie) is a side-effect, not a goal. Pommels weren't used TO balance or counterweight a sword blade, but yes that is something they do inadvertently. That's because static balance is next to useless to a person actually fighting with a sword, as they don't hold their sword still the whole time.

What actually matters is the feeling of the sword in-motion: it's responsiveness, it's power, it's "dynamic balance" if you will. I referred to this as "rotational behavior," as did the article I linked to, because a sword rotates during a strike around the point where you hold it, like the hand of a clock about the center of the clock face, and most strikes can be thought of as a rotation----a frame of reference that gives you good places to measure things in order to do all that crazy sword math.

The GOAL of sword makers when making a fighting sword (which is still their goal when they make a pommel) is to optimize and adjust this "dynamic balance" or "rotational behavior" to make the sword an effective weapon. The way the sword balances around it's center of gravity AKA "balance point" will fall where it may as a result of this process, but is not a goal of the pommel itself.
The pommel is a lump of weight that is just part of the overall mass-distribution of the sword. Most of the mass distribution is and always will be concerned with the engineering of the blade and tang, since that's what constitutes most of the mass. The way the blade is shaped governs the need for a pommel or not.

Check out this saber from the Tower of London.
The guard is not as heavy as most. The cutting area is a thin double-edged beast. No pommel to speak of. Why?


Look at the tang and base of the blade. No pommel necessary.





That is what I'm saying--it's my guess that should be accompanied by a shrug with two hands in the air. You can make great weapons with pommels and you can make great weapons without them. Neither's easy, but I bet the second one is simpler to mass produce once you've figured out the tricky stuff with the prototype. If I've made an oversimplification, THAT's probably it.