Does nobody understand that longswords and katanas are two different kinds of tool?Longswords are essentially sharpened fucksticks designed to destroy the shit out of anything resembling armor that comes their way. They shatter bone, jelly flesh, and essentially fuck people up by sheer inexorable force of being a goddamn sharp steel bar.
Katanas don’t do that.They’re not meant to withstand collision with armor or a brick wall or a charging fully outfitted warhorsebecause the circumstances of its development didn’t call for that. It’s a precision instrument. It’s designed to be lightweight, outmaneuver, and find weak spots, not go barreling into people hack-n-slashing your way to victory. It’s a specialized tool.
Ironically, when looking at a longsword and katana from the edge, the katana more resembles a steel bar IMO, whereas most longswords have a subtle taper in the blade along its length that, along with the fuller, redistributes the balance point closer to the hilt and lightens the blade. The two swords are rather close in weight; once you get longswords that are 46-48"+ do they start to consistently outweigh katanas.
And it comes down to what the swords were used against. The longsword evolved in response to armor developments (no, you can't cut through armor with one, but you can half-sword stab through joints), and the katana was also a weapon developed for its environment.
Did European swordsmiths also do the trick with frozen-in stresses in the blade to put the edge under compression and thus allow a more brittle steel there than would normally be functional?
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If you're talking about covering the untempered blade in clay like a katana before quenching it, I'm not aware of it in historical European swordsmithing.
Not all Japanese swords are katana. Not even all Japanese swords that look like katana, to the untutored fanboy eye, are katana. The katana was a fairly late development in Japanese sword design, not "thousands of years" old,
True. The 15th century IIRC is when true katanas as we know them appeared. Its 'ancestors', such as the tachi, were around for a few centuries before them. And the first Japanese swords (those that have archaeological evidence) are either Chinese jian or copied from Chinese swords.
