Top 4 Reasons Lew is My Favorite of RDL "In the world of early gloss-based Kunst des Fechtens (literally “art of fencing,” essentially fencing material written in German), I along with many others have chosen to focus on the traditions of “RDL”, or Ringeck, Danzig, Lew. These are three different “glosses” or explanations of Johannes Liechtenauer’s Zettel, which is a poem of rhyming couplets outlining his style of fencing, and not meant to be understood unless explained.

The three glosses all have a huge amount of overlap, their content being almost entirely the same, often down to the word. However, they are not exactly the same, and the content is sometimes tweaked or altered, and information omitted or added or moved from one location to another. It is because of these differences that we can identify the three groupings of glosses as Ringeck, Danzig, and Lew (there are also the glosses in Kal and Rast that may potentially constitute a fourth branch, but in my opinion the jury is still out on that until we get some more information, I’m personally leaning towards not counting it). In this article I will talk about why Lew has become my personal favorite over the past several years.

1. Decision Making

The idea of feeling soft and hard at the sword is ubiquitous throughout all of RDL, as well as its association with the word indes. The thing that makes Lew stand out in this regard in my opinion is that instead of presenting soft and hard as an equal binary choice, it is framed as a plan-backup plan type situation. Take this example from the wrath hew"