Weaponry Wednesday: War Hammers

Smashing its way into this new Wednesday tradition is the war hammer. Seems like a simple enough place to start. Stick some heavy metal on the end of a stick and start get to smashing. I mean, who doesn’t like smashing? The war hammer features heavily in fantasy literature and has gained a greater degree of recognition through Marvel’s Thor. However, the war hammer almost always plays second fiddle to the sword, often vying for this position with the battle axe, and rare is the weapon that is so misrepresented. 

Take Thor’s hammer, Mjolnir for example. The head is massive and the handle short. With virtually no reach, the weapon may as well be a glorified gauntlet and it’s actually the inspiration for Mike Mignola’s character, Hellboy. If it weren’t for its magical properties, and let’s face it, I don’t care how flawed a weapon is, if it let me fly and throw bolts of lightning I would take it, which is pretty much what Thor said, because in the original Norse legends, Mjolnir is flawed. The dwarves making it screwed up and made the handle much too short.

This was actually a pretty major problem. The reach of a weapon matters a great deal. While up close fights are dramatic for purposes of storytelling, most warriors preferred to be able to kill from the safest distance possible. The longer a weapon’s reach, the less chance a warrior was to get murdered before he could unleash some hurt. This is one of the many reasons for the popularity of the spear as an infantry weapon.

The other classic mistake in portraying a war hammer is to make the head absolutely ridiculous. I mean seriously, google “war hammer” or “fantasy hammer” and you will see that these heads are absolutely massive. Soldier’s couldn’t afford weapons that would force them to work that hard to wield them. Just hauling some of these designs to the battlefield would leave pretty much anyone exhausted. In actual combat, the weight of a weapon matters for two primary reasons, how fast it could be wielded and its penetrative powers.

I’m going to interrupt here to remind readers of a physics formula. I know—MATH! It’s absolutely terrifying and I will be the first to tell you that I am beyond horrible with numbers, but bear with me, this should be fairly painless. When taking the power of a blow into account, remember: FORCE = MASS x ACCELERATION. What this means is that speed is a critical part of the equation for dealing damage. Something too heavy, and you’re stuck relying entirely on its mass to power the attack. A second downside to tremendous amounts of weight is an inability to parry, or defend oneself. In short, it was much easier to make a weapon that could rely on speed dangerous than one that relied on pure weight, to say nothing of other practical considerations.

 

I think by now I’ve harped on the representation of war hammers enough, let’s take a look at what makes these things awesome. They’re WRECKING BALLS. As blacksmiths and armorers grew more skilled at working with metal, a lot of weapons had to work a lot harder to get at an enemy’s fleshy bits. The war hammer did not suffer this problem. Think of them as medieval can openers.

One side of the head was your traditional hammer, meant for crushing and use as a tool. The other side was a gigantic spike. The mixture of speed and weight focused on this singular tiny point could punch holes in pretty much anything. Have you ever had a woman in high heels walk on a hard wood floor? The floor gets completely wrecked no matter how dainty she is. Take that to the x power and you begin to understand the lethality of this weapon.

And the blunt end was no slouch either. While not as penetrating, armor didn’t really do a great job of absorbing the power of the strike before it reached the wearer inside. A blow that would be glancing from a sword or spear could crush a knight’s bones. This end tended to leave its victims alive more often than the other, but crippled. Monks in the far east actually liked using similar weapons because they could break men’s legs and not have to worry about killing them and breaking their vows. Of course, with the traditional weapon, this was very easily remedied with a follow through from the other end.

FAVORITE WAR HAMMER IN FANTASY LITERATURE

 

My favorite fantasy war hammer comes from Robert Jordan’s famous Wheel of Time novels. The character Perrin Aybara (who spends a great deal of the novels debating between the axe and the hammer—sounds kind of familiar, yeah?) forges a magical war hammer he names Mah’alleinir. A bit of a mouthful but still pretty dang cool and suitably intimidating. While this weapon is described as being more of an oversized blacksmith’s hammer than a traditional war hammer, it’s supernaturally light for its wielder and makes the enemies it strikes explode. That’s right, the bad guys EXPLODE. Seems a fair trade off for that spike to me.

What are some of your favorite war hammers, whether from history or fantasy? Let me know!