In defense of the Bat'leth

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With the new Star Trek series on the horizon and the numerous changes (horrible in my opinion) the show runners have made to the beloved Klingons the topic of the Bat'leth has been bandied about on forums and Youtube recently. A great number of these comments have consisted of words such as stupid, dumb, unusable, and ridiculous. Many making these comments are self proclaimed "experts" and others obviously have never held a edged weapon beyond a Mall Katana and certainly have never held a Bat'leth.

While I would never say the Batleth is a great weapon it is far from the useless peice of crap that these so called experts would like to believe. So lets start with a couple of facts about the origin of the Bat'leth. The Bat'leth was created by Dan Curry in 1990 for the character of Worf in TNG, curry was a martial arts practitioner and has said he took inspiration from Deer horn knives,  Curry also developed a fighting style with ritual dance like motions, similar to t'ai chi ch'uan for use with the weapon. As shown in the pictures below it also has much in common with the Heaven and Earth sword, the Cicada wing sword and other martial arts weapons, which seem to bring the claims of the Bat'leths un-usability into question.


One of the main issues with the bat'leth is that it is referred to as a sword (ie, Sword of Kahless, Sword of Honor) the Bat'leth is not a sword it is much more of a impact and piercing weapon and is never shown used as a true sword would be. This has lent fueled the complaints of many as they have no concept of how the weapon would be used, and insist on comparing it to a traditional western or even eastern sword.
This is a sword,
this is not,
That does not make it a bad weapon just a different one.


 Also one major fact that the neigh-sayers fail to grasp is that the Bat'leth is wielded by a alien race that is only visually similar to us, their musculature, and bone structure is quite different to ours and therefore their capabilities for using this weapon would also not be the same.


That being said the Bat'leth is far from being useless in human hands and at least one martial arts treatise has been published and although Paramount force a stop to it's publishing, it does exist and limited quantities were sold,



and while many say the Bat'leth is not practical,, there are goups who practice in it's use and tournaments dedicated to it.


Now unfortunately the Bat'leth for the new series does seem to fit many of the descriptors used by the critics of the original Bat'leth, it is simply horrible.
 And there I will end my defense of the Bat'leth for now.

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