More Parrying Dagger Data Thoughts

So in the aftermath of my last post, trying to kick around some thoughts, and at the prodding of Bella di Sicilia and Katerina Falconer de Lanark, I accepted that I should really figure out some kind of overall typography for sorting the various types of hilts on parrying daggers.

I looked through A.V.B. Norman's "The Rapier and Smallsword 1460-1820" for ideas. For this, Norman broke down as many variations on hilts that he was able to find (which was a fairly hefty number - he had worked at the Wallace Collection and as the Master of the Royal Armouries in the Tower of London) and broke them down with a number for each individual type or style of hilt. There's a lot there. He didn't do daggers, but he did reference Harold Peterson's "Daggers & Fighting Knives of the Western World" in his work. I immediately hunted down a copy of Peterson's book, and while it's interesting and fairly extensive - he covers "the stone age to 1900" -  he doesn't go into typing the hilts of daggers in the way that Norman does for rapiers. That's the price of casting such a wide net, though. With the limitations that Norman placed on his survey, it was much more reasonable to expect him to start to categorize and apply some kind of system to the hilts he looked at.

The thing is, I don't really want to use his system. He basically breaks down each variation of hilt into its own specific type, with some variations on them when needed. Which is fine, but I just don't think that there are so many different styles of parrying dagger hilts that I'll need to give each variation an individual type. There are just way too many similar trends among them.

So I did a first attempt of something else, which I amended into my spreadsheet of data for each of the daggers there so far. Here's a clip of the notes explaining it:

Click on this for a full size (legible) image!

I realize that this isn't perfect, and that there are already daggers which don't fit exactly into this. I was wrestling around with how to visualize this and also how to expand it in a logical way and while I was complaining about this to Lilias de Cheryngton, she said, "Like a tree or a flowchart?" and my mind went "YES DO THAT!"

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So that's probably what I'll use to really flesh this system out. Ideally, it will make expanding it easier (just add on a new branch and flow down from there) and there'll be a couple different ways to visualize the summary.

I thought about shifting every step of the way to numbers (it works for IP addresses, right?) but the existence of daggers with multiple sets of quillons makes that hard. Using letters for the subcategories allows me to describe some of these daggers, but not all. For instance, this example should be easy enough, because the quillons are the same style - just change it from quillon type e to 2e and that's a  straightforward. On the other hand, we have examples like this which would necessitate going down two separate branches of the tree, and I'm not sure how to get that to parse correctly. I'm sure that I can but I'm just not sure how yet. I'm going to keep trying to get this to work, and I can at least keep surveying more dagger sizes while I do. I'm going to end up going back over the list again and again anyhow, right?