Hi everyone! I would like to share a bit of my vision for the new HROARR site.

First of all, its purpose is simply to help research, material development and practicing of HEMA. This is done by providing tools, source material, links and info.
Thus far the work has been done mostly by me, with the good support of GHFS, but in the future I hope to expand on several existing collaborations and grow quite a few new ones.

It has occured to me, however, that the HEMA community currently has no common place to gather for connecting, finding news, share research and be inspired by what other people do. True, there are forums and blogs, but they are not quite what I speak of.

So, basically, what I and some other like-minded people are now hoping to be able to do, with your help, is to turn the HROARR site into a mix of a free online HEMA magazine and a research / project tool. A water hole for the HEMA community, if you will…

With the new version of the site comes a lot of new, interesting possibilities, as I can now open up the HROARR site to other researchers and practitioners.

For one thing, I can now add sub-pages for community projects and one is already up, where the GHFS Halben Stangen group will collaborate with anyone interested and share exercises, ideas and interpretations. Anyone can join in and have their own page where they can write their thoughts, post videos/photos etc.
Furthermore, I can also add “writers” and I would like to invite all of you to write reviews and articles and have them published on HROARR. Since I, from a legal standpoint, am the responsible publisher, I will act as editor. Copyrights to the material will of course remain with the original authors. And you will always be able to have your material removed or updated. Furthermore, your interpretative material, transcriptions and translations can be added to the searchable manual database, if you so wish.

Also, I have added a workshops/instructors list, so if you are interested in teaching at HEMA events, then it is a good place to list yourself. Several instructors and workshops have already been listed and more are coming in.

I am currently working on adding all stored manuals into a manual database where you can search for authors, dates, weapons etc. Each manual will also be accompanied by a short text and I thank Michael Chidester and Ben Michels for generously sharing info from Wiktenauer. The two first manuals that have been uploaded are Joachim Meÿer’s 1560 and 1570 treatises. There’s a lot more to come and with time I think the database will prove to be useful.

That’s some of the stuff that’s up right now, and I have more plans for further improvements that I will reveal later.

So again, I welcome you to join in here!

Roger Norling
Quarterstaff Instructor
Gothenburg Historical Fencing School.