New Worlds: How to Fight a Duel

Due to Book View Cafe’s ongoing problems with Hostgator (soon to be solved by leaving Hostgator for a company we can actually rely on . . .), this week’s New Worlds Patreon post is here at Swan Tower again!

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I couldn’t resist giving this essay that title, but the truth is that I can’t give exact instructions on how to fight a duel, because — like pretty much everything discussed in this Patreon — there’s a lot of variation both geographically and historically. A gun duel on the western frontier of the United States in the nineteenth century was not the same as a sword duel in eighteenth-century London, and neither of them is like an Indonesian knife duel.

But I said in the last essay that for my purposes, a duel is distinguished from any other one-on-one fight by the existence of certain formalities marking it out from normal combat. Those formalities have some common threads, and if we approach a duel sequentially, we can tease those out.

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Mirrored from Swan Tower.