For centuries, one of the most powerful weapons available to anyone was some kind of sword. Swords appeared in various forms in all sorts of cultures, and the skill of using a sword for fighting was developed to quite a high level. You’d think, in all those years and among all those experts, that the parts of swords — they’re pretty simple, but they do have parts — would have had their own names. But oddly enough, the word for the cross-piece just above the handle of a sword only appeared recently. It seems to have been mostly useful not to sword-makers or sword-users, but to writers trying to lend authenticity to their depictions of sword-wielding culture.
There is a name for the handle of a sword: the hilt. The cross-piece above the hilt protects your hand from sliding onto the blade and from the other guy’s sword during a fight. It’s called a “quillon,” which is a word borrowed from French. In French, though, “quillon” doesn’t have anything to do with a sword; it means a “little ninepin” — a bowling pin. Evidently the cross guard on a sword resembles a little bowling pin, or somebody thought it did. Sometimes “quillon” is written as “quillion.” That might just be a mistake that looks reasonable enough that editors aren’t sure which is correct.
The oddity of “quillon” is that there’s no evidence that it was ever used during the many centuries when swords were the weapon of choice. The first time anybody has been able to find it used was in 1884, when swords had been pretty decisively defeated by guns. Its first use was by Sir Richard Francis Burton in Book of the Sword: “ The quillons may be either straight—that is disposed at right angles—or curved.” It’s appeared occasionally since then, and a 1990 edition of Shakespeare Quarterly included it: Our copies [of rapiers] had..the customary crossbar, or quillon.” Shakespeare himself never used the word, though, and there’s no reason to think he ever heard it. The study of Shakespeare’s involvement in bowling leagues has yet to be undertaken, of course, so we might eventually be enlightened on this point.
The word’s first user, Sir Richard Francis Burton, was a pretty interesting character. He was an explorer and translator who reportedly spoke 29 languages. He traveled extensively in Asia and Africa, and snuck into Mecca in disguise during a period when Europeans were banned. He’s also the translator of the “unexpurgated” version of One Thousand and One Nights (AKA The Arabian Nights), so he often gets credited for all the English works that mention Ali Baba (and those 40 thieves), Aladdin, and Sinbad the Sailor. But if you go to Burton’s original translation, none of those characters or stories are there! They were added to other editions by other translators and editors. Burton’s translation was not, in fact, the first time the Thousand and One Nights was available in Europe; Antoine Galland published a French version in 1704.
One Thousand and One Nights was tremendously popular. It’s said to have sparked a whole genre of books, particularly in French, that deal with outlandish stories in Oriental settings. Not only that, but the English writers Coleridge, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Yeats, Dickens, and Poe all wrote about the Thousand and One Nights. There are some pretty creepy stories included, and it’s thanks to those stories that English has the word “ghoul,” an evil spirit from Arabic myths that robs graves and eats dead bodies.
If you see a ghoul, you’d better hope you have a sword — hold it firmly below the quillon and strike the ghoul once to kill it. But don’t hit it again — a second blow brings a ghoul back to life! Although I suppose a third one would kill it again…everybody agrees that ghouls are pretty odd.
