In the 2010 Disney movie Tangled, the hero Flynn Rider repeatedly jabs arrows into the mortar between stones and uses them to climb a stone tower. Granted, this is a cartoon for kids—but really? I defy anyone to try this. First, all the arrows wouldn’t penetrate the mortar enough to support any weight at all. Second, a normal-weight man who tries to pull himself up by a 3/8 to 1/2 inch thick stick is likely to get a painful surprise. This is cartoon stuff meant for children, but it has now spread to well-funded summer blockbusters such as the Prince of Persia. We see the hero climbing huge bolts shot in the dark at considerable distance into the tiny mortar cracks on a castle wall. The whole scene is ridiculous. The bolts are way too big for the handheld crossbows the men are shooting. There is no way any archer of the time could have hit those tiny mortar cracks in the dark, and, even if he did, the bolts are too large to fit into the crack. To make things worse, all of the bolts drive straight into the cracks—even though the men are shooting from the ground at a steep upward angle to a spot 20 to 50 feet above. Nothing about the scene is believable.
This kind of charade is still mercifully rare, but we more frequently see archers in movies using their arrows to stab enemies before putting them on the string and shooting—two kills for the price of one arrow. Is this possible? Maybe, but in close fighting, a bow is an impediment. Bows were always long-range weapons that were discarded when the battle closed. To keep hanging onto a stick with a string and a bunch of smaller sharp ended sticks when someone is swinging a sword at your head is suicide. And you can’t deflect a sword stroke with a wooden bow without destroying the bow. It may seem cool in Lord of the Rings movies when Legolas does this, but it’s not a good idea to try in combat if you want to survive.
For more on archery in fiction see The Writer’s Guide to Archery: A Practical Guide to Bows and Arrows in Fiction.
For the Archer of the Heathland Series
