I remember this viral video from this guy a few years back https://youtu.be/BEG-ly9tQGk
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Wow, that does make legendary archers in movies actually seem less impressive, I’d rather face Legolas than Lars after watching this.
Lars was heavily involved in the Robin hood movie production, the one with Taron Edgerton from a couple years ago. Despite how incredulously "blockbustery" the action sequences looked, the archery itself was all heavily grounded in reality and research from manuscripts of that era. I gained a lot of respoect for Taron Edgerton for his dedication to pulling all that off without resorting to stuntsmen or cgi. Wish the movie did better, so all their work could have had more exposure.
It seemed like a parody in tone, but it was pretty great all the way through
"Or on a horseback" is my favourite line.
Insane. After watching the world-record video I was left feeling suspect it was fake. Now i'm a believer
FWIW whilst superficially impressive, that video was thoroughly debunked https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDbqz_07dW4
I can't stand the tone of this video, so couldn't watch the whole thing but skipped through, and afaict it's debunking the idea that people ever really did this in battle? Not that the stunts in the video are fake?
Kind of a misleading thing to say it's 'thoroughly debunked' when it's very clearly for entertainment and just says they're 'myths'.
I agree, after watching both videos it seems plausible that at least some historical warriors could have used a style like Lars and been very effective with it. I don’t think that claim is really “debunked”.
They seem to have attacked the least charitable interpretation of his video. For example, I don’t think he was seriously claiming that warriors would routinely catch opponent’s arrows and fire them back in combat, I thought he was just presenting that as a cool trick.
Your correct. Lars isn’t faking his feats. But his narrative that he “rediscovered the ancient true way of archery” is fake, and originally before his rise to fame, that was his “claim to fame” he was a snake oil salesman who ended up being successful because even though his claims about the product where false, people still genuinely liked the product just for what it was, impressive archery skills, no need to wrap it up in claims about ancient lore or some modern conspiracy to “suppress true archery”.
If you’re actually good I don’t think you can be called a snake oil salesman exactly.
We have people who really do amazing things but make up wild claims about how it works - magicians.
I guess if a magician actually believed what they were saying was true, that’d be some third thing.
If you are selling A as A-prime, you can be a snake-oil salesman even if you are supremely skilled at A.
In Lars' case, he is from what I can see a supremely skilled instinctive archer. There are some historical documentation, from some regions ,documenting feats that Lars is capable of doing.
But, "feating" and "combat skills" are very different things (well, they are for sword disciplines, I will blithely assert the same is true in archery). Yes, both require skill. Yes, training one discipline can improve the other. but they're not the same. Just like how writing Haskell (or Lisp) can make you a better C programmer.
> If you’re actually good I don’t think you can be called a snake oil salesman exactly.
Of cause you can. Every single social media body builder who’s obviously on Steroids but is claiming they got to they are by eating whatever the latest marketable product they come across(see referral link in bio) is, are snake oil salesmen’s, even if they are objectively and impossible as muscular as their viewers want to be.
Lars got really good at archery doing what every other archer does… the big dumb secret you ask? He practiced. But it’s difficult to sell pratice, even expensive one on one tutoring only gets you so far. So he invented a narrative where “Big Archery” has been conspirering since the Dark Ages to teach archery wrong, but if you follow his cult of the true archery (click link for details on the subscription pricing), then you too will instantly become an archer supreme, capable of firing several arrows through keyholes!
Given the amount of effort he spends to find what actual ancient texts, ancient pictures, and reproducing exactly that, I think he has a pretty good claim to be trying to reproduce actual specific historical styles.
In later videos he talks about not just historical archery, but specific styles used by specific people with references.
That’s not how the sciences work. Historians don’t invent a narrative and then go through ancient texts trying to find pictures and snippets they can use to back up their narrative. You start from the source, study it and try to deduce the truth, and you can try to craft a narrative that portrays that truth as accurately as possible.
> In later videos he talks about not just historical archery, but specific styles
Yes he talks a lot about it and everything he makes up gets quickly and thoroughly debunked. He might as well be claiming that aliens invented archery. He’s a fraud who’s good with a acrobatic trick shots with bow and arrow, not a historian.
I've seen his version, and I've the attempts to debunk. I've also seen his attempts to debunk the debunkers, and so on
I am emphatically not convinced by the attempts to debunk.
Furthermore there is a situation where Lars clearly did start with a source, and attempted to reproduce exactly that. In other words he did what you say he didn't. Does he know what the thing he found is the way it was actually done? He doesn't, and says so. But it is one way it could have been done, and reproduces the historical feats of archery.
It started when a group of Native Americans pointed out in https://indiancountrytoday.com/archive/videos-lost-and-found... that they have maintained an archery tradition that Lars had ignored. However after Lars talked with actual Comanches, he found that they had lost the technique by which the Comanches fired so quickly. A technique which, according to both pictures and books, was completely different than the style that Lars had figured out based on Arab and Asian sources. They could still make and shoot the bows an arrows, but not at the speed described in history books.
And so, working with a Comanche archer and with authentic Comanche bows and arrows, Lars experimented until to find a method that fit the historical record. He was able to achieve historical speed and accuracy with a very different technique than he used before. Yes, he did it from from horseback, and whoed it could be done while hanging off of horseback. (He doesn't appear to be good enough to actually do it at speed while hanging off an actual horse, but that is a question of horsemanship, not of archery.)
See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=liHlCRpS70k for Lars' version of this. And https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMWOUCuZ-kQ for the Comanche he worked with.
If you're a glutton for punishment, he explains himself at length in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4mqt69VZ28. And you get to see what he thinks he got right, what he thinks he got wrong, and the limits of what he claims to know.
The most interesting point for me is that practice with shooting moving things interferes with shooting at a stationary target, and vice versa. This "two related things interfere with each other in your brain" is something I've personally experienced with Go vs Chess. But it is fascinating that it happens with archery.
Superficially impressive? Those archery trick shots were amazing! Obviously nobody was doing 360 no-scopes with arrows in the Battle of Crécy, I didn't take that as the thesis statement of the 'debunked' video.
The debunking video actually does the opposite, it just made the original video even more impressive because they couldn't debunk it well.
I don't trust any youtube video that claims to be a source of information but hides comments or likes/dislikes, it's a strong signal that the video's ideas don't hold up to even the most surface level scrutiny.
I think you're getting downvoted for the use of the word superficially (what he does and is impressive and the video you linked doesn't debunk the trick shooting itself except for the split arrow), but this is an important contribution. His historical claims struck me as off, and this video does a good job of explaining why.
"How did the Saracens measure seconds?" — My thought exactly!
I think the claim is that surviving texts about training archers describe shooting an area is a certain distance and loosing two more before the first hits the ground (with some extra requirement that the first not be aimed at some high angle). You can then go back from the kinds of bows they had and turn that into an estimate.