Best polearm for an character with flight-capabilities.

[Trip Williams]

One of my main support characters is a young boy who can fly. In the first book, he is too young to fly, but can glide and near the end begins to develop the ability to fly. He takes up the weapon of his father, which is a polearm. In the book, I chose the falchard as the particular type of polearm he uses; however, I know very little about polearms, and in the little research I did, found that there are a great many variations of polearms. If possible, the character in question's name stems from ancient egyptian, along with other characters of the same race as him (the Evianians/singular would be Eviani) therefore, if there is a polearm that was predominant or popular with ancient egyptian, that would be great. Any ideas?

 

[Devor]

Polearms get confusing. If you pull up a list of polearm names, you'll find that in history many of them were used interchangeably, or were just the regional word for blade-on-a-big-stick. Sometimes polearms were slotted together by peasants from farm tools, so even a unit with polearms could have very different shapes to their blades, yet all be called a billhook or whatever it might be. The later you get in history, the more some of the names zero in on specific weapons, often used by a specific unit of soldiers or in a government's ceremony. I googled falchard - fauchard? - and am still unsure which weapon you meant.

Polearms tend to have some key features. A spear tip. A pick or hammer for armored targets. A slashing weapon, sometimes an axe, sometimes a blade for unarmored targets, sometimes including horses. Hooks for tripping. Later weapons might have all of these, while earlier ones often didn't. If there's a polearm without a point at the end, maybe with a fan shape tip, it's more likely for controlling a crowd of peasants than for armed combat.

For a flying soldier, I think I'd want a pretty standard glaive. I'd imagine the character would fly in on a charge, which would do the most damage, then use the slash to create distance again and fly off. Hooks and other features would be a waste of weight. I suppose that assumes flight = speed.

You can look up the Egyptian word, but unless your story is actually set in ancient Egypt I don't think anyone would begrudge you if you just used glaive. I did a quick google of ancient Egyptian weapons, and to be frank, the designs are.... well, ancient.

 

[Trip Williams]

Ah. You are correct, it should be fauchard. This is kind of what I was thinking...

as posted in a blog here
What weapons did Medieval soldiers use? - Quora
(hope i referenced that correctly...)
Some pictures I found in googling fauchard had a more straight edge than curved, like it is here...

 

[Devor]

Right. So to me, that looks like a weapon designed to slash at a horse's legs. You can't stab with it, and the edge is on the inside of the blade, meaning you have pull with your swing. It's also exceptionally long, which is common for weapons that target horses.

 

[Trip Williams]

True. I like your idea of the glaive. I may just change all references of fauchard to glaive.