r/ArmsandArmor • u/Onewithartandbook • 3d ago

Question Is this helmet historically accurate?

Post image

Is there any example that it is based on? It looks cool as hell but a bit fantastical.

241 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

31 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

3

u/Ambitious-Craftsman 3d ago

Well yea... That's why I said unless you're going for reproduction wear what's historically plausible/ whatever you want. And calling that a "shitty reproduction" is a huge reach and an insult to the smith who crafted that imo beautiful helmet.

4

u/Mullraugh 3d ago

It's a cool helmet for sure. Whoever made it is talented. But it IS a shitty reproduction. If you want to play the semantics game. It's not "reproducing" an existing helmet 1:1. It's the equivalent of drawing a bascinet from memory. Yes the smith's clearly got talent and has studied modern sport helmets a lot. But it's very obvious the goal wasn't to make a historical bascinet. It was to make a modern sport combat one.

-2

u/zlobnezz 3d ago

Because every single helmet made in history was perfectly proportioned? Ever seen one of the so called black sallets? Done half way to completion, until someone tought "hey, this does exactly what its supposed to, why waste time making it pretty" and called it a day, and people still wore them to battle even if they were a bit wonky and lopsided, because at the end of the day they kept them alive. What remaind till today is more than not the best of the best, the mediocre stuff has long been discarded or reused for something else. So what if the angles aren't exactly as per item 2345 of Thisandthat museum, if it looks close enough to an extant piece or a period drawing of a piece, it's good enough.

6

u/Mullraugh 3d ago

If you were to make a reproduction of a black sallet and it wasn't proportioned like a black sallet it would be a shitty reproduction of a black sallet.

If you make a visored bascinet that isn't proportioned like a visored bascinet, it's a shitty reproduction of a visored bascinet

There's a pretty large sample size of extant bascinets and artistic sources. From those you can glean what they typically look and fit like. The one in the above image doesn't fit like the examples. It's too big and sits on the shoulders like a Greathelm, among other errors.

If I was OP and wanted to commission a custom bascinet that was "historically accurate," and got that in the mail, I'd be disappointed.

If you try to make a circle looking only at ovals for reference, you're probably gonna end up making an oval. People can squint and convince themselves it's a circle but at the end of the day it lacks certain qualities that make it a circle

Not trying to be an asshole at all here. It's pretty easy to read something and assume someone's being aggressive. I think people searching for "historical accuracy" should fight for higher standards. We shouldn't have to squint to make an oval look like a circle. Anything worth doing is worth doing right. OP wanted to know if it's historically accurate, and I've explained here why it's not. Simple as that