Archery

Archery

Archery is the sport, practice or skill of using a bow to propel arrows. The word comes from the Latin arcus. Historically, archery has been used for hunting and combat. In modern times, it is mainly a competitive sport and recreational activity. A person who participates in archery is typically called an archer or a bowman, and a person who is fond of or an expert at archery is sometimes called a toxophilite.>

Quotes

• This is how the bow wounds! To death, to havoc, to ruin!
  • Giacomo Badoaro, Venetian nobleman and playwright, Il ritorno d'Ulisse in Patria (libretto)

• ...Let fly
  The bow of speech thou to the barb hast drawn.
  • Dante, Paradiso

• We prohibit under anathema that murderous art of crossbowmen and archers, which is hated by God, to be employed against Christians and Catholics from now on.
  • Canon 29 of the Tenth Ecumenical Council of 1139

He made ready for combat; and he took forth the arrow that was given to him of the Simurgh, and he let it fly towards his enemy.

• [He] made ready for combat; and he took forth the arrow that was given to him of the Simurgh, and he let it fly towards his enemy.
  • Ferdowsi, Shahnameh

• And the earth was covered with steel, and arrows fell from the clouds like hail, and the ground was torn with hoofs, and blood flowed like water upon the plains...
  • ibid

• [W]hen he had shot his bolt and had smitten one in the throng, then would that man fall where he was and give up his life...
  • Homer, The Iliad (trans Murray)

• Yet must I yield to death and stubborn fate,
  Whene'er, at morn or noon or eve, the spear
  Or arrow from the bow may reach my life.
  • Homer, ibid, XXI. 110 (tr. Lord Derby)

• The Tao of heaven is like the bending of a bow. The high is lowered, and the low is raised.
  If the string is too long, it is shortened; if there is not enough, it is made longer.
  • Laozi, Tao Te Ching (c 77)

• They rode armed for war, curved swords at their side and the thick horn-and-sinew bows of mounted archers in cases at their knees.
  • S. M. Stirling, The Scourge of God

• The waxen line of the bowstrings struck their leather bracers with a light whapping sound ... A man dropped from each end of the attackers' rough formation, with the flat punching smack of arrowheads striking flesh loud enough to hear.
  • ibid, The Sword of the Lady

• If the hawk is flying to his nest, we two will shoot down the fledgeling with our gilded arrows.
  • The Tale of Igor's Campaign

• With Bow let us win kine, with Bow the battle, with Bow be victors in our hot encounters. The Bow brings grief and sorrow to the foeman: armed with the Bow may we subdue all regions.
  • Rigveda, m. 6 hymn LXXV

• [An arbalest] is not drawn with the right hand, ... but by placing the feet upon the weapon itself, and pulling with the whole force of the body; and it despatches arrows called bolts, of hard wood pointed with iron, which the strength of the bow can send through the strongest breastplates, and even through stone walls, where not of uncommon thickness.
  • Walter Scott, Count Robert of Paris, Ch 5

• Energy may be likened to the bending of a crossbow; decision, to the releasing of a trigger.
  • Sun Tzu, the Art of War (Ch 5)

• Black arrow! I have saved you to the last. You have never failed me and always I have recovered you.
  • John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, The Hobbit

• All nations, Turks and Parthians,
  The Tartars and the Scythians,
  The Arabs, Moors and Indians,
    With brav’ry draw their bows.
  • Allan Ramsay, "The Archers March"