A Guide to Guts's Armors, Part 2.1

A Guide to Guts's Armors, Part 2.1:

The Snake Baron Armor

Welcome to my second installment of "A Guide to Guts's Armors." For those just arriving, check out Part 1 first; not only does it cover the previous armors in the sequence, but it contains important definitions and facts about armor construction that I'll assume you've read already. 

Last time I managed to do everything I set out to do in one go, but here I ended up writing so much that it has to be broken off from the rest of part 2. That's mainly because here I go pretty deep into the workings of Guts's cannon arm and repeating crossbow. After those things are out of the way I'll be able to focus more narrowly on the costumes themselves in the next installment.

All images used are by Kentaro Miura unless stated otherwise. Now, let's get into it.

Snake Baron Armor, introduced volume 1, "The Black Swordsman", last used in "The Guardians of Desire (6)"; reappears in volume 14, episode 94, "He Who Hunts Dragons"

This is the costume that earns Guts his famous epithet, The Black Swordsman. It's the first armor that Miura ever drew for Guts, appearing in the Berserk Prototype which Miura created as a college student in 1988. 

It's notable that Guts's facial design was changed significantly by the time Miura published the first official episode, "The Black Swordsman", while the costume including the armor was almost the same; the biggest differences are that Prototype Guts wears an eyepatch and has a two-shot crossbow instead of the famous automatic crossbow that attaches to his iron hand. 

I call this the Snake Baron armor because that is the name of the first Apostle we see Guts fight while wearing it. In volume 14, episode 93, "Armament," we learn how Guts received this armor at Godo's workshop after the Eclipse.

The pieces that made up Gut's armor were already lying around Godo's blacksmith shop, but needed some modifications. For example, Rickert (with some help from Erica) combined a prosthetic hand with a miniature cannon to make Guts's famous iron hand. We can also assume that Rickert sawed off the tiller of the repeating crossbow, and added the front grip and rear brackets for attachment to the iron hand. As Guts explains to Erica, the clothes and armor are black, "because I'll be fighting in a lot of dark places. They are in the darkness."

Guts had amputated his own left hand attempting to escape from the jaws of an Apostle, using what was left of his sword as a chisel after he broke the blade in half against the Apostle's hide. It was a transradial amputation, in which he lost the hand, wrist, and most of the forearm on the left side, while keeping his elbow and a short stump of the forearm. 

Prosthetic devices have an ancient history: the Roman scholar Pliny the Elder wrote about a general named Marcus Sergius who lost his right hand in the Second Punic War (218–201 BC), but was able to continue soldiering with the help of a replacement made of iron. Some of you may have heard of Götz von Berlichingen (1480–23 July 1562), an Imperial Knight and mercenary from Franconia, Germany who lost his right hand in a siege. He had two iron replacements made, the second of which was a sophisticated device whose fingers could hold a shield, reins, or even a quill pen. 

Mobility was passive only: Götz would have needed to use his left hand to set the iron hand's wrist and fingers in whatever arrangement he wanted, and it would stay in that position by means of ratchet wheels and latches inside each joint. The 19th and 20th centuries would see the invention of more controllable prosthetic hands and hooks, which could open and close as the amputee manipulated the tension of straps or cables using other muscle groups. The two prosthetics attributed to Götz von Berlichingen are on display at the Burg Jagsthausen. Despite the similarity of their names and iron hands, Miura states that he didn't even hear about Berlichingen until after he created Guts and Berserk, making this nothing but a funny coincidence.

Iron Hand of Götz von Berlichingen, Museum of Burg Jagsthausen, image by Wilhelm Kratt

Guts keeps his stump and elbow wrapped in bandages when he wears his prosthetic, presumably to prevent chafing. Iron bands connected by pivoting arms wrap around the elbow joint, and coil springs are stretched along the outside of the joint: the springs are put in tension when the elbow is contracted, and in compression when the elbow is extended. Being unfamiliar with prosthetic technology, I'm not sure what the purpose of the springing would be, especially since Guts still has full muscular control over his elbow movement. Maybe it's supposed to help prevent hyperextension of the joint? I can only guess.

The iron hand is magnetized, which helps him to grip the handle of his sword. There is a small hammer or striker that sits partly inside a recess at the upper rear of the forearm, and produces the spark to fire the cannon when the trigger is pulled. If needed he can attach a cord to the trigger and pull it using his teeth. 

When he prepares the arm cannon to fire, the hand folds down underneath the barrel. 

After firing, he can get the hand to click back into its normal position just by flicking his arm.

The trigger is a square piece of metal (red) inside a rectangular slot on the right side of the forearm's base. The slot allows this part to slide back in the manner of a plunger, hence Rickert's instruction to "pull the metal part at the base." The striker I mentioned before is highlighted in blue.

Despite the commonness of large cannon in Berserk, Guts is one of the only characters who uses a hand-held firearm. This is not really in parallel with history, where hand firearms appeared very early together with heavier field and siege guns. Hand cannon were used in China from the 13th century onward, and in Europe beginning in the 14th century. A typical hand cannon consisted of a metal barrel mounted on the end of a stick, which could either be tucked under the arm like a lance or braced against the ground. Sometimes, to help control the recoil, a piece of metal would stick out from the barrel so it could be hooked over a castle battlement. Ignition was as simple as sticking a match or hot poker into a touch hole on top to ignite the powder. Many medieval gun barrels have an octagonal shape similar to Guts's.

The Mörkö gun, Swedish, ca. 1390. Wikimedia Commons

To make repairs or adjustments to his cannon arm, Guts uses a simple screwdriver (held in his teeth out of frame) to take out the screws by which the hand is attached. The cannon has four points of attachment to the forearm frame, and if the two rear screws are removed he can swivel up the breech end of the cannon as depicted.

You might be surprised to learn that the use of metal screws to hold machines together goes all the way back to 15th century Europe, when they were restricted to expensive and complex custom-made items. These included tournament armors, wheellock guns, clocks, and automata.

Jousting Armor by Jörg and Lorenz Helmschmid, commissioned by Maximilian I
 in 1494. Detail of image by Sandstein, Wikimedia Commons

Now, let's get on to the armor itself. Guts's cuirass is simple yet stylish, with the chest sculpted into the shape of pectoral muscles. The muscular or anatomical cuirass appears in history at least as far back as the Greek Archaic period, and similar sculpted forms can be found in many armors around the world. As in his Raid Captain armor, Guts's breastplate is fairly short and only goes down as far as his ribcage.

Bronze Cuirass, Metropolitan Museum of Art,

 1992.180.3

Back in Part 1, we saw how Guts's Raid Captain armor had a back and breastplate which used hooks, perforated strap ends, and pegs to secure the straps. It could be that Miura wasn't thinking as much about practical details of construction when he drew this first armor, as it's unclear how the metal strap ends, shaped like elongated hexagons, actually attach to and detach from the cuirass. 

In volume 14, Miura creates a mechanism that's ingenious for not contradicting his earlier drawings: instead of the pegs sticking out of the breastplate and the strap ends having holes in them to fit over the pegs, here there are pegs sticking out from inside the strap ends, and holes in the breastplate. Guts will insert the strap peg part-way into the breastplate hole so that it won't slide forward or back, then insert the corresponding hook through the hole in the peg to prevent the peg from popping out of the breastplate. At the same time, a hole in the end of the strap end slips over the pivot on which the hook rotates.

With the strap ends in place, this newly revealed mechanism could plausibly look the same on the outside. It wouldn't be as sturdy or practical as the conventional mechanism we saw on the Raid Captain armor, since most of the stress from the tugging of the straps would be concentrated on those thin hooks instead of the thicker peg, but at least it's something. There are also shoulder buckles for attaching the pauldrons to the cuirass.

The pauldrons or spaulders that Guts wears each consist of five lames, with a central ridge embossed down the middle. As is often the case with early pauldrons Miura draws, they are not buckled to the upper arm and flap around loosely. In episode 94 we get a rare inside view of the pauldrons which shows the internal leathers.

A broad leather belt and codpiece are included as usual, helping to protect what isn't covered by the breastplate. The belt is decorated near the edges with iron rivets, and there's a metal decoration in the center shaped like a figure of eight. A large pouch hangs at his right hip, and a smaller one at his left. Hanging from the same strap as the large pouch is a dagger in a simple sheath. The codpiece is a simple flap of leather.

As previously his belt joins at the right hip with the help of two small buckled straps, normally hidden by his big pouch.

The belt turns out to be tough enough to reduce the penetration of a sword point, at least when wielded by the possessed corpse of Collette.

Guts now wears a leather baldric over his right shoulder, which has hooks on either end of it; these hooks clip onto two iron rings attached to the left side of the waist belt in front and in back respectively, so the baldric can be quickly hooked on or taken off. The baldric has pockets for six throwing knives on the front, which are inserted with the blade pointing up. As Guts tells Rickert, he learned the basics of knife throwing from Judeau and feels they might come in handy. 

The baldric has another important function, which is enabling him to strap on the Dragon Slayer. The Dragon Slayer is so big as to make a scabbard impractical, and it's so crude and robust as to make protection from the elements unnecessary. On the baldric behind Guts's right shoulder is a large hook or carabiner which engages the thick chain link on one side of the Dragon Slayer's semi-circular guard, so that he can hook the Dragon Slayer onto the clip and let it hang across his back. There doesn't seem to be any mechanism keeping the Dragon Slayer at this nice diagonal angle instead of straight down, but that will be fixed in a later version of the costume.

It occurs to me that Guts's baldric didn't really have a reason to have the shoulder clip on it when it was made, since it was not originally Godo's plan to give Guts the Dragon Slayer. He gives Guts a regular-sized sword, and only when that breaks does Guts stumble upon the Dragon Slayer. It is perhaps understandable that the Dragon Slayer would have the chain link on it in case it were to be hung on a wall for display—after all, it was created more as a cheeky artistic statement than as a weapon—but Guts's baldric seems suspiciously convenient for carrying the Dragon Slayer, and it's a little plot contrivance that we might just have to forgive.

While Vargas is being prepared for execution in The Guardians of Desire, Guts lays his pouches and ammo on the ground so we can see some of their contents. The large pouch he wears at his right hip contains a flask of gunpowder, balls for his hand cannon, and probably also the crossbow magazine when he's not using it. The quiver for his crossbow bolts is a cylindrical sack with a drawstring at the top.

Throughout this part of the manga we can't normally see how guts wears his baggage because of his clingy cape, but with the cape gone we get this rare view of how everything is arranged behind him.

Now, please bear with me while I over-analyze Guts's Crossbow!😆

Guts's crossbow normally hangs on the back of his belt, with the box-shaped magazine removed for compactness. The magazine is attached to the top and feeds the bolts downwards by gravity; when Guts reloads, he grabs several bolts at a time from his quiver and inserts them into the opening in the back of the magazine. 

A collapsible crank on the weapon's right side is turned to make the bow load and shoot its rounds automatically: it looks to me as if the cranking direction is clockwise, but I could be mistaken. The crossbow has a bracket and pin on the underside of the rear which fastens around Guts's prosthetic forearm, and a stirrup-shaped horizontal foregrip on the front is held by his prosthetic hand.

It's unclear to me exactly how this crossbow is supposed to work, and in fact it becomes more nonsensical to me the harder I look at it. Obviously the power comes from the crank, but the exact way that the revolution of the crank is used to pull back the string is unclear, especially because the magazine hides what's going on below. 

The most famous repeating crossbow in history is the Chinese Lián Nŭ, also called Zhūgě nǔ or Cho-ko-nu: it could rapidly shoot through a magazine of bolts, and some were made to shoot two bolts at a time. The earliest version was invented in the State of Chu during the Warring States Period, and an improved version appeared during the Ming dynasty. The Ming-pattern Lián Nŭ has an upper assembly which includes a vertical, gravity-operated magazine, a cutout channel in which the crossbow string travels, and notch in the back of the string channel whose purpose is to catch and draw the string.

18th century Qing double-shot repeating crossbow, greatmingmilitary.blogspot

This assembly is connected to a lever at the back of the stock or tiller, so that the whole upper section moves forward in relation to the stock when the lever is pushed, and travels back when the lever is pulled. Pushing the lever causes the upper assembly to rock forward and catch the bowstring in the notch at the end of the string channel, while at the same time letting the bottom bolt in the magazine fall into place on its grooved track. Pulling the lever brings the whole assembly back, thus drawing back the string with the bolt in front of it. At the end of the lever pull, a peg sticking up from the tiller pushes the bowstring out of the notch so it can snap forward down the channel, which shoots out the bolt. The lever provides mechanical advantage because the handle on the end of the lever travels over a greater distance than the pivot point the upper assembly is attached to. Nevertheless, the weapon must be of relatively low power for a person to repeatedly cycle it using this method. It is also limited in accuracy because of the low velocity of the bolts and the impossibility of sighting along the arrow's path while in the required posture.

Animation of Ming Dynasty crossbow mechanism, https://youtu.be/dxozWlVsUj0

The vertical magazine of Guts's crossbow is similar, but it is stationary and is refilled using an opening in the back instead of in the top. As for the draw mechanism, his crossbow is powered by a crank instead of a lever. Cranequins and windlasses with crank handles were used in Medieval and Renaissance European crossbows, but these were usually separate devices which were attached during loading and then had to be removed in order to shoot, which prevents the use of a repeating mechanism even if we disregard the question of power.

Crossbow with cranequin attached, todsworkshop.com

Crossbow with windlass attached, todsworkshop.com

A common feature of many crossbows, although not of the Ming Dynasty Lián Nŭ, was the rotating nut trigger mechanism. The nut is basically a wheel with a notch cut into the top which would hold back the bowstring, and another notch in the bottom which the trigger sear presses against. The sear prevents the nut from rotating so that the string is held at a draw, until the trigger is pulled and the nut is allowed to rotate forward, releasing the string. Additional moving parts could be added to lighten the trigger pull and improve reliability, but the simple single-axel trigger depicted below was widely used before the Renaissance.

"Single rolling nut trigger system," Tod's Workshop, https://youtu.be/l4W4brUUCR0

I think the most logical way to design a crank-powered draw mechanism built directly into the bow would be to have both the nut and the grooved bolt track constructed as part of a slide mechanism that moves independently of the stock. Take for example this balestrino or miniature crossbow made by Leo Todeschini: first he slides the nut and track forward to hook the string over the nut—a position in which the track protrudes out the front of the weapon—and then he repeatedly twists the handle at the back of the bow in order to turn the screw that draws back the slide. 

"Balestrino assembled and tested," Tod's Workshop, https://youtu.be/eM9t3Zk4KCs

Once the slide is all the way back, he can depress the trigger to make the nut release the string and shoot the bolt. To use a crank handle on the side instead of this twist handle attached to the screw, we would merely need to put in a bevel gear to transfer the rotating motion of the crank 90 degrees.

"Tod of todsstuff shooting a balestrino," Tod's Workshop, https://youtu.be/se_N8CrooPY

The issue with Guts's crossbow is that I don't see any evidence of a slide or reciprocating mechanism, and it doesn't look like his crossbow even has any kind of nut either. 

What I find strangest about Guts's crossbow are the horn- or hook-shaped arms behind the bow prod on either side of the stock, which spin in circles on the same axle as the crank handle. 

I guess that maybe the crank handle directly turns these arms and that the arms grab and pull back the string. However I do not think that this would work well in real life because the force the arms would exert on the string while spinning would be more vertical than horizontal at the start and end of their revolution, with a proper horizontal force only being applied in the middle. There is also a perpendicular rod near the back of the crossbow assembly whose function is unclear. Some panels seem to show something impacting this rod, so I wonder if the spinning arms are striking it. Maybe that's the trigger which releases the bolt at full draw? 

Honestly I'm seeing a lot of contradictions here. I'd think that the bowstring at full draw would get in the way of Guts's hand while he's cranking. And if we assume that the cranking motion is continuously clockwise instead of alternating between forward and reverse, that implies that the hook arms are spinning continuously in one direction. If the arms did rotate clockwise, and thus pulled back the string on the downswing, the string would get stuck once it got as far back as the crank axle because the track it runs along is above the spinning arms. Even if the arms spun counter-clockwise, though, the arms would have to reverse direction upon the string reaching full draw for the string to be allowed to snap forward. The perpendicular rod also looks like it could stop the hook arms before they could complete a circle, depending on how close to the arms it's drawn. My reaction is to laugh and say, "Go home Miura, you're drunk." 

Phew! Glad I got that off my chest!😂

Guts takes a lot of costume damage toward the end of The Guardians of Desire. In "The Guardians of Desire (4)" he uses his cape to make the Count's henchman lord Dahl into a decoy, striking at the Count while he's distracted by the ruse. Unsurprisingly, Dahl does not survive this.

In "Guardians (5)" two of Guts's left pauldron lames fall off after he stands up from a thrashing by the Count, and there's a huge dent in his breastplate. When he gets kicked into a pillar again his pauldrons fly off completely. During all this excitement his crossbow and bolts go missing.

Next, when he's transported with the dying Slug Count into the presence of the God Hand, Femto uses his telekinesis to smash Guts into a wall so hard that his cuirass pops open and comes flying off. Because of this we see that Guts's waist pouches and dagger are not actually attached to the heavy belt around his abdomen, but instead to a thinner harness that wraps around his waist and is held up by a strap over his right shoulder, all of which is largely concealed under the cuirass most of the time.

Guts seemingly loses his baldric and cuirass in the process of escaping from the God Hand and returning to the normal world; while the crossbow and quiver might be somewhere under all the rubble in the throne room, Guts doesn't make an effort to find them. After dealing with Theresia he retrieves his cape from the corpse of Dahl and makes his exit, unarmored and in need of some serious patching up.

See you next time in Part 2.2!