When I was in fifth and sixth grade, I played a game with my friends where we pretended we lived in a fantasy world called “Clod.” Most of my friends pretended to be rulers of various fictional countries within this world. One of my friends pretended that he was the king of the elves. Whenever there was a battle, he always made a big deal about how his elven archers shot flaming arrows, which he always said were so much more deadly than regular arrows.
As it turns out, though, flaming arrows were rarely ever used in open combat by pre-modern peoples and the idea of using flaming arrows in open combat is actually kind of stupid. Flaming arrows were a real thing, but they weren’t often used and, when they were used, they weren’t used the way they are normally portrayed in movies and books.
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