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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7707385" data-attributes="member: 4937">Everyone thinks of the Three Musketeers as rapier wielding swashbucklers because that's how they are presented in the books.  When Dumas wrote the Three Musketeers, it was almost a period piece, and certainly weaponry had only advanced a little bit in the 200 years between when the books were set and their publication.  There wasn't any sort of predisposition in the audience toward finding guns too modern or whatever.  Quite the contrary, the audience would have been quite aware of the technology of the era and its abilities and limitations.  In fact, The Three Musketeers are an excellent example of what I'm talking about.  If the Three Musketeers are going to overcome great numeric odds, it can't be on the strength of their skill with a slow loading cumbersome firearm.  The only weaponry that can dispatch a great number of men in short order at the time remained a melee weapon.  The revolver and the lever action rifle are still 100+ years in the future.  So naturally the heroes - the aristocratic heroes - had to employ an aristocratic weapon and the usual force multipliers of martial virtue, martial skill, and athletic advantages.  As heroes, the plebian musket is of little avail to them, and like the Samurai - is likely to be the weapon that cuts them down even though no enemy could by skill of arms overcome them.  Porthos almost never fires his musket.  When he employs it at all, it is as a bone crushing club wielded by his Herculean frame.  The evolution in warfare that had occurred since the Musketeers time - the caplock, rifling, the miniball - had finally put an end to the melee weapon, and along with Napoleon's innovations in field artillery had finally all but crushed the last of the ancient aristocratic weapons of war.  (The full extent that it had done so wouldn't be realized in Europe though for another 60 years, despite the American Civil War and the Crimea teaching anyone willing to look all they'd needed to know.)   England fielded longbows (in an official capacity) for the very last time at Waterloo.  So, Dumas was looking back toward a time when a single skilled individual could do for half a dozen, at least in close quarters.  In 1844, increasingly no one believed that, though briefly - the revolver would change that, at least in American heroic myth.</blockquote>

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