Vom Tag
— from the roof
The chief high guard of the German school. The sword waits above the head, every descending cut latent in the shoulders.
You stand in Vom Tag — sword raised over the right shoulder or straight overhead, weight settled, eyes on the opponent's hands. Tag is where the descending cuts are born: the straight Oberhau, the diagonal Zornhau, and every derivative that follows from them.
Branches of the play
Cuts you may throw
Guards you may transition to
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From the manuals
- ⅠPseudo-Hans Döbringer (anonymous Nuremberg gloss)— Cod. HS 3227a, c. 1389
“vom tage”
The earliest surviving Liechtenauer gloss treats Vom Tag as one of the four chief guards and warns against lingering in any of them: the fencer who stands still in a guard, the author writes, is already losing the initiative. The sword on the shoulder is preparation, not rest.
Read on Wiktenauer ↗ - ⅡSigmund Ringeck— MS Dresd. C 487, 15th c.
Ringeck's gloss describes the guard with the sword held over the right shoulder, or held straight up over the head with arms extended. From either form, the named hidden strokes — Zorn-, Krump-, Zwerch-, Schiel- and Scheitelhau — are launched against an opponent who has committed to another guard.
Read on Wiktenauer ↗ - ⅢHans Talhoffer— Cod.icon. 394a, 1467
Talhoffer's plates open with two fencers approaching one another in this posture. He gives almost no commentary on the guard itself; for him it is simply the opening, the place every plate in the book begins.
Read on Wiktenauer ↗ - ⅣJoachim Meyer— Gründtliche Beschreibung, Strasbourg 1570
Meyer keeps Vom Tag among his four primary guards (with Ochs, Pflug and Alber) and distinguishes a right-shoulder form from a centred high form. He frames every guard as a transitional moment: the sword passes through Tag on its way to a strike and returns to it once the strike is finished.
Read on Wiktenauer ↗ - ⅤFiore dei Liberi (Italian parallel)— Fior di Battaglia, Getty MS Ludwig XV 13, c. 1410
“Posta di Donna · Posta di Falcone”
Fiore depicts the same shoulder-borne sword as Posta di Donna and the centred overhead form as Posta di Falcone. He marks both with the crown of a master-guard and writes that the descending blow they launch breaks every lower posture.
Read on Wiktenauer ↗ - ⅥWiktenauer — community concordance— Vom Tag entry
Wiktenauer collates the gloss tradition: the guard appears under names including Vom Tag, vom Tach and Tagk in the German sources, and is treated as functionally equivalent to Fiore's Posta di Donna and Posta di Falcone in modern reconstructions.
Read on Wiktenauer ↗
Notes are paraphrased summaries of how each source treats this play, not translations. Follow the Wiktenauer links for the original verses, gloss texts and high-resolution scans.