Polearm

Basic Information

Crudely, a polearm is a melee weapon that includes a pole and a head in its construction. How long the pole has to be to qualify is a matter of debate, but you're unlikely to impress anyone with a polearm that's less than four feet in the haft.

Yes, this does mean that a spear or a pike is a polearm - albeit a very simple one - but those have their own entries. A staff isn't … because it's just a pole.

Unfortunately the breadth of this definition means that there are (literally) hundreds of possible polearms, many of them overly complicated and their identity obfuscated by having different names in different languages for virtually the same weapon. Here are some of the more prominent ones:

• Spetum: Like a spear, with side spikes. Similar to the partisan and other mutant spears.
• Awl Pike: Like a spear, but with a much longer head - up to half its length - in the shape of a long metal spike. Also called the awl spear or ahlspiess.
• Bardiche: A large axe head on a long pole. Similar to the bearded axe and Dane axe.
• Poll axe: A small axe head on a long pole, often with a counter-weight to improve the swing.
• Halberd: An axe head, on a pole with a hook or spike on the back and a long spear point on the top. The axe-head is usually angled downward differently than most axes. This suggests the long spear point was mainly used for initial/primary attack, and the axe was a secondary attack done whilst pulling the weapon back into position after a failed thrust.
• Sword staff: Basically a double edged sword blade on a long handle.
• Glaive: Basically a single edged sword blade on a long handle. The voulge looks and works much the same but is differently constructed.
• Ranseur: Like a glaive, but curved and sharpened on the outside of the curve. The Japanese naginata is similar.
• Fauchard: Like a ranseur, but sharpened on the inside of the curve. The war scythe is a pretty similar bit of kit and nothing like the reaper's scythe that it was forged from.
• Bill: A hooked blade, sharpened on the inside and derived from a pruning tool - military versions often had a spike on the back and a spear point on the tip but the original forestry tool remained pretty deadly¹. Confusingly, the military bill often gets called a guisarme, but this tends to be simply a case of gratuitous French.
• Lucern Hammer: Basically a warhammer on a long handle, usually with a spear point on the tip. Sometimes called a bec de corbin or "crow's beak", although this can imply a shorter weapon.

These are a sample only - and are mostly medieval European names. Other parts of the world built similar things with different names.

The improvised weapon known as the war-scythe also bears mention here - it was essentially an agricultural scythe with the blade bent through ninety degrees and re-mounted in line on a straight haft to create a crude glaive. Contrary to various fantasy art depictions, this is the only practicable way of using a scythe as a weapon - scrap it and re-use the parts.

The polearm is generally an artifact of the mid to late middle ages and generally owes its weird shape to some specialised role in overcoming horsemen and/or armour. They were often stockpiled as militia weapons, being relatively effective in semi-trained hands, relatively cheap to produce and, in many cases, capable of generating a decent "spear hedge" if needed. Many of the more peculiar shapes start to die out as the pike-and-shot era takes hold, although halberds in particular remain popular, especially in the hands of picked units deployed to support the flanks of pike phalanxes. Indeed not a few European armies kept halberds into the era of the musket, usually in the hands of colour parties and/or senior NCOs.

Despite being primarily an infantry weapon, surprising amounts of space in contemporary martial arts manuals is dedicated to sparring with polearms, implying that they were taken seriously as individual arms as well. The poll-axe in particular appears to have been a knightly (or at least man-at-armsly) weapon. Perhaps unsurprisingly the Japanese take much the same approach to the naginata.

Sources

Bibliography

1. Video by Lindybeige on why Halberds have their distinctive shape

Game and Story Use

• Give your campaign nation a signature polearm for flavour - the medieval English did very well with Bills (and indeed billmen and longbowmen were amongst the troops levied to face the Armada²), the French seem to have loved the voulge, the Swedes the sword-staff and the Germans the halberd. The Swiss, of course, loved the pike, but used elite halberdiers as flankers - and halberd armed Swiss still serve as the Pope's ceremonial guard.
• Something that is surprising about the Japanese approach to the naginata is that it seems to be considered a woman's weapon - or at least a suitable weapon for a woman to learn. some sources suggest that this springs from a time when the naginata became unfashionable and tended to be left at home, at which point the wives of the absent samurai took to training with them for home defence. This may - or may not - be true.
• Very popular with Gary Gygax for some reason - with the result that early versions of "that RPG" went into almost fetishistic detail about them.

Footnotes

1. And is still on sale today - look for a long handled bush hook

2. There is even some evidence that units of "bills and bows" were called up in the English Civil War, although they appear to have been few in number and not had much significant footprint.