My apologies, my post was pretty ambiguous. Instead of "larger" I should have said "longer." The longer side of the drag is in the direction of travel, that is, on the underside, on every European saber where I've looked. I'm assuming this was for the functional reasons I've mentioned, and even if the sword wasn't to be dragged around it would be done in the same way. Of course there's no way to know how a non-European maker would orient the drag. However if we assume these things were done capriciously, we stop being able to say much of anything about anything.
|