Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of I Heart Radio. Hi, my name is Robert Lamb and this is the Artifact, a short form series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind, focusing on particular objects, ideas, and moments in time. The Nightmare on Elm Street film franchise gave us an iconic but at times perplexing horror icon in the form of Freddy Krueger. He's a disfigured phantom of the opera esque character with a taste for Fedora's
and red and green striped sweaters. He does not wear a mask, and he attacks his victims in their dreams, making frequent use of his signature weapon, a clawed leather right hand glove. Freddy's glove. While iconic, has only a few real world analogs. Throughout in history, weapons like the sword have proven to be more than effective as a
means of slashing adversaries with a forged blade. When we do find weapons more in line with Freddy's claw, they tend to either still require the use of a handle or hilt, such as with various punch daggers, or they function in a way comparable to, say, brass knuckles in Japanese martial arts, the tiko kagi claw weapon perhaps serves
as one of the best parallels to Freddy's claw. I was reading about this weapon in Classical Weaponry of Japan, Special Weapons and Tactics of the Martial Arts from two thousand and three by Sergei Mole. Mole draws special attention to the Shuko and ashiko weapons hand and foothooks, respectively, which are thought to have been used as quote unquote
ninja weapons for scaling walls, trees, or other obstacles. Their main function was climbing, not combat, but Mole points out that they could still have proven fierce in close corners combat, and it certainly would have given the user a certain psychological advantage. The tiko kagi, however, which means iron backhand claw, was unlikely to have been used for climbing, he writes, and its elongated blades were seemingly designed to slash and rip up skin. Still, it should be noted that the
tiko kagi was not a glove. The human hand, after all, has evolved for fine manipulation, it can also be used for bare handed violence, and it has even been hypothesized that the hand evolved to form an effective fist for punching, but it certainly didn't evolve to slash. Oh, certainly, human fingernails can dig in tear, but your fingers simply are not suited for the broad slashes and of course occasional torpedo style stabbing through the torso that a Krueger glove
seems designed to administer. Freddie's creator Wes Craven cited the housecat as inspiration for Freddie's claw, and certainly cats are pretty skilled slashers, but even their amazing retractable clause are multi purpose, and as Douglas j Emlin points out in the excellent book Animal Weapons, the primary purpose of the clause during a kill are to catch and hold the prey in place in order for the cat to deliver
a powerful killing bite. Not only does this latching on with the claws enable the teeth to sink home in the prey animal, they also hold the prey animal in place through the death throws, and this prevents these movements from snapping the cat's long canines off in the body. Freddy Krueger, of course, is a fictional monster. He can do whatever he pleases, while an actual human might well break their own fingers. Using such a glove as a weapon,
all Freddy has to do his dream. Tune in for additional editions of The Artifact or the Monster Fact each week. As always, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.