Bone and Sinew

I've been watching a lot of medieval movies lately. When I die, I hope Valhalla is just a great big mead hall in the sky, for if I see one more Elysian field with a slow, haunting, woeful hymn, I'm going to puke.

After seeing Beowolf & Grendel, 300, and about all 14 hours of the extended Lord of the Rings movies in a week's time, I have a question. Just how easy is it to shear a limb asunder using a sword? From the looks of the sword play in these movies, almost effortlessly. I can understand how rending the head from the body could be achieved with a single blow with some regularity, as the blade could pass between vertebrae.

However, I believe that arms and legs would be a different matter. While I believe you could do an arm at the elbow, it would have to be a perfect landing. I can't imagine that a sword can cleanly cut through an arm for two reasons: (a) The limb would most likely give. Unless the arm would be irrevocably being swung into the path of the oncoming sword, it would give, drastically reducing the force of the blow, the bringing rise to my second issue, (b) bone. Could a sword pass through flesh, cleanly cut through the bone, then continue through more flesh? I imagine it would shatter the bone similar to a bullet, but you would think that would cause some sort of resonance along the sword, causing it to lose momentum.

Having seen various Al-Qaeda videos, it looks much harder than they make it look in the movies...unless maybe a sword has a sweet spot. Does a sword have a sweet spot?
Maybe it's just that Monty Python is more true to life than we ever considered.

Furthermore, I also discovered what Bullion is made out of. Basically, they take all the meat by-product that they can't use and boil it down, dehydrate the meat flavored water and add a ton of salt. To me this means they use whatever can't be used to make hotdogs and scrapple. Then figure the other inedibles used to produce glue, oils, pet food, cosmetics, anything collagen based, jell-o, leather, and, to some degree, scrimshaw. I have formulated two conclusions from this.
1. Bullion is probably pretty gross when you think of it.
2. Bullion is proof that industrial society truly uses every part of animals, thus in turn showing how wasteful Native Americans truly were.

p.s. I recently saw "Spamalot." While it was hysterical, I was disappointed when King Author failed to parry the Black Knight's errant blows.