Like King Robert's hammer in A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones? Were there any famous users of it? Is it purely a fictitious weapon? I gots to know!
Hi there, this is surprisingly enough not in our FAQ. However, here are a couple of threads that may interest you as you wait for further answers (this is not to discourage further comment; there's a lot to be said here!).
It's important to note that 'war hammers', 'battle-axes' and similar weapons as depicted in fantasy works are just that: fantasy. Now, that said, war-hammers and axes did exist in medieval combat. The use of said hammers is, as the two links already posted describe, actually to counter heavy armour, and it is not the first time a weapon was designed for this purpose. For example, when the Dacian Falx which the Romans encountered when Trajan invaded in the 2nd Century was a deadly weapon which was designed to puncture armoured opponents, and was quite effective at that. Special measures in terms of up-armouring the legions in the second phase of the invasion are described which were never seen again, analogous to the up-armouring of vehicles to deal with IEDs in modern urban warfare.
Now, what did a war-hammer actually look like? Well, they were generally like this: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/76/Indo-Persian_war_hammer.jpg A hammer on one side, and a pike type implement on the other, similar in purpose to the above Falx. This particular example is about two and a half feet long and would have likely wielded with one hand, the other with a shield. War axes are much the same; short, one handed weapons. The massive two handed weapons serve no real purpose when you think about it. While they might have the weight to knock a man down, the swinging action on such a weapon means that it would be unwieldy in a coordinated line of battle, relatively easily avoided, and just in general ineffective.
