Medieval behavior has had a renaissance of late. We faced a deadly plague that swept across the globe, an actual mob stormed actual ramparts, and Elon Musk challenged Mark Zuckerberg to a duel. And as often as twice a week, eight women haul giant suitcases and plastic bins full of armor made in Ukraine to a small gym in Irving. There the women, the Dallas Mythics, practice buhurt, or armored medieval combat.
The sport is not to be confused with live-action role play (LARP), which is character based; buhurt is more violence based. Nor is it to be confused with Medieval Times Dinner & Tournament. “Medieval Times wishes,” says 33-year-old Lauryn Lueken, who cofounded the Mythics in 2019. “It’s real combat, real weapons, and real armor,” she says. Nobody knows, going into a match, who’s going to win.
Generally, though, the Mythics win. Buhurt is a small and male-dominated sport, so most female fighters must practice independently, in basements and backyards across the nation, coming together with their teammates only for occasional tournaments. The Mythics are the rare U.S. women’s team whose roster is mostly based in the same metro area. The frequency with which the Mythics are able to practice together makes them deadly in the arena, like a Division I football team taking on a bunch of players who met just that day.
Lauryn Lueken receiving some adjustments.Photograph by Chad Wadsworth
On a Saturday morning in March, Lueken and her teammates arrive one by one at the North Texas Fairgrounds, in Denton. Here they will fight the tournament’s only other women’s team in five-on-five group skirmishes, called melees, in a large square arena in the livestock pavilion. In front of dozens of rowdy ticket holders, teams will fight to qualify for the International Medieval Combat Federation’s annual world championships, scheduled for late July at Spøttrup Borg, a castle in Denmark.
The Mythics are easy to pick out in the long line for “weapons check.” The queue extends from a building across the fairgrounds’ parking lot, where volunteers in yellow shirts inspect participants’ axes and swords to make sure there are no protruding bolts or too-sharp edges. The few other women in line belong to the team the Mythics will fight today, the Nite Owls, a group of “mercenaries”—women who will battle together just for the day.
Shanna Knight, the Mythics’ 33-year-old captain, arrives with an armload of axes and swords, wearing a jersey with “Knight” on the back. (“I know,” she says of her on-the-nose surname. “When we got the jerseys, people were like, ‘You think?’ ”) A former Army medic, Knight is small and intense, with big, ever-alert hazel eyes. She has competed in buhurt for more than nine years, about three of them with the Mythics, and she met her husband at a tournament overseas; one imagines literal sparks flying as their steel swords clashed. She hands the weapons to her teammate McKenzie Karickhoff and returns to her car to collect more. Karickhoff, with curly red hair and delicate Renaissance-painting features, is by all accounts the “nice one.” She has a habit of leaning over to ask her opponents if they’re all right after she sends them crashing to the ground.
Karickhoff brings forth Knight’s haul to a folding table to be inspected. “The rattan needs to be wrapped,” a yellow-shirted man tells her, gesturing at the handle of an axe.
“She’s not gonna like that,” Karickhoff says, referring to Knight. She heads off to inform Knight, who stalks back moments later, gripping the offending axe in her right hand with tensed knuckles. Karickhoff follows. “Told you,” she says to the inspectors cheerfully.
Knight quickly extinguishes her annoyance. Her fight today is with the Nite Owls. Soon she is kneeling on the ground in the livestock pavilion, grumbling (“a weapon will pass for nine years, and then not”) as she wraps tape around the handle of the axe.
The rest of the Mythics drop their things in the same spot, close to where the San Jacinto Knights, a Houston-based men’s team, are sitting in a large ring. Whether for temperature control or aesthetics, several male fighters on other teams spend the day shirtless. One such man strolls around the livestock pavilion in his greaves and cuisses—calf and thigh armor, respectively—with his tattooed arms flexed at his sides. From the square arena come war cries and metal clanging against metal. Teams win a melee by knocking most of their opponents to the ground, and the men spare no effort. One competitor smashes another’s helmet with an axe over and over so hard that onlookers cringe.
Hannah Crespo (left) and Lueken preparing to armor up.
Photograph by Chad Wadsworth
A breastplate.
Photograph by Chad Wadsworth
Volunteers inspecting weapons before the tournament.
Photograph by Chad Wadsworth
A men’s team, the San Jacinto Knights, based in Houston.
Photograph by Chad Wadsworth
Knights deal with inflammation too.
Photograph by Chad Wadsworth
Chain mail and gauntlets.
Photograph by Chad Wadsworth
The men’s teams battling it out.
Photograph by Chad Wadsworth
Hannah Crespo (left) and Lueken preparing to armor up.
Photograph by Chad Wadsworth
A breastplate.
Photograph by Chad Wadsworth
Volunteers inspecting weapons before the tournament.
Photograph by Chad Wadsworth
A men’s team, the San Jacinto Knights, based in Houston.
Photograph by Chad Wadsworth
Knights deal with inflammation too.
Photograph by Chad Wadsworth
Chain mail and gauntlets.
Photograph by Chad Wadsworth
The men’s teams battling it out.
Photograph by Chad Wadsworth
The Mythics roost among their armor and weapons, trying to stay cool in the thin breeze provided by a large fan near the pavilion’s high ceiling. Their fight was originally scheduled for the afternoon but is bumped to later as the men’s fights go long, and still later when one man is taken away in an ambulance.
Kayla Scarponi, a 34-year-old Mythic in a slitted black dress, takes a seat on top of a big plastic container and pulls out a large fan. Scarponi moved to Dallas from Maine expressly to join the Mythics—she’d previously had to fight them, she says, and was sick of losing. She didn’t particularly enjoy or excel at sports growing up, but she loves buhurt. “I don’t have to put a ball in a hole. I can just bash.”
Because it can take some women an hour to armor up, they begin getting ready long before it’s time to fight. Tyrle McDaniel, a 46-year-old who previously handled claims for Geico and is now writing a romance novel, picks up a jacket-like piece of armor with big, scaled shoulder plates. In total, she says, the armor and accessories weigh one hundred pounds. When I briefly hold the piece, which will protect her torso, the veins on my forearms pop out from the effort.
A volunteer comes over to greet the Mythics. “My one request is just don’t kill them,” she says of the Nite Owls.
“No, no, we know!” says McDaniel.
Knight’s husband has arrived with their young son, Marcus, who alternates between handing the women electrolyte beverages and banging a sword against their armored legs. Knight says they’ve received some compelling incident reports from his school. “One classmate told him, ‘My mom’s gonna spank you,’ ” she says. “Marcus said, ‘My mom’s gonna chop your head off.’ ”
After the Mythics are in their armor, they continue to wait. The sun is beating down on the pavilion, and inside the armor, the heat is obscene. In the Mythics’ encampment, 28-year-old Katie Crosby, who had noted earlier that her face reddens easily, has achieved a tomato hue. A 29-year-old Mythic named Hannah Crespo sits perfectly still in a chair in her armor, her gauntleted hands in her lap and her eyes closed, conserving her energy.
The Mythics and the Nite Owls mid-combat.Photograph by Chad Wadsworth
When the women finally do fight, after such a long day of sweaty anticipation, the first of their battles is brief. The Mythics and their opponents run at each other like metal bears, and one by one the Nite Owls drop. The second bout ends in under a minute, after Crespo charges a Nite Owl, pushing her halfway across the arena and smashing her into the plywood railing. The audience issues a collective “ouch.”
The melee consists of three matches of three rounds each. The women take a break after the first match, collapsing into chairs as they pull off their helmets, their hair plastered to their red faces. Although they were short, the rounds are akin to all-out sprints in multiple weighted vests, and the heat has depleted the fighters further. Fortunately, they need to win only one more match to go to the international championships.
Their next victory is even swifter. After around thirty seconds, women are strewn across the dirt. The Mythics throw the last of the Nite Owls to the ground, then look at the carnage around them as if they, too, are shocked by the comical brevity of the bout. Then Karickhoff leans down to ask a fallen Nite Owl if she’s all right. In buhurt, at least, chivalry is alive.
This article originally appeared in the June 2026 issue of Texas Monthly with the headline “Sisters in Armor.” Subscribe today.
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