Sailor Saturn, the sailor soldier of ruin and birth, carries the distinctive bladed weapon that the characters refer to as the Silence Glaive.  The weapon has become part of her iconography, and most canonical images of Sailor Saturn show it, too.  The Silence Glaive, according to the anime and manga sources, contains enough power to destroy a planet.  When Sailor Saturn brings down her Silence Glaive in a certain way, she can unleash her world-destroying powers.  We know now what the power of her weapon can do, but some fans have wondered about its name.  What is a glaive?  Why does it have the name Silence Glaive?  Should we really be calling the weapon the Silence Grave, instead?  This article attempts to provide satisfactory answers to those questions.

     What is a glaive?  Dictionary.com¹ cites two different dictionaries that define the term.  According to one of those dictionaries, a glaive is “A sword, especially a broadsword.”  Another dictionary defines the term as “A weapon formerly used, consisting of a large blade fixed on the end of a pole, whose edge was on the outside curve; also, a light lance with a long sharp-pointed head.”  That same dictionary also states that a glaive is “A sword; -- used poetically and loosely.”  The term evidently refers to a specific weapon, and it refers poetically or generically to a sword.  A certain source that describes weapons, fencing, and fighting methods states that a glaive is a “Polearm fitted with a long, single-edged cutting blade, originating from the scythe (having its blade turned 90 degrees)”².  Medieval soldiers apparently used the weapon quite often.  The foot soldiers were usually peasants who fought along with their lords³.  It should not be difficult to see the connection between the weapons that the peasants used in war and the objects they used for farming.  People long ago probably modified farming instruments into weapons.

     What does that medieval weapon have to do with Sailor Saturn and the Silence Glaive?  We should notice that her weapon looks like a medieval glaive that has a scythe blade attached to it.  Furthermore, some of the characters in the Bishjo Senshi Sr Mn continuities use the epithet Scythe of Silence ( Chinmoku no Kama) to refer to Sailor Saturn’s weapon⁴.  In the manga, the katakana characters that represent the name Silence Glaive ( Sairensu Gureibu) appear over the kanji Chinmoku no Kama (Scythe of Silence).  The Japanese use the katakana characters gureibu to approximate the terms grave and glaive.  Although Sailor Saturn’s powers have to do with death and destruction (those terms suggest the idea of graves), it is reasonable to say that we should not be calling her weapon the Silence Grave.  The kanji kama usually means scythe⁵, so the glaive is more expedient than the grave in this case because of the weapon looks like a combination between a glaive and a scythe.  (People have used glaives and scythes as weapons.  According to a certain source, the glaive originates from the scythe.)  Furthermore, Sailor Saturn performs a maneuver named Silence Glaive Surprise, not Silence Grave Surprise.  The reason we use the name Silence Glaive Surprise is that the katakana characters that represent the name ( Sairensu Gureibu Sapuraizu) also appear above the kanji combination chinmoku kama kish⁶.  That combination contains the kama kanji.

     Sailor Saturn’s association with silence derives from the planet Saturn’s astrological connections with gloominess and taciturnity (habitual silence).  (The term saturnine, which derives from the name Saturnus, means taciturn or melancholy⁷.)  Her association with the scythe derives from the mythological scythe that the Grecian Cronus and the Roman Saturn wielded⁸.  (The Grim Reaper, whose image evidently derives from those two deities, carried a scythe and personified death.)  The Greek poet Hesiod composed the poem The Theogony, which contains the story of how Cronus castrated his father Uranus.  Hesiod used the term drepanon () in his poem to refer to the scythe⁹.  That Greek term can also refer to a curved sword or a pruning-knife¹⁰.  Incidentally, some English writers use the term glaive loosely or poetically to refer to a sword.  Those two terms apparently can have similar meanings.