Hi Sverre!
Good to hear that you enjoy sword fighting and Sweden!
In Sweden there are about 250 practitioners in total, divided on 22 clubs of various sizes. GHFS is without doubt the largest with about 90-100 paying members. Actually GHFSis one of the largest HEMA clubs in the world, alongside of Hammaborg, Ochs, Schola Gladiatoria and a few others. You can see some stats here:
www.hroarr.com/survey/worldwide/practitioners The club has existed for about six years and several of the early members are still in the club, including our head trainer. Ages in our club range from 16 to 55.
GHFS is a martial arts club and as such has no focus on other historical aspects like clothing or handicraft. We focus solely on the fighting techniques. We practice with modern equipment and use both steel and nylon simulators in training and sparring.
The majority wear modern protection like Lacrosse gloves, hockey neckprotection, arm guards for escrima, kick boxing or police riot gear, a cup and a fencing mask. However, in the beginner's class you need no gear what so ever. But, a mask is good to invest in fairly soon both to protect yourself, but more importantly so that your training partner can hit you properly.
As you can see from our schedule
www.ghfs.se/P%C3%A5g%C3%A5ng/tabid/57/Default.aspx we have beginner's classes on mondays and wednesdays and advanced classes, which you can participate in after you have done an oral and practical graduation test, on tuesdays and thursdays. We also have smaller groups for pugilism, military sabre and sword and buckler, and even a small study group for polearms. The advanced group also practices Ringen (wrestling) two months per year.
This compendium shows what you should know before taking the graduation test:
www.ghfs.se/Texter/Nyb%C3%B6rjarh%C3%A4fte/tabid/68/language/sv-SE/Default.aspx for the advanced group
Our teachers are very skilled and two of them have actually won the tournaments at Dijon. Our longsword training is based on Sigmund Ringeck, but many study other masters as well, like Joachim Meyer. And of course other smaller groups use other material, like Ms I.33, Paulus Hector Mair, Military sabre manuals etc.
Every year we arrange a big Hema event where about 130 people come to participate from the UK, the US, Germany, Austria, France, Denmark and other countries. During this event we see three days of interesting workshops and also an informal tournament. There are quite a few clips from Swordfish 2009 available on YouTube.
GHFS is probably the Hema group with the biggest presence on YouTube and we record a lot. Here are some links:
www.youtube.com/user/GothenburgHFSwww.youtube.com/user/Leondrianwww.youtube.com/user/taffy1975www.youtube.com/user/mika3logrenwww.youtube.com/user/NjurvarGood luck with both your internship and your sword practice!
