UK Edition
A Danish archer has released a video of himself shooting targets with a skill and speed that makes the Lord of the Rings' elf archers look like amateurs.
Lars Anderson claims to have become the fastest archer in the world today by studying historical descriptions of ancient war archery to re-discover their techniques.
In his latest video, which has been watched more than 4.5million times on YouTube in under 24 hours, he demonstrates how holding arrows in the firing hand and placing them on outside of the bow would have allowed archers to fire at speed and while running.
Thus freed from the constraints of the quiver, his tricks become increasingly incredible, culminating with the bowman leaping up to catch an arrow mid-air and firing it back at his target before his feet have even touched the ground.
It's the sort of archery only seen in Hollywood films, but the Danish archer insists the video is authentic and just the result of a lot of practice.
"Many people have accused me of being fake or have theories on how there's cheating involved. I've always found it fascinating how human it is, to want to disbelieve anything that goes against our world view – even when it's about something as relatively neutral as archery," he says.
"At one of our combat archery tournaments last year, I ended up in a one-on-one duel against a friend. Every time he shot an arrow at me, I'd shoot it out of the air with one of my own. After five arrows, he just gave up in good-natured disgust. Sure, it was showing off, but it was also a lot of fun!"
It is not the first time Lars' archery feats have become an internet hit. In 2012 he released a similar video which also gained a huge following.
But since then, he has increased his firing speed to three arrows in 0.6 seconds - faster than legendary fictional archer Legolas (played by Orlando Bloom in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings film trilogy).
So confident is he in his speed and accuracy, Lars finishes his latest demonstration with a heart-stopping stunt: shooting down an arrow as it hurtles towards him.
He succeeds in splitting it down the shaft.
As easy as he makes it look, none of these tricks should be tried at home. Lars admits he had reservations initially about showing the arrow splitting shot and stresses that months of training went into all of his stunts.
Instead, you can listen to Lars discuss how he got into archery in the podcast below: