Star Wars: The Force Awakens Trailer - unanswered question

Watched the new The Force Awakens trailer and the main thing that stuck was me was what was the point of the T-shaped lightsaber...

I tried googling Sword forms to see if this was a part of any ancient swords and while there are jaggy guards they still don't look like this and their purpose was to help protect hands.

Here is an interesting page on sword forms.

EDIT: I've had a couple of responses including in the comments here about how this is just a hilt or guard like a normal sword would have or saying all the answers can be found by googling crossguard lightsaber.  So after further internet research heres what I've learned:

• If this is a guard to protect hands (which may be useful given that Luke and Anakin both lost their hands in lightsaber duels) then that crosspiece should either be light too (see this Techcrunch article) or has to be made of some material that can't be chopped through (see this piece in the Washington post)
• This is a rare design and we haven't seen before or have we?  There is some talk about one  being wielded by a Jedi called Roblio Darte in some Clone War comics but from reading the Wookiepedia article that one seems a slightly different design with another blade coming off at a 45 degree angle.
• The blades coming out a 90 degree angle to the sword still seems a bad idea to me more of a nuisance to the wielder than one who is being attacked.  As a defensive measure maybe you need a hilt made of some impenetrable material, as an offensive weapon those extra blades should be angled forward.
• I wonder if anyone can come up with an analogous traditional sword with a long 90 degree hilt with blades at the end of the guard not just spikes where the guard is used in attack.