I hope all who read this are enjoying the new year, despite any upsetting mundane news. Each January is like a shiny new penny before it accumulates all the scratches from circulation.
As I said in my last post, I want to spend this year -- in which the SCA will celebrate the 60th anniversary of its founding -- documenting exactly what I do within the context of the Society, both in terms of arts & sciences and of service. My first idea was to make weekly posts, but when I told this to one of my friends, she said that might prove to be too much of a burden. So ... twice a month? We'll see how that turns out. If I stick to that schedule, that will make the most posts on this blog since 2009.
So, here we go.
Service as chronicler: The Drekkar, Storvik's newsletter, is due out on the 5th of each month. So I'd better finish up the January issue. I've got all the materials for it. At some point I will make a special memorial issue for Baroness Gracie. But I also need to earn some freelance money to keep my head above water.
Service in heraldry: I need to recruit some teachers for the Tri-Kingdom University session that is rapidly approaching. 😱
Musical arts: Dance practice resumes tonight after a couple of weeks off for the holidays. Laydes Fayre continues to rehearse for two upcoming events, one at the Lochmere Midwinter Revel on the last day of this month and another at Kingdom Arts & Sciences Festival (KASF) in March. The Laydes primarily sing, of course, but some of us play musical instruments, so we're rehearsing an instrumental cantiga for the Lochmere revel. I play soprano recorder semi-competently; recently I was given a used alto recorder, so I should try to learn that too. But someone else has already claimed the alto recorder part for this cantiga, so I'll play soprano melody. No big deal. It's a simple piece.
Tangible arts: I have warped my inkle loom for a second Baltic pick-up band. (Woven band, NOT musical band!) One of these days I'll have to write an entire post about Baltic pick-up weaving, but this is not the time for it. I am also planning what to wear to Highland Hearthglow later this month. Some alterations are in order, and maybe one new thing, but I don't have time to create an entirely new outfit from the inner layers out.
I've been busy with non-SCA things for a couple of months, but of course "my medieval life" is never far from my mind. Let me summarize things here on Thanksgiving Day.
First of all, service. A few months ago, I took over the role of baronial chronicler. The previous chronicler had been doing the job for seven or eight years. Guess I'm stuck with it for a while. 😃 It's really not that difficult for someone who has been writing and editing for a long, long time. The two hardest things are (a) remembering to get going on the next issue and (b) making the notes of the last baronial business meeting sound coherent.
My other piece of general service is my role as Sea Tyger Pursuivant -- the "heraldic education deputy" for the College of Heralds and Scribes of Atlantia. (I don't do the scribal education part, though.) My task over the next couple of weeks is to contact some people and convince them to teach heraldry classes at the next University of Atlantia session, which is completely online. That session also the weekend after a virtual Known World Heralds and Scribes Symposium; I guess we'll be having those every winter now, because not everyone can get to the summer sessions in person.
And now for A&S...
I am still a member of Laydes Fayre and enjoying it. At one of our rehearsals in September, we held a mini-shower for a member who was expecting a baby. She gave birth, right on her due date, to a healthy baby boy named Declan. We'll also have a cookie exchange at our December rehearsal.
Several of us Laydes who also play instruments have formed an ad hoc mini-consort to perform at an upcoming event called Highland Hearthglow. The Barony of Highland Foorde (the whole northwestern region of Maryland) is holding a cozy day-long banquet event at a lodge in Thurmont that is usually affordable to the wedding-industrial complex. It sounds very posh in a 14th-century, High Middle Ages sort of way. Our mini-consort will be performing several pieces that are NOT dance music. I am no expert, but in general these pieces are slower and easier to play than most of the dance music of the era. You just have to watch out for a few weird bits like occasional irregularities in the time signatures. I think we will sound great together. (Incidentally, I'm playing the soprano recorder. No way do I know enough ukulele for this. I've really put the uke on the back burner with all my mundane work lately. I should really get back into it.)
(Also, the whole Laydes Fayre group will perform at both Hearthglow and Lochmere's Midwinter's Revel. One of the pieces we're rehearsing is called "Ave Maris Stella," which I believe means "Hail the Star of the Sea.")
Of course I am still a member of Three Left Feet. We still rehearse on Monday nights during Storvik fighter practice. I went to a couple of dances at Pennsic 51 (since I helped publicize them, after all). Pennsic wasn't even my biggest dance event of the year; that would be the Known World Music and Dance Symposium, held just outside Indianapolis at the fairgrounds where the SCA 50-Year event took place in 2016. It was a long drive, but I'm glad I went.
With all this musical stuff going on, it's not surprising that I haven't done other A&S stuff lately. At least I've finally hit a holiday lull in my mundane work, so I can pick up a needle and thread again. I have some mending projects to do and a linen chemise that I started sewing two years ago. Plus, I would like to make at least one totally new dress. To that end, I picked up a bin full of really nice fabric -- mostly linen and wool -- from the estate of the late Dame Brenna, who was quite the fabric hoarder in her lifetime. My non-SCA partner is annoyed that I acquired a bunch of fabric when I don't have much storage space, so I'll have to figure out some place to put my new stash until it gets sewn. I'm thankful that I received a copy of The Medieval Tailor's Assistant (2nd edition) for my most recent birthday; it will certainly help with all that sewing!
One final thing I am doing: I am knitting myself a pair of socks. Nothing special or SCA-accurate. Just a pair of socks, because I have not knitted socks in several years.
I apologize for not having kept up with this blog. I have not given up the SCA. Since the last entry here, I've been to a few local events and have regularly attended the Three Left Feet dance practice on Monday nights. (Three Left Feet is not, strictly speaking, an SCA dance troupe, but we share space with the ongoing Storvik fighter practices.) For the past year or so, I've been singing with Laydes Fayre, an interbaronial all-women group directed by the talented Mistress Arianna Morgan of Lochmere.
Never fear, I haven't given up on heraldry! I am the Sea Tyger Pursuivant, in charge of rounding up people to teach heraldry classes. (Of course, I totally forgot to register for the most recent University of Atlantia session a couple of weeks ago, so I couldn't take any of these classes. Ah, well...)
I haven't been doing much A&S stuff because I have been undergoing a lot of upheavals in my life, mostly related to my finances (my health is fine). Someday I will make myself some new garb, but this is not the time for that.
That was a day!! My Kingdom of Atlantia hosted a HUGE Virtual University on February 13th!! Our Virtual Universities have grown so big that we have to have seven class sessions, not just six, to accommodate them all.
I taught "Your First SCA War" for the first time in 10 years. The 2011 version happened in person, of course, so I just brought to the classroom a large plastic bin full of things related to Pennsic: the program book, copies of the Pennsic Independent, event medallions, and other artifacts of "home." This time around, I figured that I could show some photos of Pennsic without worrying about whether the classroom was equipped with a digital projector for PowerPoint slides (which isn't a very medieval thing to do anyhow!).
Unfortunately, I spent so much time looking up my photos (not all of which are online or otherwise organized) that I didn't get to embed them in a PowerPoint presentation. No biggie, I thought, I would just share them straight on my screen. But Zoom didn't like what I was doing, and at some points I was just showing a blank screen. Oops! Twenty-first-century problems, indeed. So I just went back to teaching in front of the live camera. I think my 30 or so students were pretty well engaged anyway. I fell a bit behind in terms of time, but I made sure everyone got the handout (updated from the decade-old version) afterward.
Even though the SCA's ban on in-person events is scheduled to expire at the end of May, the June 12 session of the University of Atlantia will be held virtually -- and concurrently with the (also virtual) Known World Sciences Symposium, which originally was supposed to take place in one of the western Kingdoms.
One of the disadvantages of updating this blog so infrequently is that I need to pack a lot of information into each post. After all, despite the surging pandemic, the virtual SCA world, and especially my Kingdom of Atlantia, is still going strong.
Twelfth Night
The weekend of January 9th was Kingdom Twelfth Night, which was the first one I've "attended" (for some value of "attendance") since 2014, when my barony, Storvik, hosted the event. I got out of bed and dressed in time to see a wonderful ceremony in which one of my friends, Mistress Teleri Barod, took another of my friends, Lady Sonya Flicker, as her apprentice. Afterward they had a nice Zoom chat with us guests, including some I haven't seen online much since the pandemic lockdown began.
Their Royal Majesties, Anton and Luned, held morning and evening courts. At the former, They awarded supporters in the shape of a narwhal to 50 gentles who have been helping to keep the Kingdom afloat during these plague times. At the latter, They gave out a number of awards and recognized a new Laurel.
My partner (he's not in the SCA) made some tapas-style dishes for dinner, which was offline. (Yes, it might have been nice to figure out a way to dine "together" via Zoom, but who wants to watch other people chewing?) Finally, we had an evening ball via Zoom, which was not recorded, so we could truly "dance like no one is watching."
I wore garb all day so I would feel as if I actually was attending the event. With a nod to the overall Spanish theme of the event, which features lots of sideless surcoats for women, here's what I chose to wear:
Mistress Teleri bequeathed the wool surcoat to me some years ago. I should lengthen it, because I'm a few inches taller than she is, but I haven't yet found the right fabric to complement the existing garment.
On top of my head in that picture is a frilled fillet cap (styled as in the Manesse Codex) that I created after taking a class on the subject at last September's Virtual University of Atlantia. I made it out of an old (and quite softened) cotton bedsheet, so I applied quite a bit of spray starch to the final product. I fully intend to make another one out of linen.
By the way, I took the surcoat off when it came time to dance.
University of Atlantia
Speaking of Virtual University ... we have another session coming up on Saturday the 13th. Once again, SO many people submitted class proposals that this session will have seven class periods instead of six. Atlantians love teaching and learning!
This time around I'll be teaching "Your First SCA War." I taught this class a decade ago, but I will update information as necessary and I will also stress that I have no inside knowledge of how the current pandemic will change large SCA events in future months or years or whenever we can have them again.
Despite my last post, I have not spent the past few months in sackcloth and ashes. Yes, we are still in the novel coronavirus pandemic. No, we will not have any in-person SCA events until the end of January 2021 at the earliest. However, I am plugging along.
Since I've been self-employed at home for the past decade, I am quite used to the concept of spending many hours alone at my desk. However, I "get out" quite a bit, thanks to Zoom (and the occasional Google Hangout or Facebook Live). Pretty much all my social outlets -- not just the SCA, but also my church, my professional organizations, and my Toastmasters club -- have moved online. I can "go out" in the evening and not worry about driving in the rain or catching the Metro train home.
If Virtual Atlantia had seams, it would be exploding at them. Check out the Activity Calendar for starters. Is that calendar packed or what? Not all the activities shown there are from Atlantia -- a few are from other Kingdoms. And some baronies don't always put their own activities in the Kingdom's calendar, so there are even more online goings-on than Virtual Atlantia would have you know.
Plus, so many online classes! Early in the pandemic I took several classes at an online university in the Kingdom of Atenveldt, mundanely Arizona. In our Kingdom we had two virtual University of Atlantia sessions, one in June and one in September. At the former, I taught a "Medieval Lithuania" class via Zoom -- and I had attendees from six Kingdoms! Two from as far away as Lochac (Australia)! In September I didn't teach anything, but I learned that my June effort had earned me a "Masters of SCA Studies" degree from the University. (Totally unaccredited from a mundane standpoint, but still a nice feather in my cap for all the work I've put in since 2004.)
Thanks to Zoom, I also had the chance to attend some classes at the Known World Heraldic and Scribal Symposium (KWHSS). This was only the second KWHSS I've been able to attend -- the first was the one that took place in Atlantia's Barony of Sacred Stone in 2011. For me, KWHSS involves expensive travel and hotel arrangements. This year the symposium would have been in Lochac, specifically the Barony of Stormhold, and there was no way I could have afforded that kind of trip. But thanks to the Web, I could even hear the voice of a Stormhold friend, Mistress ffride, with whom I've been corresponding for years.
Their Majesties have been recording nearly weekly messages to the Atlantian populace, and they have also started holding virtual courts to hand out actual awards. This past weekend, They traveled all the way up here to Storvik. Our barony rented a tiny live-theater space in downtown Silver Spring, and the only people permitted to attend Their Majesties and Their Excellencies in person were the herald (Duke Ragnarr) and a couple of tech-crew members. Two poignant moments took place. One was the tribute that Baron Celric and Baroness Ilania paid to the late Baron Rorik, in the presence of Rorik's faithful companion, Fred the goose.
In the other poignant moment, Their Majesties called Duke Ragnarr in front of them to present him with his long-delayed Award of Arms (AoA) scroll from way back when, before he was a Knight or a King or a Duke. Their Majesties pointed out that Ragnarr was always more concerned about other people getting their AoA scrolls than getting his own. What made this moment especially poignant was that the Royals who awarded him his Arms in 1993, Kane and Muirgen, were killed in a car accident a few years later.
These virtual courts are the only ones we're likely to see for a while still. Official SCA events in North America are banned through the end of January 2021, as the pandemic continues to rage. We didn't have Pennsic this year. Atlantia is not having War of the Wings this week.
This is the "New Normal," as opposed to the "Before Times" (I am not the only person using this terminology).
Some people don't like participating in online SCA classes and courts. I get that. I have a Toastmasters friend who spends so much time in videoconferences while working from home that she just cannot bear to sit through another 90 minutes of a club meeting in the evening. That's understandable.
I'm just glad that we Atlantians have some sort of online presence for those people who say, "Hey, I was thinking of getting involved in the SCA once the pandemic is over," or who are curious, or who are super-interested in online learning. We may even try some court video recording after the pandemic, so that people who have a hard time joining us in person because of health issues can still see what's going on. It may seem odd at first, but no more so than internet communications seemed to SCAdians of 20 or 25 years ago.
There's a reason why I haven't been to an SCA event since February 8, when I attended Bright Hills Baronial Birthday. One of the members of my household was awarded the Pearl, which is the Grant of Arms-level award for arts and sciences in Atlantia, so I wanted to be there (plus, our outgoing submissions herald received the Golden Dolphin award -- with the late Pedro's medallion).
My attitude toward the SCA hasn't changed. But the world has, with this COVID-19 pandemic we're currently experiencing.
It was if society packed up their toys and went home around mid-March. SCA events left and right were canceled. One minute the staff of Gulf Wars XXIX in the Kingdom of Gleann Abhann (southern Mississippi) said that the event was still on, and people should use hand sanitizer; the next minute it was canceled, even though people were starting to arrive on site and many more people were en route.
Overnight, it seemed, most of the rest of the March events on Atlantia's schedule were postponed or canceled, followed by virtually all of the April events.
Except Coronation. But how could Coronation go on if gatherings of more than 10 people were strictly prohibited? The outgoing King is a lawyer and, as an officer of the court (as, I think, all members of the bar are), he can't be found disobeying the law.
So yesterday we had a Virtual Coronation, live-streamed on YouTube from the back yard of the incoming King and Queen:
The woman who was elevated to Laurel was supposed to have been elevated at Gulf Wars (but see above). The outgoing Majesties wanted to make sure she received her due recognition before she and her husband moved out of Kingdom for mundane reasons and she had to make a whole new set of acquaintances. There were also a few other pieces of business that were supposed to have been transacted during March.
As you can see, it was a nice enough day in North Carolina that the "event" could be held outside. A woman in Storvik, Dame Emma West, made the beautiful silk banners hanging on either side of the tent.
So, now the next big Kingdom events are supposed to be Spring Crown Tourney and Ruby Joust, both in May. However, both are scheduled to take place in Virginia, where the stay-at-home order does not expire until June 10. The new King and Queen did not announce anything about these events, particularly Crown, yesterday. Probably they are working behind the scenes, and communicating with the SCA Board of Directors, to figure out how to handle the situation.
I haven't surveyed all of the SCA kingdoms -- there are 19 of them besides Atlantia -- but I do know that the East Kingdom has postponed both Coronation and Crown and combined them with another big East Kingdom event on Memorial Day weekend. That won't quite work for us, because our Memorial Day weekend event, Ruby Joust, is still technically prohibited in Virginia. I don't think the Kingdom of Aethelmearc has yet postponed its Spring Crown Tourney, which is supposed to be held the same day as ours (first Saturday in May). I am less familiar with other kingdoms.
So far, Pennsic 49 is still a go. The Mayor of Pennsic 49 decided to nip rumors in the bud by putting out an emphatic statement that Pennsic 49 will be held unless HE says it is canceled (link goes to a PDF). I suspect that the Pennsic executive staff uses the annual Aethelmearc War Practice event (held the weekend before Memorial Day weekend) as its big planning meeting, because the Mayor said the meeting would be held virtually if War Practice has been canceled in person. (Update even as I continue to write this: Today the Sylvan Kingdom announced that Aethelmearc War Practice has been canceled.)
I don't want to start any rumors, and I do NOT speak for the Pennsic staff, but I can't help thinking that the go/no-go decision needs to be made no later than late May. At least the decision *by* the Pennsic staff (obviously, if the state government shuts down fairs and festivals, it's not the choice of the Pennsic staff). The deadline for paid, online pre-registration for Pennsic 49 falls on June 16, and that is also the deadline for refunds. Yet some other SCA branches have offered refunds after the cancellation of their events (Pennsic is a different beast altogether, though, because of its sheer size -- it's kind of a partnership between the SCA and Cooper's Lake Campground). I don't think the Coopers want to give back huge amounts of refunds, and I really don't think people will be happy if they can't get refunds from a canceled Pennsic. So ... we shall see.
Anyhow. Back to my own Kingdom of Atlantia.
Just since this crisis began, Duchess Adelhait and the Kingdom Web Minister have put together a page called Virtual Atlantia, a central location where online gatherings and classes can be posted. People can even get University of Atlantia credit for teaching or attending classes!
One of the first online Kingdom-wide happenings was a Saturday afternoon in which the participants in a Zoom meeting started to read aloud The Decameron by Boccaccio. Reading aloud a book of stories "told" by people stuck on an island during a huge plague -- what a medieval thing to do! There were about 15 or 16 of us, including a few bardic Laurels, and we managed to get through the introduction and all ten of the stories from Day One in about three hours. It was enjoyable, but I have no idea when we will take up Day Two.
I got frustrated with trying to post the PDF of the handout, so I just did a cut-and-paste into Blogger and made a page. Then I had trouble displaying the handout page on my main blog page, so that's why I'm creating this post.
Grrrr.... Is it just me or is Blogger really that much clunkier than Wordpress.com, which I use for my non-SCA blog?
I may try a new layout/design for this blog in the near future. This template is the closest thing to "something Lithuanian" that I could find originally, but it seems quite dated. If you return to this site after an absence and it looks radically different, please don't freak out.
