Question for my readers

Last year I taught "Lithuania: The Biggest Medieval Country Of Which You Might Not Have Heard" at Pennsic University. The link to the class handout is here (and it's also linked to the first post in this blog).

The deadline for getting courses listed in the Pennsic XXXVIII book is coming up FAST (a week from tomorrow, I think). Do you think I should teach this course again? Should I change the focus at all? I'm not sure that I have enough material to stretch into two separate one-hour classes, although I will try to work on that for Pennsic XXXIX in 2010.

Comments and suggestions welcome!

Margutis time!

Easter Sunday hasn't started yet where I live, but I'm sure the preparations have been going on for a while now. For many of us, the preparation involves coloring eggs.

A month ago, at Atlantia's Kingdom Arts & Sciences Festival, a woman was running a demonstration of making pysanky, or Ukranian Easter eggs. I had the opportunity to make one myself. I can't say I'm the world's greatest artist, but here's how mine turned out:

I enjoyed doing this pysanka, certainly. But how would it fit in with my Lithuanian persona?

Well, as you might suspect, pysanky are part of a lot of Eastern European cultures. The Lithuanians use the word margutis for this type of artwork; it doesn't sound much like pysanky, but there you have it. Lithuanian eggs tend to be a little more muted than their Ukrainian counterparts, with more earth tones, and different patterns too. Right after the Kingdom Arts & Sciences Festival, I found this example. I also found a page describing Lithuanian Easter customs. It's interesting to read through the customs and tease out the old Pagan traditions mingled in with the Christianity. The essay also explains why, for years, I could never find other people who did "egg fights" with hard-boiled eggs on Easter Sunday, the way my family did. It's a Lithuanian custom! My father must have gotten it from his Lithuanian-immigrant parents.

By searching around a bit, I found more examples of Lithuanian decorated eggs. You can probably find more, especially if you search on the word margutis. Finally, through the Web site of the Balzekas Museum of Lithuanian Culture in Chicago, I found an online tribute to Ramute Plioplys, a folk artist in the Lithuanian tradition.

Enjoy!

The Millennium Odyssey

I can't believe I haven't already mentioned that this year is the millennial year of Lithuania! Well, specifically, it's the 1000th anniversary of the first mention of Lithuania in a manuscript (the Quedlinburg Annals). Of course, the nation is commemorating the round number in typical fashion.

One thing I think is cool is the Millennium Odyssey -- the voyage of the yacht Ambersail around the world to visit "Lithuanian communities" on five continents. The ship arrived in Miami just two days ago. Sad to say, although Baltimore has a thriving Lithuanian American community, the Ambersail won't be sailing up the Chesapeake Bay to the Inner Harbor. It's bypassing Maryland and Washington, D.C., and going straight to New York. :-(

Ah, well, next month the annual Lithuanian festival will still take place in the Baltimore suburbs, and I'll have my fill of culture for another year.

Just a quick update

I've created a "syndicated feed" for this blog over at LiveJournal, where I have been active for many years. Mostly I'm doing this post as a test to make sure the feed is working.

If you're new to this blog, please feel free to check out the older entries and also my Pennsic 37 class handout.

Topics I would like to cover in the not-so-distant future include period Lithuanian documents and my upcoming adventures in the world of SCA tents.

Finding stuff in the "missing" book

Last weekend I purchased my second copy of "Women's Garb in Northern Europe, 450-1000 C.E.: Frisians, Angles, Franks, Balts, Vikings, and Finns" by Christina Krupp and Carolyn A. Priest-Dorman. It is #59 in the Compleat Anachronist publication series of the SCA. (To buy back issues of this fine quarterly publication yourself, go here.) I had bought my first copy of CA #15 from Poison Pen Press a few years back, but it's gotten lost somewhere, and I didn't have it in front of me when I taught my Pennsic course last summer.

I vaguely recalled that I'd noticed something wrong with the booklet the first time I read it, but I couldn't remember what it was until I read the section on Baltic garb again. It turns out that not all the sources mentioned in the Baltic garb section are actually listed in the bibliography in the back of the booklet. One of them was "Moora, 1932" and the other was "Kulikauskiene & Rimaniene, 1958, Abb. 567, reproduced in Ginteus."

Thanks to Worldcat.org, I think I've tracked down the former. It's a book called Die Vorzeit Estlands ("The Prehistory of Estonia") by H. Moora, published in Tartu, Estonia, by Akadeemiline Kooperatiiv. Fortunately for me, the Library of Congress has a copy, so I might actually get to see it someday.

I'm having more trouble with the second search. "Ginteus" doesn't even exist in Google. Through BookFinder.com I noticed a volume called Senoves Lietuviu Drabuziai Ir Ju Papuosalai: (I-XVI A.) ["Ancient Lithuanian Clothing and Ornaments: (I-XVI century)"] by R. Volkaite-Kulikauskiene, published by the Lietuvos Istorijos Institutas (Lithuanian Historical Institute) in 1997. Again, the Library of Congress has this and other works by this author. (If she's the same person as in the 1958 reference, then she's had quite a long career!)

I wonder if "Ginteus" is a typo for "Ginters," as in the bibliographical listing for Tracht und Schmuck in Birka und im Ostbaltischen Raum ("Costume and Jewelry in Birka and the East Baltic Area") by Valdemars Ginters (also at the Library of Congress).

I suppose I could e-mail the co-author of CA #59 for the identity of "Ginteus," although since it's been 17 years since the booklet was published, she probably doesn't have the answer at her fingertips.

To summarize, I'm really glad I got myself another copy of this CA issue, because it's very handy for getting some plausible female garb together. However, I have to remind myself that this booklet was published in 1992, just months after the Soviet Union fell apart and the Baltic republics got their full identity back. I'm sure that much new research has been done in the last 17 years, and it would be great to pull it together so that it could be of use in the SCA.

Persona Pentathlon ... someday?

Every year, Atlantia holds a Kingdom Arts & Sciences Festival, at which the finest artisans and performers of our fair lands gather to compete, network, or just show off their stuff. An annual competition for adults is the Persona Pentathlon, in which each entrant must display five entries pertaining to a single persona -- a tenth-century Viking, perhaps, or a 16th-century Elizabethan.

I would love to "evangelize" medieval Lithuania by choosing one time period in Lithuanian history and crafting five related entries, all representing things that a woman of that era would have done or known about. But what to do, what to do? My knowledge, so far, is more abstract than practical.

Scribal arts -- of the five major categories, this is the one I'm weakest in. I love books, just don't ask me to illustrate or bind them....
Costuming and needle arts -- I could certainly come up with a few costume components, but I would have to document them to Lithuania and/or the Baltic region quite precisely.
Pyrotechnica -- Not all of these would be applicable to Lithuania, but perhaps I could put together some jewelry and one of those headbands that some women wore over their veils.
Domestic arts and sciences -- I would have to do some research to figure out which "traditional" foods are really SCA-period (I'm sure that potato-laden dishes such as ceplinai and kugelis are NOT). Weaving is important to Lithuanian culture, of course, but I'm not very good at that.
Courtly arts -- if I could get my hands on kanklės or skuduciai (panpipes), I could try some Lithuanian tunes -- again, IF I could document them. (I don't think anyone wants to hear my solo voice.)

I certainly don't have my act together for this year's Persona Pentathlon, but I'm going to be looking at all the 2009 entries to see the amazing skills among Atlantia's populace. And I hope to do some networking. As I said in a previous entry, I want to develop a Lithuanian persona much more fully, but it strikes me that most of the stuff I've been doing and teaching has been based on tertiary sources at best (photos of European reenactors, Victorian-era drawings, books and Web sites that discuss "folk arts" without specifying their time period, etc.). I want to increase my authenticity -- well, as best I can without actually journeying to Lithuania, which is a bit out of my price range, sadly.

Featured entry of the day

Well, lookie here, see what's the featured article of the day over at Wikipedia -- the House of Gediminas! Now, I'm no stranger to this part of Lithuanian history, but for the average reader of the online encyclopedia, this must be pushing the limits of obscurity.

A quick read of the entry reveals one of the problems in getting people to take an interest in Lithuanian history: the names are long and complicated and don't have much to do with English, German, or the Romance languages (at least superficially). Gediminas, Skalmantas, Daumantas, Jaunutis, Mindaugas, Traidenis, Vaišvilkas, Algirdas, Kęstutis, Vytenis, Vytautas the Great, Vainius, Vykintas -- hoo boy, even my head starts spinning after a while, and I grew up in a town with a lot of people with non-Anglo-Saxon names.

Part of the problem for modern-day scholars is that, as this author writes, Lithuanians didn't really use surnames until the late 14th and early 15th centuries. Before then, men used single names that came from two root words: "much strength" or "great hope" or something like that. (My mundane surname seems to mean either "much patience" or "much endurance" -- I guess I'm descended from a guy who had a hard life.)

Someone else wrote an article on feminine names from the Gediminid line, but as you can see, there aren't too many attractive-sounding ones to choose from.

Some people of Lithuanian descent actually use some of these old names as their given names. When I was a kid, the electrician who worked on our house was named Gediminas -- no wonder we always called him "Gid"!

What I'm trying to accomplish as Lady Patricia of Trakai

In my five years of participation in the SCA, I've dabbled in a lot of different activities, some more so than others. I've made a few garments, I wove/braided/knitted several wire necklaces (in a technique some call trichinopoly), I've learned about the historical uses of knitting, I've brewed a few concoctions of varying quality, and I've tried to learn nallbinding and sprang. At the moment, I'm probably most active in instrumental music. (When I sing around a campfire, people tend to drift away to another campfire.)

But I have one overarching mission, one to which I alluded in my introductory post: I want to increase and spread the knowledge of Lithuanian history and culture within the SCA.

The method of "spreading" knowledge is obvious -- teaching classes at our SCA "universities" -- but what about increasing knowledge? As someone who is partly of Lithuanian heritage, I've been aware all my life that most Americans (from whose ranks the SCA draws much, though not all, of its membership) hardly know anything about Lithuania. During the Soviet era, it was one of the most closed regions of the USSR, and it was difficult if not impossible for Americans to get permission to visit the region unless they had relatives there. Fortunately, Lithuania regained its independence right around the time that Internet technologies exploded in the early 1990s, so suddenly I was learning about stuff I'd wondered about all my life.

Since its inception, the SCA has been mostly about Western European medieval culture -- it's what we all learned about as we were growing up, and it's the inspiration for countless fantasy novels and movies. However, as our modern society has grown more diverse and less Eurocentric, SCAdians are exploring all sorts of other cultures that interacted with Western Europe prior to 1600 (or 1650, depending on how you define "pre-17th-century").

For Eastern European countries and cultures, the umbrella group within the SCA is the Slavic Interest Group (SIG). SIG covers a huge swath of territory, from the Balkans and Poland to Kievan Rus to the central Asian steppes. I've been on the SIG e-mail list for a few years now, and I've found a few other Polish-Lithuanian enthusiasts -- from as far away as Australia (Lady Asfridhr of the Barony of Stormhold in the Kingdom of Lochac).

So far, I've learned enough about Lithuania to teach an hour-long "introductory" class (again, see the link in the first post in this blog). The warm reception I got for both classes (at Pennsic, it was SRO!) has convinced me that there is an interest in the topic -- at least, the title of the class gets people in the door to see what they've missed in all the other medieval history courses they've taken throughout their lives. But I feel as if I've only scratched the surface.

What do we mean by "Lithuania"? The incorporated borders of the modern-day nation? The farthest extent of the Grand Duchy, which stretched to the Black Sea? The ancient tribes who inhabited the Baltic coast -- the Letts, Semigallans, Livonians, Curonians, etc? Watch for my future posts on the subject.

Countdown to Twelfth Night

It takes quite a bit of work to get out the door and head to a major event like Kingdom Twelfth Night. You don't just jump into the car and drive off.

I've already accomplished some of the prep work: hand-washing my chemise, purchasing some finger foods to nibble on during the day (because our hosts are not offering lunch, only dinner), printing out some sheet music that I don't already have, and printing out the directions to the site in Virginia.

Tonight I will have to:

• press the parts of my chemise that will show when I'm wearing the dress, and probably press some of the cloth napkins
• check the silk dress to see if it needs touch-up pressing
• check feast gear to make sure it's all clean (sometimes it gets dusty)
• pack garb, feast gear, and musical instruments/supplies and get them out to the car TONIGHT because it's supposed to be rainy tomorrow
• make sure the perishable products are grouped together in the refrigerator so that I can grab them tomorrow morning.

Here is my packing list:

• the three pieces of my Cavalier outfit (jacket, shirt and chemise -- see previous post)
• the Cavalier hat (for indoors) and a felted wool hat (for possible rain outdoors)
• my wool cloak (needs some repairs, but it's what I have right now)
• pearl earrings and necklace; Opal medallion
• extra pair of shoes for dealing with the weather
• feast gear in its basket
• cameras (video and still)
• small basket (for carrying small items around the site)
• musical instruments and accoutrements
• small cooler with snacks and the rest of the Diet Peach Snapple in the back of the fridge
• directions to the site
• maybe the olive-oil lamp (but then I have to bring olive oil).

Quite a bit of stuff, huh? And this is only a day trip to an indoor site!

Cavalier outfit

I'd like to write a little bit about the outfit I'll be wearing for Kingdom Twelfth Night.

This dress was made in the Cavalier style, which actually existed in the early to mid-17th century (see this page). That makes it a bit post-period in terms of the SCA, which generally covers the sweep of human history prior to 1600 C.E. (In other words, the time span ends with the Elizabethan era, since England's Queen Elizabeth I died in 1603.) However, I wore this outfit to Kingdom Twelfth Night 2007 and I got no complaints, just lots of compliments. It's stunning enough that nobody seemed to get bent out of shape.

The jacket, chemise and skirt were hand-sewn by a woman who played in the SCA and other reenactment groups before giving up the historical stuff to go to law school. Sadly, I do not know her name. When she was preparing for law school, she passed along some of her outfits to Dame Brenna of Storvik, who sold them for her at an SCA event in northern Atlantia.

The jacket and skirt are made of rose-colored silk (silk noil, maybe?) and have gold-colored trim. The jacket uses hooks and eyes to stay closed; I attached some extra-large hooks and eyes to make sure the thing stays closed. The chemise is white cotton; the lace on the collar appears to be hand-made by somebody, but the lace on the cuffs seems to be of commercial provenance.

Mostly this outfit fits me amazingly well, considering that I never met its creator. The one small detail is that I can't button the jacket cuffs because my forearms are too fat, but I hope the large cuffs on the chemise disguise that. Perhaps I should get some fabric sizing to make the chemise cuffs a little stiffer.

To accessorize the outfit, I purchased a black Cavalier hat from Tall Toad Costumes and added a rose-colored feather. I also purchased a pearl necklace from a jewelry-maker at Kingdom Twelfth Night 2007; sorry, I cannot remember the name.

I'm looking forward to an enjoyable Twelfth Night this year, and I'll try to remember to ask Dame Brenna for the name of the costumer.