My contribution; For Honor; Playing Hard

The radio was on in my bedroom and it was playing Q, a morning arts and music show on CBC 1.  The speaker said "...the SCA and re-enactors..." and very soon thereafter talked about his love for "German longsword."  Just like these words and phrases were normal parts of the English language  that many people would have no trouble understanding.


I said to my wife, "If this guy, a Canadian,  can use 'SCA' and 're-enactors' like this, it's largely because of you and me."

Other long-time participants in the SCA in Canada and especially in Ontario may think this unwarranted braggadocio, but I don't.

Fortunately the radio program had nothing to do with Nazis.  The person  being interviewed was Jason VandenBerghe, a Montrealer who designed the Ubisoft video game For Honor, which was released a couple of years ago. 

VandenBerge was on the air discussing "For Honor" because it is currently the subject of a documentary film,"Playing Hard." It sounds very good. The CBC interview is of interest to people who care about modern ideas of chivalry.

SCA amateur medievalist art from forty years ago

Nearly forty years ago, when artistic and craft information was much harder to find than today, serious-minded members of the Sociey for Creative Anachronism sometimes produced amazing works of art modeled after medieval exemplars.

This is one of them.

It is not a reproduction of a medieval document, but it does commemorate an event in the SCA by using artistic and calligraphic models.

Today more people are capable of doing comparable work.

Hijacked!

A recent article in the Public Medievalist makes me feel that someone just walked over my grave.

The author, Paul Sturtevant, has done us a service by giving a name -- "Schrödinger’s medievalism” -- to ambiguous phenomena that may or may not  be the product of racism.

While at the beach in Ocean City, Maryland he spotted an unfamiliar pseudo-Scandinavian flag, which he soon discovered was the "Vinland" flag, Vinland being the shortlived Viking settlement  in Newfoundland ( A.D.1000), and the flag a product of the goth metal scene.  The inventer of the flag was not an obvious racist  But the flag has come to mean more than its perhaps lighthearted origins, at least to some:

I was suddenly confronted with two equally likely possibilities:

1. on the one hand, the Vinnland flag waving at me could be yet-another appropriation of the medieval (or in this case, a medievalism) by white-supremacists in order to push their hateful agenda;
2. on the other hand stood the possibility that someone in the shop was not a neo-Nazi at all but simply a fan of Type O Negative Was it a racist dog whistle? Or was it simply a band flag?

Following the ADL’s advice of judging carefully in its context didn’t help either; the shop was an innocent-seeming place, full of flags and toys and kites and no obvious signs of white supremacy. On the other hand, one of the flags they flew outside was the “Thin Blue Line” flag. This flag was originally created to honor the sacrifices of police officers, but, you guessed it, the flag has subsequently been appropriated by those advocating that “Blue Lives Matter” in opposition of the Black Lives Matter movement.

So was this flag a white supremacist appropriation of the Middle Ages? I don’t know. And without more information about the person who chose and raised that flag, I can’t know.

That’s why I call it a Schrödinger’s Medievalism.

Sturtevant explains in more detail:

In the famous “Schrödinger’s cat” thought experiment, Erwin Schrödinger said(entirely theoretically)that because of quantum mechanics, if you put a cat in sealed box with a flask of poison and a radioactive trigger, you cannot tell what state the cat is in—whether it is alive or dead—without opening the box. So, without more information, the cat can, weirdly, be considered both alive and dead at the same time. 

  So, that Vinnland flag was a “Schrödinger’s medievalism.”  

To my mind, a Schrödinger’s medievalism is a piece of medieval culture found in the wild that you know has been appropriated as a symbol by right-wing nationalists or racists. But, that piece of culture also has a broader, potentially benign, meaning. You can’t tell which is it until you get more information—and sometimes doing so is impossible. So, sometimes you are left in the uncomfortable position of having to treat it as both benign and hostile at the same time. 

.

Sturtevant  gives an example of the toxic potential of this phenomenon, when he takes us back to Maryland:

Another example: I attended the Maryland Renaissance Festival this year, and in the crowd I noted a small group of four young people. They were all cosplaying, and all wearing replica amulets of Thor’s hammer...

For some white-nationalists, Thor is an icon of white Aryan warrior masculinity. But Marvel’s Thor comic books and films have been reimagining the Norse mythological tradition in a way that is more inclusive than ever. And notably, three of the four cosplayers I saw were people of color. For them, it seemed that Viking religion was simply cool, and the amulets were part of a fun costume.

White supremacists try to appropriate these sort of symbols precisely for this reason: it’s easy for them to hide in plain sight, allowing them to slip under our radar. And even more insidiously, when it comes to light that these are sometimes used as symbols of hate, it can make white supremacists’ numbers seem greater than they really are.

The reference  to the cosplayers hits close to home for me, even though I'm not young, noticeably racist, or a person of color.  By today's definition I can be seen as a cosplayer, since I have been dressing up and re-enacting the Middle Ages for nearly 50 years.  Now I and my non-racist fellow members of the SCA, generally seen as harmless eccentrics, are in severe danger of being reclassified as harmful eccentrics.  Take a look at some of the alt-right demonstrators last summer and you will see a fair number of them are wearing leather armor and round shields and various ambiguous symbols.  How many non-SCA people will be able to distinguish these characters from the SCA.

As Sturtevant says:

Why we can't have nice things.

There's more to the article.  Read it.

Modern ideas of Chivalry

Let's start out the New Year with a story about modern ideas of chivalry.  I found a 15-year-old account of the SCA's Pennsic War lurking on my hard drive while I was looking for something else.  It was a year when a good number of us fighters were revisiting the medieval sources for chivalry (meaning both fighting and non-fighting aspects)  with the desire to see the relevance of the medieval ideas and practices to a bunch of fun-loving reenactors.  Lots of special events touching on this took place that year,

One of the key medieval characteristics of chivalry is the conviction that present-day knights (or men-at-arms) are not living up to the standards of the Good Old Days.  Several modern scholars have pointed out the strong reformist strain in medieval treatises.

At the Pennsic War in question, there was one notable incident that showed the disagreements about the nature of chivalry could easily pop up.  A rather large group of fighters were in one of the camps working on practice exercises based on 14th-century techniques.  No doubt they felt rather virtuous; I did. (Yes, I was one of them.) Most SCA fighting is based on no medieval precedents. Here we were doing something provably medieval!

Then we were called out.  Here's what I wrote at the time:

A male inhabitant of the camp rather self-righteously informed us that all us “gentlemen practicing a martial art” had ignored a lady struggling to put up pavilion walls the previous day.    After our apologies and his departure there was a lot of speculation about whether this had actually happened or how much we were at fault, since none of us had noticed said lady.    I discussed this with lots of people over the next few days, and even wondered rather maliciously if this should be a topic for the chivalry roundtable on the upcoming Monday, instead of the proposed questions.

A victory for medieval re-enactment:  we re-created the lack of sympathy between fighters and non-fighters.  At least we got close.  And everybody got to feel virtuous and that the other guy just didn't get it.

Image:  Damsel in distress.  Did the knight carry her luggage to his camp afterwards?

Be proud, heralds!

Or maybe this is just a bit over the top.

I am translating a fifteenth-century set of treatises by a man who went under the title Sicily Herald.  He was big on the historic foundations of heraldry and armory.  This morning I was looking at his account of the history of heraldry and read this:

Concerning the seven ages of the world in which are comprised the commencement, the middle and the end of the noble office of arms,

Don't blush!

A welcome tribute at Pennsic War 46

If you are not interested in the Society for Creative Anachronism, skip this.

I used to be relatively famous in the SCA for being one of the very few people  who had attended all of the yearly Pennsic wars, and for having fought in all the major battles.  Well, my health has prevented me from doing this for the past two years.  This year, somebody did something about it.  My daughter Eanor's husband, who goes  by the medieval name Haroun, decided to host a deed of arms in my honor early in this Pennsic war.  (If you don't know what a deed of arms is, I've got several relevant books on them for sale.)

I had already decided not to be miserable and envious of my friends having a good time, and I had succeded, pretty much, but this deed of arms and the efforts of Eanor and Haroun sure made it easier. One feature of deeds of arms in the SCA is that there is usually a book in which participants record their thoughts about the event, the hosts, etc. For this deed there was a blue-bound book
The fighters who turned out, filled with respectful, eloquent, even philosophical messages.
I was truly touched.
I was also impressed by how well-spoken and thoughtful these people were, remembering that their distinguishing characteristic is that they like to hit their friends with wooden swords while wearing funny clothes.
One person who I would have liked to have seen was Bill Colbert (William de Montegilt), who is one of the most senior members of the SCA, noted also for his long service in unglamorous jobs. I respect William because he joined very early on in the East Kingdom. He was -- like many back then -- an unlikely warrior, one who you might think would not be able to take the punishment. But he's still with us, more than 40 years on.
Pictures to follow.

My advice to SCA members on service

When I was asked to advise people at Winter War on service, I turned to Geoffroi de Charny's Book of Chivalry.

SCA -- The Dream

An amazing evocation of the SCA at its best.

Kent State, Northwoods, and the SCA

This day is the anniversary of the Kent State University shootings, where the Ohio National Guard, faced with unruly demonstrators against the Vietnam War, shot several of them including people who were not part of the demonstration. I was in university at the time in the United States and opposition to the war was pretty high. This however got many people who had not actively protested the war very angry. The Kent State demonstrations had been a reaction to the invasion of Cambodia, a major expansion of the war that Richard Nixon had promised to wind down when he was elected. The invasion of Cambodia and the shootings at Kent State and also at Jsckson State University in Mississippi got me and thousands of others to take part in antiwar marches who had never done so before.

Two days before the shootings, and a week before the marches against the Kent State killings, I had taken part in the first tournament held by the SCA in East Lansing Michigan. Lke the first SCA tournament four years earlier, it was a great success that inspired us to do more. As a result our Michigan State University – based group became the barony of Northwoods, part of the Middle Kingdom, which was headquartered in the Chicago area." NorthWoods for a good while was the largest and most dynamic SCA group between the two coasts. I have often wondered if we had scheduled our tournament on May 9 instead of May 2,1970, whether we would have had the heart or the interest in putting on Northwoods' oh so successful first SCA tournament? And if not, what would the history of the SCA have looked like?

Longsword on the New York Times site

This video link will probably disappear sooner rather than later but in the meantime it's an interesting look at one variety of HEMA (Historical European Martial Arts).  These people are inspired by the techniques of the late medieval German masters, but though they strive for historical authenticity in their moves they are not interested in other kinds historical re-enactment or re-creation.  No "thees and thous," as one of them puts it.  (But note that there is one guy on the sidelines who seems to be wearing some kind of medieval clothing and maybe a coronet.)

There is a wide variety of martial arts out there these days, different organizations pursuing different goals.  This may lead to the Balkanization of a field of activity once completely dominated by the Society for Creative Anachronism.

An accomplishment?

People who know me through the SCA can probably guess at the mixture of emotions I experienced upon discovering this site, which seems to be a reader mistaking something I wrote for the SCA "in persona" for an actual 12th century treatise.

A human kaleidoscope

People who wish to introduce medieval dancing into the SCA have a real problem – almost all of our documentation for dances done in the medieval period actually come from late in the Renaissance. Some people who want to dance often use other styles as inspiration, in particular in English country dancing. Once you get past the anachronism here, there's a lot of fun to be had doing known country dances or choreographing new ones.

One member of the SCA, known in it as James Blackcloak has created several new country dance inspired choreographies. Some of them are on YouTube. For your enjoyment, I direct you to this one, entitled St. Paul's Cathedral:

Living your ideals

In light of a conversation I had earlier today,

something that other people have noticed

occured to me : a lot of the problems of the SCA derive from the fact that it is trying to re-create not reality but an ideal creation. Take it a step further. In a sense an SCA member is on the same level of reality not of Count Roland in Charlemagne's time – a real human being – but Roland of the song of Roland. Does this make sense? Roland of the Song of Roland was an attempt to portray an ideal knight. An SCA knight is an attempt to portray an ideal knight. Neither poets nor re-creationists can manage that trick though. Once you start trying to fill in the details the ideal figure becomes less and less believable.

My low level of blogging comes from the fact that I have moved again. I am now in Windsor Ontario.

Laying down my arms

Some of you know that I have long been a member of the SCA -- for about as long as I have been studying the real Middle Ages, 40 years and more. One of the main activities I took part it was fighting in the lists and on the  mock battlefield. I loved fighting, and once upon a time I was pretty good, back in the pioneering days of the sport.  I have been doing it a lot less recently because of health problems and the reduced energy of older age, which combined to make me less enthusiastic about being hit with sticks by large, unsympathetic men.  I just lacked  the faith that I would bounce back from an injury.

This week I found I have another health problem -- blood clots in both lungs. I was actually admitted to hospital where I was started on a course of anticoagulants, some of which I may be on for the rest of my life. So that is it for being hit, at least on purpose, by large unsympathetic men (not to mention the women).

Things could be worse. I was the least ill person in the crucial care unit of my hospital, where I was stuck because there were no beds in ordinary wards. At those times that I wasn't tied down too much by wires and IV tubes I could get around perfectly well, which is more than can be said about everybody else.

Fighting in the woods

I am there dodging swords.  Thanks again to Kyle Andrews.

Jack Vance's hadaul, done SCA style as "Mordain's Rings"

A little medievalesque fun on my back field.  Thanks to Kyle Andrews.

Steve Muhlberger on the Combat of the Thirty -- a Chivalry Today podcast

Earlier this summer Scott Farrell of Chivalry Today interviewed me on the Combat of the Thirty against Thirty of 1351 and the contemporary re-enactments by members of the SCA at its Pennsic War.

Here is that interview.

This year I did not take part, but I did get the T-shirt. Really.

More from Gulf War XX -- with soundtrack

https://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=518491293926#!/video/video.php?v=518491293926

Notice no snow.

More medieval re-creation: Kingdom of Calontir War College 2011

Gulf Wars XX