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.

Back to the Source -- A documentary on Historical European Martial Arts

Whatever you think of the subject matter -- the re-creation of late medieval and early modern martial arts starting with the surviving treatises from the period -- Back to the Source is quite an amazingly good documentary.

I have enough experience of the earliest SCA and its later evolution to recognize the attractive glow around people who are inventing something from early exemplars and creating a dream -- and creating a community in which the pioneering impulse is very strong.  Some of the interviewees worry that as HEMA progresses and becomes more standardized -- in other words as the pioneers teach a more sophisticated art to a large number of people -- something will be lost.

Sorry, folks, this is guaranteed to happen. You will attract people who want to practice "sport for sport's sake."  Some of them will care a lot more about winning than recreating a historical art.  Where pioneering HEMA members of today may respect scholarship as much or more than winning, a large, developed HEMA community will include plenty of people who value winning and winners more than the historical purists.

Enjoy it while you have got it.  Whatever your particular "it" is.

Folk of the Air

I promised a couple of weeks ago to discuss The Folk of the Air, a novel by Peter S Beagle, which contrary to the opinion of some readers I think is a very successful piece of literature.

It might be considered a novel of hippy-dom in the San Francisco Bay area in the early 1970s. It is also a book about the intrusion of supernatural elements into a modern community. And most of all, it is a contemplation of the ideas and attitudes that in real life created the Society for Creative Anachronism in that same Bay Area in that same era.

Peter Beagle, who enjoys a very high reputation among a certain group of fantasy readers, is in this novel perhaps not as careful to construct a unified work of art as in some others. There are a few weak spots in the book that support that analysis. However, one can also argue that Beagle has got countervailing strengths which allow him to deal with a number of themes in interesting ways. The novel is complicated and diverse, just like life.

My own interest in the book is unsurprisingly in the way he portrays the early SCA (as the League of Archaic Pleasures), not as it was but as it might have been. Beagle says a lot about the SCA, especially the SCA in its earliest days, and he is very fair in his portrayal. He shows the good the bad the mundane and the bizarre that can accompany a serious effort to revive historic activities and culture. Like the early SCA, Beagle's League of Archaic Pleasures exists for good reasons and bad. People have a variety of motivations, not all of them good, and not all of them contemptible either. If you are a long-time member of the SCA like I am, you recognize people thinking and talking about the activities they have taken up and the Society they have created, taking pleasure in them, and wondering whether what they're doing makes any sense. Beagle does not answer their question.

One can argue that this kind of social fantasy is dangerous, and Beagle is quite aware of that. He deals with the dangers by portraying them as age-old supernatural forces that reemerge from elsewhere to intervene in and exploit the favourable environment created by the existence of the League. Beagle is able to make the reader shiver almost as much as the characters in the book do when confronting unexpected and uncanny manifestations.

I was talking about this book to a friend who had had it unread on the shelf for years and realized that my younger friend might find this to be a historical novel about a certain time in California's history. It is after all nearly a half-century old.

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.

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:

Do late medieval fight books reflect actual practice?

For anyone interested in the actual practice of late medieval combat, interpreting the fight books that survive is a crucial activity. Thanks to a heads up from John Joseph Cash, here are two attempts to do so.

One of them is a master's thesis in archaeology submitted by Johann Keller Wheelock Matzke to the University of Exeter in 2011.

The other is a summary and interpretation of that thesis by Randy McCall at this website.

At this moment I have no opinion about the value of these works.

Unhelmed

As portrayed in Froissart's Chronicle; and thanks to Raymond Hindle.

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.

Battle of Nations – a BBC documentary

Thanks to the person who alerted me to this documentary on four British newcomers taking part in the Battle of Nations competition of 2013.

Given that at the same age I was taking part pretty actively in something similar – SCA combat based on the use of safer weapons but with no limit on the force used – I have say this looked pretty loony to me nonetheless.

Two moments from my first viewing: the documentary says that the British combatants were "cultural ambassadors" representing their country in international competition. I have to say that I choked on my coffee when I heard that.

Second, back when I was helping to invent the SCA, attracting girls was definitely a major motivation for us young male fighters. It is sad to report that these young Brits seem to be total failures at this aspect. Drinking yes, girls no. What's with that?

Tam Lin

A friend sent me a link to this marvelous rendition by Anais Mitchell and Jefferson Hamer of the British folk song Tam Lin.



Hearing this version of the song was a shock. It forcefully read reminded me of this version of Tam Lin by the folk-rock group Fairport Convention,, which I first heard in the summer of 1972:



That summer I was in Norwich, England taking part in an archaeological dig. It was a wonderful way to celebrate my graduation from University. The people running the dig provided us with cheap housing and a little bit of spending money, and we scraped or dug dirt. It was a social and informal learning experience and I soaked it up.

The house we were staying in was a student house during term time, and the usual residents had left lots of their property, including a record player and the Fairport Convention album Liege and Lief. I played the album a lot, particularly the song Tam Lin, about "an earthly knight" rescued from the Queen of the Fairies by his lover. I was an SCA member, a historian hoping to be a professional medievalist some day, and someone who really appreciated the rock elements of this particular arrangement.

And Tam Lin was just the beginning. Somebody told me about a weekly get-together of folk music enthusiasts at a pub near our dig, and I went there more than once, although I never had the nerve to to sing an American folk song. And before I left England a friend of mine gave me one of the early Steeleye Span albums.

The result was that I had found in British and later Irish folk the soundtrack of my life for the next decade, The decade when I was a graduate student and when I was most intensely involved in the SCA.

It was really something to reflect on that..

Well Met: a book on Renaissance Faires

I have yet to read this book, but Jeff Sypeck's post on Quid Plura is intriguing:

What hath the Renaissance faire to do with psychedelic rock? The vogue for “world music”? The frilly shirts of Jimi Hendrix? The rise of craft breweries? The House Un-American Activities Committee? Before reading Well Met: Renaissance Faires and the American Counterculture, I hadn’t thought to ask—but Rachel Lee Rubin’s book is a useful reminder that pseudo-medieval pursuits are sometimes more about the present than they are about the past.

Rubin starts with the basics: how the first faire grew out of a children’s commedia dell’arte troupe organized at a California youth center by teacher Phyllis Patterson. In May 1963, Patterson and others organized the first “Renaissance Pleasure Faire and May Market” as a fundraiser for left-wing Pacifica Radio, drawing more than 3,000 revelers to a North Hollywood ranch. Associated with hippies and drugs by local detractors, the event quickly outgrew Pacifica. It spawned its first imitators in Minnesota and Texas in the early 1970s; more than 200 Ren fests of varying sizes now thrive across the United States.

So how did a countercultural crafts-and-music romp evolve into a nationwide subculture overseen, in some cases, by a large entertainment corporation? Well Met doesn’t chart the growth and commercialization of the Ren faire. Instead, Rubin has two goals: to explain “the ways in which various forms of cultural expression ‘tried out’ first at the faire became recognizable staples of American social and cultural life,” and to restore the Renaissance faire to a central place in the history of the counterculture. Once I got past my initial disappointment that the book wasn’t a history, I was won over by Rubin’s argument for the importance of the Renaissance faire to the culture of the 1960s and 1970s—and its long-overlooked ubiquity.

Her evidence is legion: how the Los Angeles Free Press began as the Ren faire newspaper; how Americans, who now consume beer from nearly 2,500 craft breweries, first sampled ale at the faire; how fashion choices and even the typefaces on psychedelic album art recall early faire fliers; how the faire anticipated renewed markets for handmade crafts and set precedents for large outdoor rock concerts; how occasional faire-goer Michael Jackson mimicked the moves and style of faire mime Robert Shields; how the Flying Karamazov Brothers, the Firesign Theater, and Penn and Teller all got their start at Ren faires; and how the faire coincided with a Middle Eastern cabaret boom in California that helped build an audience for international music. Rubin even suggests that the Ren faire helped revive interest in the klezmer. Who knew?

There's more...

How the combat worked at the Red Knight's Deed

Some of you will be interested in this.

Almost all the weapons, pole axes and spears apart, were steel weapons, rebated in some cases.

There were two types of combat: unarmored and armored.

In unarmored combat, the fighters wore armor on heads necks hands and lower arms and generally some type of gambeson or pourpoint on the body. The vast majority of the pieces were in medieval style, though there were some modern fencing masks.

In unarmored combat, a distinct touch to any part of the body was sufficient to end the pass. The first combatant to win three passes won the whole combat. As one might expect, thrusting predominated as a tactic, and hands were a favorite target.

In armored combat, there were three different kinds of fighting. There was what was called "outrance" where the first combatant to strike a good blow against a gap in the armor won the combat. Good blows had to be delivered to a lightly armored area or a gap between plates. Plate armor was proof against a thrust or a blow of the sword. Grappling and throwing one's opponent was allowed in this style and in no others.

Second, there was what was called "plaisance" where each fighter was allowed to throw 12 blows against his opponent with no breaks in the action. Victory was judged by the Herald/marshal, and the Duke, Duchess and ladies.

Third, there was an unnamed type of combat in which the first combatant to strike three good blows against his opponent won the match. There was a break after each could blow.

In most situations combatants judged the effect of blows on themselves, but final judgment rested with the presiding authorities. For instance, if two fighters grappled and fell to the ground, as presiding judge whether one of the two had had sufficient control to claim victory.

Deed of the red knight

As many readers know, I have been participating in the Society for Creative Anachronism for decades. One of the things I have done in that time is designed and run medieval – style tournaments. So my scholarly work on formal combats ( deeds of arms) has been paralleled with attempts to re-create, for fun and for interest, various kinds of formal combats. The distinction between running an SCA event that has some pretensions to a medieval atmosphere and running, either in SCA context or elsewhere, something closely modeled on an actual medieval event may be a little bit fuzzy, but let it suffice to say that I've tried to get closer to medieval exemplars as time goes along.   Christian Cameron, novelist and reenactor, has similar ambitions and this past weekend I was privileged to take part and indeed help design an effort at re-creating late 14th century formal combat. Christian wanted to experience a close reenactment to help him understand and write about such an event in one of his upcoming novels, part of a Red Knight series. He also wanted to invite some of the most interesting reenactors he knew to a special party. Did he ever succeed! Christian happens know some very creative people, and also has access to a lakefront property of great beauty in Prince Edward County, Ontario. So this past weekend, some serious but fun-loving folk showed up with pavilions, armor, and civilian costume of the highest level. He asked Cole Cioran and I, who ran a Roland-inspired deed at the Pennsic war about 10 years ago, to come up with a usable and satisfying set of rules and competitions that would appeal to Western martial arts aficionados, historic reenactors, and serious SCA people. We were also given the task and the authority to manage the fighting aspect. Cole was the chief Herald and the marshal of the lists, while I played "the Duke," a presiding noble who with his Duchess Judith, (in real life the owner of the site and a most gracious patron) acted as the final authority as to what took place in the lists. Duchess Judith and I also, with the jury of ladies, gave awards and honorable mentions to the fighters who were the most impressive. These were satisfying roles to play, especially considering the quality of the competitors and their general good attitude and desire to re-create a chivalric deed of arms. Duchess Judith, whom as far as I know has no experience with such events, turned out to be an enthusiastic and sensible contributor to the action. Besides the combat in the lists, there was also archery and a rather marvelous feast prepared on the spot in a rather wonderful outdoor kitchen which is a permanent part of the site. As we ate we were entertained by the Schola Magdalena, who performed 14th century choral music at the highest level of skill and beauty. But the greatest pleasure was simply being there overlooking Lake Ontario and chatting and drinking with like-minded happy people. And there were no disasters, thank heaven. Even though I was there as an experienced hand, in one sense I was a complete novice. I had never before seen that much combat with steel weapons, nor such a large group of people using actual armor for actual protection. SCA style combat has its virtues, but here it was steel (mostly) swords against (almost entirely) mail and plate. Impressive. I may have more to say about it in a bit


Image: Cole at work.

Freelance Academy Press and La Belle Companie demos at Kalamazoo, May 2013

Freelance Academy Press, which publishes the Deeds of Arms series that I edit, sponsored two sessions on Western medieval martial arts and historical combat at Kalamazoo's Congress of medieval studies earlier this month. One of them, a reenactment of a judicial duel in the Italian tradition was videoed and can be seen here. Likewise, La Belle Companie, which re-creates a late medieval retinue, presented a show and tell on how 14th and 15th century English men at arms armed themselves – or rather, were armed by other people. It too is here. I mentioned the prominent place that high-quality reenactment had at this year's conference, and now you can see what I meant.

Kalamazoo Medieval Congress, 2013

I really enjoyed myself.

What was most remarkable was the number of sessions based on re-enactment or experimental archaeology.

Activities  on site included:

Smelting

Drinking ale and mead brewed with historic methods

Dressing a person in armor starting with the underwear

A late medieval armor  fashion show

This doesn't include discussions of activities off site.

Peak moment: watching a re-enacted trial by combat while in the next room a pick-up choir learned plainchant -- and sang it very well indeed.

Online intellectual content – the real thing!

Two interesting posts from long time correspondents (what do you call a person whose blog you read on a regular basis?).

Over at Hammered Out Bits, Darrell Markewitz, the Norse reenactor and craftsman, brings his own perspective to the question of interpreting small objects. This artifact sparked a discussion about what it actually represents or how it can actually be used to establish details of Norse costuming.

Says Darrell:

...no matter how much you work with artifacts, you never really understand then until you see them in life, actually before you. Reading the measurements does not really impact you. Almost everything is either way SMALLER, or way LARGER in actual truth, than what you imagine it is.

That's the core of his post, but it's actually worth looking at it to see why Darrell thinks this. Well illustrated!

Then there is Professor Grumpy over at Historian on the Edge. He is writing a new book about how historians have not only lost control of history, but are in danger of being excluded from it. Sounds cranky? More like appalling, actually. In the sense that he is describing an appalling situation.

This reminds me of a time maybe twenty years ago when a well-known Canadian scholar, an historian actually, was arguing that we should reorganize Canadian academia on the model of "real countries." Reading this summary of how a real country (UK) does things, I am just glad that we have avoided reality so far.

Anyway, I highly recommend Prof. Grumpy's first chapter, and I congratulate him on maintaining his calm in the face of a situation that he must find intolerable.

Martial art

For the last 20 years (!), My wife and I have been hosting an SCA medieval re-creation event on our rural property. Because it takes place on Labor Day weekend, and because we have 95 acres of land, there is time and space for a lot of different things to happen, or for people just to relax.
One of the chief activities is SCA style combat, which uses rattan weapons to make possible a vigorous style of fighting. I don't think that the SCA style can honestly be called an historical one; it evolved from some logical but mistaken assumptions about the effects of weapons and armor. Thanks to intelligent and scholarly martial artists we know a lot more about late medieval combat at the very least.
But SCA combat has its virtues. You can stage a hard-hitting analog of medieval combat with a minimum of serious injuries. Many SCA fighters have never broken a bone, even after many years of competition. And it has a certain aesthetic appeal.
This aesthetic element was brought home to me on the weekend. I was discussing various combat systems that now exist with someone who fences in the "cut and thrust" style, in which real steel swords are used. He and I both agreed that we did not see the point of certain modern jousters and martial artists who have adopted medieval styles, who use something like medieval weaponry and medieval techniques, but scorn dressing up in medieval costume, since what they are doing is in their minds a purely modern thing. The two of us didn't see the point. It may or may not make any sense to fight in a medieval or pseudo–medieval style just for the fun of it, but to do the same thing in 21st century dress and high tech armor just has no meaning for me at all.
And that same day I was lucky enough to see the fruits of medieval aestheticism, SCA style. One of our standard fighting activities involves a small earth and wood fort that we built some years back. One of the challenges of using it is coming up with scenarios that make a certain tactical sense, even though the number of fighters involved is seldom over 20. On Saturday afternoon, some good scenarios were devised and played over and over until everyone was good and tired.
It may be the fact that I am now retired from fighting for good and all, but I found this fighting to be really quite amazing. To my educated eyes, everybody involved looked like they really knew what they were doing. That struck me because with few exceptions, the fighters were what passes for average in our corner of the SCA. There were no famous knights, except one, and he is not nearly as famous as he deserves to be as a master of the pole weapon. There were also a number of quite new fighters, and they picked up on the clues of their more experienced neighbors like there was nothing to it. For me, it was an impressive and moving moment.

Making iron at the event, 2006.

Medieval minstrelsy reconstructed

What should appear in my mailbox this morning but a newsletter from Boydell and Brewer entitled the Medieval Herald. This newsletter is much more substantial and interesting than many of the electronic commercial flyers I get. For one thing, it includes some very good interviews with authors, who all have the knack of making their work accessible – or have been edited very skillfully. Makes you think that maybe their books would be accessible too. One feature in this issue of the Medieval Herald will be of interest to a number of my readers I'm sure. There is an interview with Linda Marie Zaerr, who works on the performance of middle English romances. And what you know, she has a whole page of links to her performances. I will include one below, a short one, and if you are interested, you can follow up here. Her YouTube statistics are not very good, which makes me think that hardly anybody has discovered this resource yet. Here is Prof. Zaerr on the vielle (fiddle) performing an excerpt from Bevis of Hampton: