Monday, October 25, 2010

Greetings to the Barony from your Very Proud Baron and Baroness!

War of the Wings was a wonderful event, and we were so very happy to have time to spend with all of our friends. We experienced such joy at representing this fine group and words cannot express our gratitude to all the fine gentles who made it happen. Special thanks go out to Lord Brandon for organizing our encampment, and Lady Milicent who pulled the potluck dinner together.

Now our thoughts turn to more local events. In November we have Try It Day in the Canton of Brockore Abby. This is a wonderful time to share what you do with friends or family who have perhaps not felt comfortable coming to an event, or to try something new yourself! Relax and avoid the holiday shopping madness!

Yule Toy Tourney is a chance to enjoy and event and get that warm feeling from helping others less fortunate. The toys collected will be distributed by Country Santa, spreading the joy of the season. And to add to our fun, we’ll have an Iron Chef feast featuring the secret ingredient- APPLES!

We look forward to seeing all of you in the coming months.

Geldamar and Etain, Baron and Baroness

Yule Toy Tourney V, December 11

As the leaves change color and fall from the trees, the weather gets colder and the Yuletide Season approaches. It is a time to curl up beside a warm fire on a chilly winter’s night and enjoy the peaceful joy of the season in the company of loved ones. But let us all also remember those who need our help the most at this festive time of year. The Barony of Nottinghill Coill would like all to join us the weekend of December 10th-12th for our annual Yule Toy Tourney and help bring the spirit of Yuletide to needy children in the upstate of South Carolina. Each new, unwrapped toy donated will be hand delivered on Christmas Eve to children who otherwise would not have the opportunity to experience this magical time of the year! The Country Santa has been working many years to give toys to needy children in the upstate. ALL toys will be donated to this most worthy organization! The website for The Country Santa is http://www.countrysanta.org/

Martial Activities: Heavy and Rapier Tourneys will be “gift tourneys”. Each fighter will be given two “gifts”. If you are defeated on the field, your opponent will tell you whom to present the gift to on their behalf. There will be additional gifts at the MoL table so that eliminated fighters can buy back in to the tourney for a $5.00 donation to “Country Santa”. The winner of each tourney will be the last fighter with a gift remaining. Archery Shoot will be a Holiday Themed test of skill and accuracy.

Arts & Sciences Activities: While documentation is not required, extra points will be given if it is included! 1) Best Handmade Toy (does not have to be period) 2) Best Baked Item (breads, cookies, etc.) 3) Best Yuletide Ornament

SITE ENTRY: One new UNwrapped toy per Gentle. For Fighters: one new UNwrapped toy per Fighter, per weapon form. All toy donations will go to “Country Santa” of Pickens County SC.

Lodging: $10.00 per person. This covers lodging for Friday and Saturday Nights in dormitory-style rooms that sleep from 6 to 12 persons. Each room has its own heating/cooling unit and bathroom. Lodging will be limited to the 1st 50 gentles who register, so register early!

Feast: $10.00 per person. As a special treat, Saturday evening, three of the foremost chefs in the Barony will participate in a “Medieval Iron Chef” challenge. Lady Jamila, Lady Milicent, and Captain Nichola will each prepare feast portions using a secret ingredient chosen by Their Excellencies - APPLES. Feast is limited to 80 gentles, so don’t miss out!

Site: Wesleyan Camp, Tabor Building. 125 Bethany Cove Drive, Pickens, SC 29671

Site Restrictions: Site is Dry. No Fire Pits or Open Fires. Smoking in designated areas only. No pets.

Autocrat: Brandon Caiside (Brandon Cassady). PO Box 543, Easley, SC 29641. Phone: (864) 404-6796. Email: bcaiside AT yahoo.com

Reservations: Lady Caitríona inghean Ghiolla Phádraig (Jennifer Dutschke), 308 Earle Rd, Central, SC 29630.
Email: scagreyhound AT yahoo.com.

Make checks payable to: SCA Inc./Barony of Nottinghill Coill

Dukkering, Chapter Three: Soldier of Fortune by Baron Bardulf

After a candle had been placed in a window, the sound of a carriage could be heard outside. A man and a woman entered and surveyed what was before them. Although they were dressed like commoners, their disguises failed instantly.

He was old and bearded but presented himself with the calm, rock-solid demeanor of a seasoned warrior. He was a man born to command armies, yet there was a sense of earthy humility about him. He expected obedience and devotion, not out of pride, but simply because that was the natural order of things.

Although she too carried the weight of many years, the woman was unlike her companion. The dark skin and eyes bespoke a Turk, or perhaps a Moor. While it was clear that the other four men beheld her with respect and awe, fear was easily seen behind their regard. They took pains never to look her in the eyes.

“Are we alone?”

“Yes Sire - as you have ordered, there are none here but the gypsy woman.”

“Take your men outside. Stay in the shadows, remain unseen and allow no one to enter.”

“Sir Tancred...” The ice in the woman’s voice halted them. “...that doesn’t mean you can kill some unlucky wretch.”

When the door shut, the old man glared at the woman beside him.

“I’ll thank you not to address my men in that way. Tancred’s a fine knight...”

“- and a damned sorry excuse for a monk. Have you forgotten what he did to those poor bastards at Caesarea? They had laid down their weapons and yet he slaughtered them.”

The man shrugged off the reproach and turned his attention to Dulcinaya.

“So that’s her, eh? - that gypsy?”

“Don’t make light of the humble; she is a powerful seer.”

“How did you learn of that knave’s ‘ talents’?”

“I have my own gifts.”

He gave the old woman a look of barely contained disgust. “ I’ve had enough of your foul arts.”

“I didn’t choose to be what I am - and neither did she.”

The man strode across the room and stood before Dulcinaya’ s table.

“Now then…” He placed his fists on the table-board and leaned closer. “ …tell me my future with those cards.”

“Cards?” Dulcy’s eyes opened wide with sudden panic. “Oh, you mean these? Fortune telling?? N-N-Never M’Lord!!! I’ll not do such a loathsome thing! These cards are for clever tricks, idle amusements, games of chance, sleight of hand....”

“There! - you see? Here is your great oracle! This miserable creature has confessed herself to be a fraud. We’ re done here! I’m through with this nonsense.”

“Stop it, Jacques. You're scaring her. She thinks you’re a witch-hunter.”

“Me, a witch-hunter? Of that you must have no fear.” He looked at the older woman with a wry smile. “I’ve already found all the witchcraft I can deal with.”

“Pray, be seated.” The woman took her place at the end of the table while “ Jacques” made a great show of sullen resignation and sat opposite Dulcinaya. “ You must forgive the old dog.” Her voice hinted at irritation. “ He’ s a soldier. Oft-times he forgets that not everyone must jump when he barks.”

The woman’s demeanor shifted. The dark eyes beheld the gypsy with a serious and uncompromising regard. “I now ask for your service…and above all…your trust.”

She reached beneath her cloak and unfastened a leather pouch that hung from a belt.

“NO!” He rose to his feet and bellowed. “ I FORBID IT!!”

“You can’ t stop me. Accept that…”

“You don’t dare…you wretch! Have you forgotten your oath?”

“Spare me the lecture - I’m not one of your acolytes.”

“If you defy me….”

“Even in my defiance I will honor my oath. I pledged you my service - not my obedience! When you spared my life at Antioch, I gave my vow to you. In Jerusalem I accepted the burden that you placed upon me. I have served you like no other.”

“If it’s any comfort to you, you were my last choice.”

“I was your only choice. Only I could bear its touch without going mad. How many of your men paid dearly for that knowledge? I’ ve often marveled at my fate. How can it be that only an infidel woman can hold and possess the object that all of Christendom desires?”

The dark eyes grew cold.

“Mark my words, you fool! You and your knights are too rich, too powerful, and too proud. The whirlwind is coming, Jacques. I can feel it, but I cannot see it! It will soon be upon us and it may already be too late. The gypsy is your only hope.”

The old man looked at the woman. His eyes searched her as one who was grasping for a shred of trust.

“Please believe me.” Her voice softened. “If there were any other way........”

Jacques slowly regained his seat. “May God forgive me for this.”

The woman opened the pouch and produced a well-worn goblet and cruet.

The Tradition of Medieval Gaelic Storytelling by James Acken

When sitting down to write this article I suddenly remembered the opening credits to Steven Spielberg’s 1985-1987 television series Amazing Stories.

Its first enthralling image showed a group of Neanderthal like humans around a campfire while a storyteller, lit from below by firelight, gesticulated wildly, weaving some truly ‘Amazing Story’.

The image carried all the power and significance of narrative or storytelling. We live by stories. They provide the glue for our culture and act as the backbone of almost every religion that exists. The unique traditions of storytelling can thus often act like a cultural thumbprint.

The word saga, for example, is a Scandinavian term that has its roots in their verb ‘to speak’ and is cognate with our verb ‘to say’. It suggests the oral origin and nature of the Norse and Icelandic sagas, each of which is divided into a number of short chapters not unlike episodes of The Sopranos or Lost and advance the fairly linear story often through multiple generations.

The shape of these large narratives is close enough to our modern novel that students usually find the sagas easier to engage with than Gaelic sgeula or scéalta, even though these latter are only the length of a single chapter of the sagas.

Numerous collections of scéla (and from here on I use the neutral medieval word) have appeared over the last century. Tom P. Cross and Clark H. Slover’s Ancient Irish Tales is robust though slightly archaic in language, while Geoffrey Gantz’s Early Irish Myths and Sagas is a clear modern translation but hardly complete. Myles Dillon’s The Cycles of the Kings is perhaps a better representation of how the medieval Gael would have thought about these tales.

The great difficulty of the scél tradition is that it seems so transparent in translation. Certainly there are odd moments, as when the jealous wife of Mider, one of the Tuatha Dé Danann, transforms his lover-to-be, Etaín, into a giant, musical fly, the water and music from whose wings could heal the sick and sustain warriors better than food; and certainly, the tales make a strange kind of fairy-tale sense, as when Cú Chulainn must perform a number of heroically difficult tasks to win his wife Emer, and then, having fathered a son by a different woman overseas, unknowingly kills him when the boy comes to find his father. Still, there are some moments when the tales present seemingly impossible difficulties for the modern reader.

One example is in the death-tale of the legendary Irish king, Conaire Mór mac Eterscél, entitled Togail Bruidne Dá Derga, or ‘The Destruction of Dá Derga’s Hostel’. The story is simple.

After a long and peaceful reign, Conaire breaks his gessa, the semi-divine taboos set on him at birth, and falls prey to his treacherous foster-brothers who ally themselves with the British king, Ingcél Cáech.

The great confrontation between Conaire and his foster-brothers - a kind of an early Irish Showdown at the O.K. Corral - takes place at one of the great guest-houses in Ireland: the bruiden of Dá Derga.

If the plot is simple, the scél is not. A maddeningly repetitive series of descriptions occupies almost half of the tale - some 24 pages of Gantz’s 51 page translation - wherein Ingcél spies on Conaire’s retinue in the bruiden and describes them to the foster-brothers.

The list of names and increasingly bizarre descriptions, one of which shows Conaire’s otherworldly champion Mac Cécht as a landscape complete with hills, forests and lakes, is so interminable that students invariably skip at least a third of them.

Nevertheless, these descriptions were central to the purpose of the scél. A Gaelic nobleman’s greatness was expressed in his (or her) entourage, and Conaire’s boasted fantastic individuals from every corner of Ireland and Scotland - half of them from the síd, the infamous fairy-mounds. Mac Cécht himself, described as a landscape, is from the síd and thus, when Mac Cécht fights, it is as though the land itself fights for Conaire.

The true power of the Gaelic scéla, though, is in how they mirror our human experiences. Each scél elucidates a single or short series of events where several characters meet. Each of these characters feature in any number of other scéla so that the events of one scél resonate throughout the entire corpus of scéla like ripples in a lake.

Without reading these, it is difficult to really grasp how this works, but the effect is that the more you read, the more significant each little thing becomes. With this in mind the scope of the scél tradition, extending in written form from the earliest Gaelic sources of the seventh century to the present day, collections of oral tradition like Joe MacNeil’s Tales until Dawn: Sgeul gu Latha, cannot but instill awe in the most jaded of us.

Fellow Citizens...

First, I want to welcome anyone who would be willing to do an interview or for your own original submissions of A&S works and research for the purpose of sharing here. This section is for YOU, the artisans of our fair Barony!

This month I also wanted to take the time to urge all artisans to consider teaching an A&S class (or two or three!) at the upcoming Baronial events; Yule Event and Baronial Birthday. I would like to see people teaching introductory levels classes just as much as advanced. You do not have to be a laurel or considered yourself to be “laurel quality” to teach an A&S class. So let’s get the creative cogs moving and put on those teaching caps. If you need assistance please bug your local Minister’s of A&S or feel free to contact me so I can bug them.

Don’t make me hunt you down! Okay, well just so you know that would actually be fun for me, so don’t tempt me!*

Rohesia Anven of Thessalonica
Baronial MoAS
Scribe, Heavy fighter, Combat & Target Archer, etc.

*Autocrats feel free to contact me as your mercenary for hire in order to find people to teach classes at your event… [slightly evil grin]

Picture source: Bodleian Library, Oxford; MS. Lat. liturg. d. 42, fol. 47r

Ahoy the Coill!!!

Just wanted to throw something in this edition of The Quill because of a recent conversation on the Merry Rose.

For those who aren’t on the Rose, or don’t follow it much, there was recently a discussion about how we as a Society treat newcomers and how we can improve that. One of my biggest pet peeves is people treating newcomers like they have “cooties”, and as was put in one post, “passing them off to the nearest Chatelaine”.

I try to make it clear that in my opinion, everyone who plays this game IS a Chatelaine…

Which brings me to the point of this letter…

I would like to say that in my opinion, this Barony is the most Welcoming group I have ever seen, in my 15 years of playing, in two different Kingdoms now. It makes me feel good to see that there are ALWAYS new people at our events, and there is ALWAYS someone talking about having helped a newcomer recently.

I would like to thank each of the Canton Chatelaines, but it’s just as much every member of every group, as it is the Chatelaines. And THAT is what is going to keep the SCA alive for our children to grow up in, and our grandchildren when it’s their time.

I don’t say thanks enough to everyone for all that they do to make this Barony what it is, and for that I apologize.

But all of you, doing what you all do so well, is what makes my job as Baronial Chatelaine easy.

I look forward to seeing many of you at the Try It Day hosted by Lady Millicent, and hope to see a lot of new faces that day as well!!!

Yours in Service,
BlackJack

Colonial Cup Demo

The Colonial Cup races will be held November 13th this year in Camden, South Carolina. The local groups closest to Camden have been invited by the Colonial Cup to participate in the In-field activities, to include a processional in front of the Grand Stand and a demo of the different activities the SCA has to offer. The Colonial Cup races are very popular and highly publicized so the opportunity for media coverage and promotion is excellent.

There are still some spots that need to be filled for the demo and processional, including heavy and rapier fighters, and those with portable A&S activities. If you would be willing to help with this very important event, please contact Baroness Beatrice von Staufen
 baronessbeatriceAThotmail.com
 803-646-6441

Try It/Newcomers Day

Saturday, November 27, 2010 9 AM to 8 PM
Antioch Recreation Center
2460 Antioch Road, Hartsville, SC 29550

Ever wanted to try a new art or craft? Want to find out more about fighting or archery? Want to learn some new recipes? Want to just get away from all the Turkey Day left overs? Well here’s your chance! Come join us on Saturday, November 27 for Try It Day!

A day filled with hands on classes and marshaled activities. For those new to the SCA it’s a chance to try out different activites and maybe find something you love….For the more experienced, it’s a chance to try something you’ve never done before! And after the day is over, there will be a pot luck feast in the hall! So grab your gear (garb is optional!) and join us…there’s sure to be something for everyone.

If you are interested in teaching a class or sharing your knowledge with others, let us know and we’ll set aside some space and time for you. And for those with a fighting mind, there is ample room for heavy, rapier and archery. ALL levels of interest and skill are welcomed. This would be a real opportunity to talk with those who are skilled in YOUR areas of interest!

Feast will be pot luck! This means many items to choose from, so you get a chance to sample a variety of dishes. The ‘cost’ of feast is a dish that serves about 8 people.

The real bonus to all this??? It’s FREE!!!!!!!!!

For more information or to set up class space please contact:

Lady Milicent Shively
Email:_Hagatha819ATaol.com
OR
Lord Donal Oneal
Email: _RainbowWarior826ATaol.com
Phone: 843-917-4511 (Milicent & Donal)

Directions:

From the North: Take your best route to Highway 15 South Business. Turn right onto Highway 102 (Patrick Highway). Continue for 0.6 miles to the fork in the road and bear right onto Antioch Road. Site will be approximately 4.2 miles on the left. Watch for signs.

From the South: Take your best route to Highway 15 North Business. Turn left onto Highway 102 (Patrick Highway). Continue for 0.6 to the fork in the road and bear right onto Antioch Road. Site will be approximately 4.2 miles on the left. Watch for signs.

Hotels within 15 minutes of site:

Comfort Inn
903 S. 5th Street Hartsville, SC 29550
843-383-0110

Fairfield Inn
200 S. 4th Street Hartsville, SC 29550
843-332-9898

Landmark Inn
1301 S. 4th Street Hartsville, SC 29550
843-332-2611