Why I didn't join the SCA

I didn't go to the 50th anniversary celebration of the Society for Creative Anachronism, but I did contribute some of my recollections of my very early days in the organization.  Flieg was kind enough to present it three times at the event.  For those who missed it, here is my story of:

I wasn't interested in the SCA – I was a fan

By Steve Muhlberger (Finnvarr de Taahe)

This is a story about how I didn't join the SCA. It might be more accurate to say that it's about how I passed on plenty of opportunities to get in on the ground floor.

We can argue about where the ground floor is but I'll just say that I did not go to the first tournament and I didn't attend a West kingdom event until 1975.

Let's start in 1967 when I moved from Ohio to New Jersey. This made it possible for me to go to the World Science Fiction Convention in New York that year. I was in heaven! While I was there I picked up a lot of free fanzines and announcements of various sorts and bought a few books as well. One of the fanzines was a one-page newsletter that older science-fiction fans will know went on to greater things. It was Locus number one. And in that fanzine was an announcement that there would be a meeting in New York City with the intention of founding an East Kingdom of the Society for Creative Anachronism. I looked at it said something like, "huh" and paid no further attention. I was not interested.  I was a science fiction fan.

While at the convention I joined the next year's worldcon, called Baycon. It was taking place in Berkeley on Labor Day weekend of 1968,and those who were lucky enough to go had a great old time. Part of the festivities was a tournament put on by the SCA and lots of people were very impressed. Some of them went home and started working on creating their own branches of the SCA.

I was not part of this. I didn't have the money to go to Berkeley so what I got out of it were the handouts that all convention members got in person or by mail. One of them was a guide to the Current Middle Ages, a very practical little booklet written by the SCA which showed how you could put on a tournament in your backyard. I looked at it, said something like "huh, " and thought no more about it. I wasn't interested.

A few weeks after Baycon I started at Michigan State University where I joined the Tolkien Fellowship – something that made me deliriously happy . Other Tolkien fans! At least two of the members, Tracy Brown and Bob McNish, had been at the Baycon and had taken pictures of the tournament. They were trying to sell their friends on the idea of putting on a tournament in East Lansing. They didn't have any luck. Me, I looked at the pictures, said something like "huh," and thought no more about it. I was not interested.

The next year, 1969, I had a bit more money and I got to go to St. LouisCon. Part of this worldcon was the coronation of the first king and queen of the Middle Kingdom. Representatives from both East and West were there to take part, or as they saw it, run the show. For various reasons there was a long delay and several times my friends and I walked through the room meant for the coronation and glanced at people in medieval customs. There weren't very many of them. We didn't even stop to ask them about it. We were off to panels or the book  room or something else more standard and science-fictiony. It's probably just as well I didn't try to get interested because the conflict between the two senior kingdoms over running  the coronation might've turned me off. On this occasion I didn't even say "huh", and I certainly thought no more about it. I was still not interested.

That fall I was back at Michigan State having more fun than ever with the science fiction and fantasy clubs. They were pretty big by now and we had a lot of energy. As Halloween approached, many of us decided to dress up. There was not a lot of consultation about what would be fun and appropriate, but when we got together it turned out that a whole bunch of us had adopted sword and sorcery personas. And then, seeing her opportunity, Signy Dimraedela (Tracy Brown) stepped forward with her Baycon photos in hand, and said wouldn't it be interesting if we did a medieval tournament SCA style? And suddenly I was interested. As were a whole bunch of other people. And that was the beginning of the barony of North Woods, one of the earliest and most dynamic  Middle Kingdom groups.

And that's the story of how I was not interested in joining the SCA.

Is this America?

CBC's Radio program "The Sunday Edition" interviewed Rebecca Solnit and Andrew Solomon on the "Trump phenomenon" and violence in American politics. They were appalled, of course. Solomon said among other things

The gap has got wider and wider and wider ... The Trump phenomenon is so bewildering to the people who do not subscribe to it and feels so urgent to the people who do subscribe to it that I have the sense of a country and people who have no understanding of one other. Many friends of mine have said to me that "I thought I was an American but I don't know if I am if this is going on in our country." And I think that there is a real feeling that the sides are so far apart and that in particular the Republican side is so uninterested in compromise of any kind on any topic no matter how much such compromise might serve the public good I think ...the level of anger and frustration and alienation on both sides has escalated to a point that I have not seen in my lifetime.

I don't know how old Solomon is, but I wonder if he remembers the civil rights movement and the murders and the riots of the 1960s. He certainly does not remember the imposition of Jim Crow to put the African-American population of the South back in their place, but I am sure he has heard of it.

What this all reminds me of is the 1840s and 1850s, where besides the intense battle over the possible extension of slavery to the West, there was a strong anti-immigrant, anti-foreign religion, anti-intellectual movement best seen in the American Party, also known as the Know-Nothings. Of course, there were differences: back then the undesireable immigrants were Irish and German, and the bad anti-American religion was Catholicism. But what really reminds me of today was the possibly apochryphal origin of the name Know-Nothings: "I know nothing...except Americanism." Yes, this is America. Image: The Know-Nothings repel the invading papal hordes.

Donald Trump as eccentric knight errant

Kevin Baker in the New York Times:

...he risks becoming completely untethered — nothing more than the slithering id of a nervous age. He comes off too often as the candidate of “Game of Thrones” America, a bombastic, misogynistic knight errant in an endlessly wandering, unfocused narrative; traversing a fantasy landscape composed of a thousand borrowed mythologies, warning endlessly of a dire apocalypse that never quite materializes.

I've read Arthurian romances like that...

The Most Eminent Orators and Statesmen of Ancient and Modern Times by David A. Harsha

Today someone in Facebook's management made the prediction that in a few years text would be irrelevant to the operations of the company because everybody would be using videos. This strikes me as a pretty unlikely scenario, seeing that newspapers still exist at least in a niche market or two. But it had me thinking about the changes in public taste and the use of media as I looked up the offered "forgotten book of the day."
Today's book dates from the 1850s and it is entitled "The Most Eminent Orators and Statesmen of Ancient and Modern Times. "
And what I found interesting about this book is that it is not exactly a collection of famous speeches, stretching from the ancient Greeks up to modern times, but a collection of lives of orators as celebrities. The forgotten book series has some curious material but I was really struck by the fact that so many of the famous orators in the collection are completely unknown today, except perhaps to certain types of historians and literary scholars. Who remembers Charles James Fox anyway?

(And if you do remember Fox do you remember Henry Grattan?)

Answer: Fox was a Whig leader in the House of Commons at the same time as William Pitt, in other words during the American and French revolutions. Old Fox (though he was actually young Fox back then) certainly belongs in his place as a man famous for the eminence of his oratory. If I recall correctly he never became Prime Minister, and his career is most famous for his defence of Reform and Revolution against the repressive English government of Lord North, which provoked the American Revolution.

My point is Fox's oratory was considered a significant public art form. A speech by Charles James Fox was probably, at least among prominent and important people, the equivalent of a major Beyoncé video. The equivalent of Charles James Fox still gets a fair amount of attention today in British politics and beyond, but he sure certainly doesn't come across as an artist.
Image: Your clue is "Ireland."

Somethin's goin' on and you don't know what it is

--Do you, Mr. Jones?

Vast medieval cities of Cambodia

Just after World War II, when there are plenty of airplanes sitting around doing nothing in particular, archaeologists started using aerial photography to map and explore wide swaths of the ancient and medieval landscapes.
Well, both photography and air travel have improved a lot since World War II, and aerial surveys are used all the time for many purposes. Archaeologists are still part of this process. As a result things we never even suspected are being discovered all the time.
Do you know that Angkor Wat is hardly unique to medieval Cambodia? Well, nobody else did either. But now we see there are traces of cities as big as modern cities. And that is saying something because cities of the last two generations are huge on historic standards.
There are some really interesting maps, plans, and pictures of this work in the Guardian.
Image: A twelfth-century deed of arms in Cambodia. How would William Marshal do against these guys? Hint: armor.

Forbes gets it right about Catal Huyuk ( Çatalhöyük)

Twenty-five years ago, when I was first teaching ancient history, I spent a whole lecture of the Anatolian site of Catal Huyuk as an example of an early city. The settlement was called a village in most accounts, but it looked like a city to me. I was following a very persuasive and accessible discussion by Jane Jacobs, who may not have been an anthropologist but knew a thing or two about the development of cities.

Today I ran across an article in Forbes which covered the peculiar burial customs of the people of CH. What caught my eye, though, was the clear statement that Catal Huyuk is "One of the world’s earliest cities [7500 BC, population 10,000]." Hurray! Jane justified! I can't link to the images somehow; look at some good ones by following the link above.