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Maunche text for Gavin Kent

This scroll is one where I collaborated with another scribe; I wrote the text, and Konstantia Kaloethina created the physical document. Gavin, the recipient, is a giant nerd about Welsh bardic traditions, and specifically the Mabinogion. I happened to know that he had been hoping that his eventual Maunche scroll would include the little decorative faces on the ascenders of the top line of the text in the Red Book of Hergest, and in talking with Konstantia, they decided that they’d try to make a scroll that matched the dimensions and style of the Red Book as closely as possible. I offered to write text for them, both because that’s a skillset I have more practice in than they do and because I wanted to be involved in this particular scroll. I’m not very accustomed to collaboration on scrolls, so this was a newer experience for me. I did know enough to check with Konstantia about how many words they wanted, and since the Red Book is a calligraphy-primary source, they said “go nuts for te...
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Silver Rapier scroll for Percival Michaelson

  The theme of this piece seems to have been “Choices were made.”  I’m not entirely pleased with some of the choices I made on this one (enough that I was debating entirely redoing the calligraphy before starting the illumination), but I think it came out well enough in the end. Knowing that the recipient’s persona is (primarily) 13th century English made picking an exemplar easy - I had really enjoyed working from the Rugby-de Brailes bible  on a  previous project , which is 13th c. English, and was more than happy to go back to it for another try. Picking a source for the words, on the other hand, was harder than I expected or wanted, this time around. I just was having the devil of a time finding something appropriate for a fighting award, in 13th century England, that wasn’t thoroughly religious. An offhand comment by Effingham led me down a rabbithole of hunting texts, and I landed on the 15th century Master of Game , based off an earlier work. Close enough! Dig...
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Silver Wheel scroll for Emidio di Arquata

I continue to not leave myself enough time to work on scrolls. In the case of this one, I had planned more time, but failed to account for stressing about Kingdom Rapier Champs a week before this was due, and then the BoD threw a wrench into my timeline with their peerage poll - I’m heavily involved in the heraldry community, and spent a chunk of time editing the Pros and Cons document instead of working on this scroll. Ah, well, it still went out on time, but I’d like to be less stressed about it. As usual, I did the entire thing myself because I haven’t figured out how to collaborate with other scribes yet (I’m always worried I’ll ruin their work), and this way my lack of time management isn’t impacting anyone other than myself. The recipient for this one doesn’t have an EK wiki for me to mine for persona details, but based on the documentation for his name as registered (some benefits to being a herald!), I was aiming 14th century Italian, ish. The only other information I had was ...
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Silver Brooch scroll for Rosalie Jane Blackmoore

Okay so this scroll was more rushed than I wanted it to be. Between stress about the election and a trip to Vancouver, I had less time than is ideal to work on it, so I deliberately chose a relatively simple exemplar. As always, I started with the text. The recipient didn’t have a lot of persona information on her wiki - basically all I had to go on was that the scroll should be in English, and that she spends a lot of time with her father, whose persona is 13th century English. Given that I was tight on time, I was originally intending to just do this as a template scroll - using the various standard phrasings given in the EK Scribal Handbook to compose a scroll text that sounds vaguely period and hits all the important elements, but isn’t based on any particular period text. Once I actually sat down to work on it, though, I figured it wouldn’t take much time to look through the Epistolæ database of medieval women’s letters ( https://epistolae.ctl.columbia.edu/ ) to find something...
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DMNES off-label use: Generating lists of names by culture

The Dictionary of Medieval Names from European Sources (DMNES) is one of my very favorite sources for documenting SCA names, but it can be hard to navigate, and it doesn’t have an easy built-in interface for just browsing names by culture. This is unfortunate, given that one of the ways a lot of names heralds like to handle consults is to hand your submitter a list of names to see if any of them stand out. Just because it doesn’t have an easily browsable interface, though, doesn’t mean it’s not possible to use it to generate lists of names by culture! I stumbled on this awhile back, and figured I’d write up a quick how-to. Fundamentally, this hinges on the fact that the sources for each name in the DMNES are meticulously cited, and that citation is bidirectional: not only is there a link to the source in each individual name’s citation, but each source text has links to every single name that’s listed from that source. The trick is getting the link to each source for your target cu...
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April Fools heraldic shenanigans

It is the custom of the SCA College of Arms to create and publish Letters of Misintent on April 1, rather than the more usual Letters of Intent, full of shenanigans of some type or another. Much of the time these are filled with pop culture references made documentable to SCA period by means primarily of the FamilySearch records and the fact that late 16th-century English surnames were often found used as given names as well, but there are occasionally other types of shenanigans, though those are generally funnier to heralds than to layfolk. This is the second year I've been the East Kingdom's submissions herald and therefore nominally in charge of deciding on a theme (or lack thereof) for the April 1 letter, creating it, and publishing it. Last year, everything was Very Too Much and I didn't get around to it; this year, I was determined not to let it pass me by, as I'm stepping down this summer and I wanted to have at least one with my name on it. Behold, the East'...
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Proposal for updates to SENA Appendix A: Czech, part 1

One of the best resources for consulting heralds is Appendix A of SENA , as that provides lists of name patterns that do not require further documentation, sorted by language group. If you're not particularly familiar with a given language (and even if you are!), it's a fantastic resource to help you construct historically-plausible names using a structure that's been previously documented to period, without needing to reinvent the wheel every time. Things like "late period English names can use double bynames" or "French descriptive/occupational bynames may use the article le, la, l', les or un/une or omit it." Not every language is represented, but it's a fantastic starting point and one that I point every new consulting herald towards. The Czech table, so far, has been empty, with merely the note "Czech: All patterns in Czech must be documented. Academy of Saint Gabriel report 3244 ( http://www.s-gabriel.org/3244.txt ) gives some leads fo...
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