Hello and welcome!

Since “make an SCA blog” has been on my to-do list for entirely too long now, here we are! I’m not planning to follow any particular type of structure or consistent posting schedule, but I do have a number of projects I intend to put here over time.

At the moment, I expect to primarily post about SCA heraldry and historical Czech onomastics (particularly as it relates to potential use in the SCA), as those are my two main areas of interest, but I’m leaving it open-ended because (a) I have Opinions about a lot of different things, and (b) I’m still always discovering new things to be a nerd about, so I don’t want to limit myself unnecessarily.

As for who I am - hi! I'm Anéžka Liška z Kolína, currently Golden Gryphon Pursuivant (baronial herald for the Barony of Carolingia in the East Kingdom), though that's likely changing in the next few months. I've been interested in heraldry and historical onomastics for about four years at this point, and have been spending the last couple of years digging deeper and getting more involved.

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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...

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...

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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