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...

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'...

Or and Vert

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